Destruction and rebuilding

As we come up onto Tisha B'Av, I wanted to reflect on what I did last year for this holiday, and how it means something similar and different to me this year.

Last year, I spent the holiday evening at the home of Rabbi Michael Lerner of TIKKUN fame in Berkeley, CA, where he holds meetings for his Jewish Renewal synagogue, Beyt Tikkun. We read Lamentations by candlelight, after the evening had started. Earlier, we davened and then joined together for a meal before the fast. It was a solemn night, but a joyful one as well. I felt a great sense of community and spirituality, which was no doubt helped by being so high up in the hills of Berkeley.

This year, I am sitting at home. I am not going to services, because I would be home too late if I did. If that's lame, I don't care right now. My number one priority right now is taking care of myself. I am no less observing the meaning of the holiday, and this year, at least for the time I am spending alone, I am going to fast. I have plans to be with a friend, and I will eat either very little or not at all. A full-on fast might not be healthy for me, either, but I am going to meet it as much as I can.

I want to feel the hunger. An occasional fast is good sometimes. There was a good article that a friend shared on the practical nature of fasting, and it's true, fasting does something to you. It changes you, even when you aren't looking for it. It changes you in ways you don't expect. But shaking up your usual rhythm, you are forced out of your usual ways of thinking. Maybe this is perfectly what I need right now.

Lately, I have been feeling "stuck." I have been feeling like my life is in one particular place, and I'm not getting anywhere by trying to push it or shove it, heaving this way and that, but it's not going anywhere. It's like a big rock stuck in the sand, and it doesn't want to budge. So maybe for this holiday I will stop pushing. I will stop forcing my angles on all the things I want to "change," and instead let change happen of it's own accord.

I will open my mind and let the change come in. When you stop, sometimes, and stop thinking, that's when the good ideas come in.

Like cats.

Last year, Tisha B'Av was about remembering a part of my life that was broken, a part of my life that was destroyed; a relationship that failed to flourish. This year, in some ways, is the same. I have that relationship, still mourned, still broken, still lost. Even if having it in my life would be obsolete, inappropriate or just plain useless, I still mourn it's passing. Its remembrance still brings me pain that I just want to alleviate, and don't quite feel I can. And now, I have other relationships, built and lost. Each one a temple, where I sacrificed to G-d a little piece of myself, and now those sacrifices, too, are gone, never to be returned.

But even with those losses, what this Holiday really is about, to me, is hope. Hope for the future. Hope for rebuilding those corrupted relationships, or if not those ones, then to build new, stronger, better ones. With people I might not even know yet. Or friends who are just around the corner, who perhaps I've met, but are just ready and waiting in the wings to take my life to a new level of bliss and personal satisfaction that I've never known before, and which would belie my grief, but would make it, oh, so worth it.