People think me quite strange when I say that I love Tisha B’Av, the Jewish holiday which falls in the middle of summer when the days are long and the heat often unbearable. How could I love this holiday which is considered the saddest day of the Jewish year? Many people would opt to expunge this day from the holiday cycle altogether.
Tisha B’Av is a day of grieving, of destruction and loss—a mournful lament. Tisha b’Av, literally the 9th of the month of Av, commemorates the great catastrophe, the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, the center of the world for the Jewish people. There were two Temples in Jerusalem—each supposedly destroyed on the 9th of Av—hundreds of years apart.
Many people imagine the ancient Temple as a magnificent stone building, set in a stone courtyard, set in a stone plaza, set in a city of stone; and they think of Tisha B’Av as a remembrance of the destruction of this stone city. Their vision of the Temple may not extend beyond the human confines, beyond the building complex. However, the Temple in Jerusalem has always been associated with the Garden of Eden, the garden of earthy delight. My own understanding of the Temple comes from the prophet Ezekiel. He was one of many who saw in the Temple a representation of Eden. In Ezekiel’s vision, a river flowed out from under the Temple and gigantic trees grew along the banks of the river, and wherever the river flowed, fish were bountiful and the plants flourished, freely giving their foods and medicines. What better description of Paradise? The Temple and the Garden were then one and the same. The Temple is an icon of the Garden, and the Garden is an icon of the Earth.
The text we read on Tisha B’Av, Eica (Lamentations) is a montage of devastating and gruesome images of the suffering that comes to an entire people when the Temple and the city of Jerusalem go up in flames. As poetry, the language of Lamentations invites our minds to roam and make associations. When I hear the word Temple, my mind jumps to the Garden of Eden and then to the Earth, and the suffering that the Earth and all of us are facing as we are caught in the whirlwinds of our changing climate.
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