{"id":192,"date":"2026-07-17T04:14:54","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T04:14:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/summitrelocationtimess.com\/?p=192"},"modified":"2026-07-17T04:14:54","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T04:14:54","slug":"the-possibilities-of-grief-as-a-rupture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/summitrelocationtimess.com\/?p=192","title":{"rendered":"The Possibilities of Grief as a Rupture"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Jewish holiday of Tisha B\u2019Av next week is built\u2009\u2014\u2009entirely\u2009\u2014\u2009around grief. Originally focused on the destructions of the Temple in Jerusalem by both the Babylonians and Romans, it\u2019s now come to encompass every catastrophe to befall Jews from the expulsion from Spain in 1492<\/span> to the outbreak of World War I\u00a0to the mass deportation of Jews to the Treblinka death camp in\u00a01942<\/span>.<\/p>

Read more The People Fighting Back: Inside Maine\u2019s Immigrant Defense Movement<\/a><\/p>\n

The traditional way to observe the holiday is to perform Jewish mourning rituals while recounting these histories along with the poetic record of the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, the Book of Lamentations. It can be a\u00a0powerful practice, with deep possibility for personal and political transformation\u2009\u2014\u2009if we face what we\u2019re\u00a0mourning.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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During the 19<\/span>th<\/sup> century in the United States, the early Reform Rabbi David Einhorn, a\u00a0slavery abolitionist, rewrote the meaning of Tisha B\u2019Av in his prayer book Olat Tamid. He acknowledged the horrors that accompanied the destruction of the Temples, but refused to make the rebuilding of a\u00a0physical Temple, or a\u00a0return to a\u00a0single Jerusalem, the point. The mourning, in his hands, had the capacity to be turned into hope, even celebration: the coming of a\u00a0new and global Jerusalem, an Olam Ha\u2019Bah, a\u00a0just society built everywhere by Jews working alongside their\u00a0neighbors.<\/p>\n

Contemporary rabbis have mostly abandoned this tradition, instead using this holiday to recount a\u00a0litany of horrors to reinforce the idea that Jews are a\u00a0uniquely oppressed people whose trauma is what unifies and defines us as Jews. This produces an artificial separation of Jews from our neighbors, evoking grief to amplify a\u00a0right-wing lie that we are alone in our experiences. It also reinforces the stature of legacy Jewish institutions (what we call \u200b\u201c<\/span>Fortress Judaism\u201d) that since the Second Red Scare have expelled leftist Jews from communal life\u2009\u2014\u2009political repression that has worsened since October 7<\/span>, when support for the genocide has become \u200b\u201c<\/span>a defining feature of employability\u201d in Jewish\u00a0institutions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The end of that level of coercive control is leading most Jewish clergy to take wild swings in the discourse. Hundreds of rabbis lobbed another bad-faith accusation of antisemitism at New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, this time for quoting Italian Communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci on interregnum, the time between the end of the old world and the beginning of the\u00a0new.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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