On the Three Weeks

The three weeks between the fast days of the 17th of Tamuz and the 9th of Av -- days when we mourn the loss of the two Temples in Jerusalem -- are days of hishtokekut and ga’agua, longing and yearning, says the Slonimer Rebbe in his book Netivot Shalom. We do not cry over a loss of the past, but rather we cry as an expression of our yearning for something in the present and the future, our yearning for the divine light that was so clearly present in the Temple.

The experience of the Temple, according to some, was an experience like that of Mount Sinai, the highest form of prophecy and revelation of God. This we do not have today. Our world is a place devoid of clear signs of God, a world in which it is easy to be an atheist.

And yet there is in us this yearning for more, this searching, aching, reaching feeling. This feeling is born out of this sense of God’s hiddenness from the world. It is because we live in a world without the Temple, without a revelation like Mount Sinai, without the perfect Garden of Eden, that we have such feelings of yearning, and so a religious sentiment is born within us. Our yearning is very productive. It creates a kind of presence in the face of a world of absence. As the Italian author Erri de Luca writes, “When you feel that you are missing someone, it is not an absence, but a presence. It is a visit; people, villages from afar have arrived and become your guests for a little while” (The Mountain of God). The act of longing turns absence into presence.

So it is with our feelings of longing for Jerusalem, for a place of God. Through our yearning we create a kind of presence. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, we say, may my right arm be forgotten. I cannot forget my right arm. It is here, constantly, along my side. So, too, through our yearning we create a kind of presence for Jerusalem; we change the reality. The Temple is no longer a thing of the past, to be buried and forgotten but very much a piece of us, something we carry through life with us, like a limb.

There is an important message here about the power of yearning, the power of tears. The Netivot Shalom says that through our feelings of longing during this period, we actually bring closer the redemption, we actually begin to rebuild the Temple, begin to build within ourselves dwelling-places for the divine light. Our yearning has an impact. “Her tear was on her cheek,” says the Ecclesiastes verse, referring to the mourning of Jerusalem. The Netivot Shalom says that this verse means that the tears made an impression on her cheek. Normally tears just roll off, but this type of crying has an impact, makes some impression on the world, creates a kind of presence. Sometimes the power of such yearning creates an even stronger presence than the thing itself that we miss, says the Netivot Shalom.

The cries that emerge out of our world of absence can be incredibly creative, producing something of great beauty and spiritual weight. So are the cries of two of our megillot. The one, Eichah, Lamentations, that we read on the 9th of Av. And the other, the Song of Songs, which we read on Passover (and in some communities, every Friday evening). The Song of Songs is a song which encapsulates these feelings of yearning, as the two lovers desperately search for each other, coming close, but never quite reaching one another. Perhaps it was for this reason that R. Akiva said that the whole of the Torah is holy, but the Song of Songs, the holiest of the holy. It is the search, the yearning, itself – in the face of absence -- that reaches the highest spiritual heights. The Israeli singer Shuli Rand sings a beautiful, painful song about such yearning as well, in which he says to God, “And I continue, in the dark, to dig, and to ask and to beg – Ayeh? Where? Ayekha? Where are you?” It is out of his very sense of divine absence – Where are you, God? – that Rand creates a beautiful, aching sense of spiritual presence.

This three week period of mourning is like the drawing of a black background for a picture, says the Netivot Shalom. On top of this black background, the most beautiful bright colors can be painted. Emerging from our period of deepest darkness and the acute awareness of absence in the world, we begin to create a presence that leads to the highest moments of the High Holidays and Sukkot and Shmini Atzeret, the beautiful colors and celebrations of the fall holidays.