It’s Shabbat Shachor, the “Black Shabbat” that falls right before Tisha b’Av. Today our experience of the sweetness of Shabbat is tempered by awareness of what’s broken, from our own ancient stories of destruction and becoming refugees to what we see and hear on the news even now.
Monday night will bring Tisha b’Av, when we’ll go deep into this brokenness — a paradoxical beginning to the uplifting journey toward the Days of Awe. In Hasidic language, that’s a descent for the sake of ascent.
But how can we now celebrate Shabbat with awareness of these sorrows?
You might ask the same question of anyone whose loved one has received a fearful diagnosis, or of any mourner, or of anyone who knows the grief of ending a marriage or losing a beloved home or enduring any kind of loss.
In Jewish tradition, we suspend formal mourning on Shabbat and festivals. But someone who is grieving is likely to still feel their grief even on days that are supposed to be joyful — maybe especially then, because the disjunction between how they are “supposed” to feel and how their hearts naturally flow can be so profound.
Shabbat Shachor offers us an opportunity to sit with that tension between joy and grief. For many of us, that’s deeply uncomfortable. It’s easier to paper over the sorrow and just be happy, or to keep joy at arm’s-length and just sit with sorrow. Today our tradition asks us to resist both of those easy outs, and to sit with the dissonance of a psycho-spiritual chord that’s both major and minor.
If you’re feeling grief, today invites you to temper your sadness with Shabbat joy. If you’re feeling Shabbat joy, today invites you to temper your happiness with an awareness of life’s sorrows. This can feel like a grinding of our emotional gears. The heart wants to lurch to one extreme or the other — sorrow or joy — not to stretch wide enough to feel them both at the same time. Resist that temptation.
On Monday night we’ll be wholly in a minor key. Tisha b’Av is a day of mourning for our communal losses: the destruction of the first Temple by Babylon, which led to our becoming refugees; the destruction of the second Temple by Rome; and a long list of other losses and griefs throughout our history. That day isn’t quite here, but we can feel it just around the corner. We can see it coming.
I’ve learned as a pastoral caregiver that every loss evokes and activates every other loss. Sitting with our historical and communal losses can heighten our sadness around personal losses: the loss of a loved one, the loss of a job or a home, the loss of a relationship, the loss of health, the loss of hope. Maybe you’re feeling that way today. If not, you’ve likely felt that way before… and will feel that way again.
And yet amidst all of that loss, both present and anticipated, today we’re still called to open our hearts to the abundance and flow of Shabbat. On Shabbes we’re still invited to taste perfection. Even if our ability to rejoice is subdued by circumstance or memory, we still offer thanks today for life’s many blessings. We still open ourselves to the experience of feeling accompanied and cradled by divine Presence.
It’s not a matter of either / or — either we savor the sweetness of Shabbes, or we marinate in the bitterness of grief. It’s a more nuanced and complicated both / and. On Shabbat Shachor we affirm that our hearts are flexible enough to hold both. And what we affirm today as a community carves pathways in our hearts that will help us affirm this truth in our own ways, on our own time, throughout our lives.
Today is our communal Shabbat Shachor, the day when we sit with this balance between grief and joy as a community. But in every life there are individual Shabbatot that take place in this middle ground, partaking in sweetness and in loss. Today reminds us that even when we grieve, Shabbat can still bring comfort — and that even at our times of greatest joy, some of us will still struggle with sorrow.
Today invites us to cultivate compassion for ourselves and for each other, knowing that everyone lives in the balance, the tension, the middle ground between sorrow and joy. This is spiritual life. This is human life. May we recognize that even at times of rejoicing, we and our loved ones may be carrying grief…and may we help each other access gratitude and joy even during life’s times of darkness.
Cross-posted to Velveteen Rabbi.
Shavua tov — a good new week to you.
Dear Congregation Beth Israel members and friends,
