Hook Me, Babe! A Blessing for the Month of Tammuz

A young plant pushes through cracked earth under a glowing sunset and full moon.

Bottom line, even for a medium as novel as Instagram, when it comes to the translation of attention into action, there is really nothing new under the sun.

Friend,

A “hook,” in web-speak, is designed to grab attention. Outrage. Confusion. “You’ve been doing Jewish wrong,” maybe. Or a clear value proposition — “Here is the secret I just learned that saved my business thousands of dollars a month.” If your eyes stick for more than three seconds, Instagram records it in their engagement metrics.

How do we grab attention ethically?

Here are three key takeaways from RUACH’s recent videos:

• There is a serious hunger for content that puts Jewish thought in conversation with other traditions. Our “Yoga + Jewish Mysticism Are Friends” video has quadrupled our follower count in the last month. It’s been saved by nearly 100 people.
  

• Ethical virality, as a longer-term strategy, means playing the game — creating entertaining, thought-provoking, emotionally stimulating short-form videos (called “reels”) — in service of human connection, not polarization or rage-bait. There are hooks we will use, and hooks we won’t.
  

• If the hook grabs attention, the “CTA,” or “Call to Action,” directs it to action. CTAs can be links to events, instructions to follow or comment below, really any step that converts the viewer into an active participant in the culture. In the language of Jewish tradition, we might say that the hook frames the learning, while the CTA is the “halakhah le’maaseh” — the “action step,” as a folk translation, or “prescribed traditional action.”

Bottom line, even for a medium as novel as Instagram, when it comes to the translation of attention into action, there is really nothing new under the sun.

Which brings us to the month of Tammuz — the lunar cycle, in Jewish tradition, when new disasters seem to keep striking familiar wounds. Fun, no? The “hook” of Tammuz, so to speak, is the breaching of the walls of Jerusalem, the placement of an idol in the sanctuary, and the sin of the Golden Calf (among other catastrophes outlined in the Mishnah).

Just after the full moon of Tammuz, in this month of peak sunlight, the Israelites’ capacity to err and suffer punishment — at divine and human hands alike — is on flagrant display. Why?

But honestly — if this new moon is meant to activate our sense of grief, without falling into the trap of trauma-bonding content, it can’t be a coincidence that Tammuz is aligned with the renewed shortening of days. In the ancient Near East, Tammuz was actually the name of a fertility deity. Each year, as the summer heat began to scorch crops and overwhelm new growth, Tammuz would “die” and be taken to the underworld, to emerge the following year. Each year, Tammuz’s namesake month featured rituals of lamentation — professional mourners literally weeping in public.

While Israelite tradition explicitly distances itself from this kind of Tammuz worship, it made the choice to adopt the name for this Hebrew month, and to center our own particular narrative of rupture, vulnerability, and grief.

Yet the CTA, in Torah, is not despair. The CTA, in Torah, is reflection, listening, and strategic action towards renewed growth.

After the Golden Calf, the Israelites double down on their wandering path, still prone to complaint and mistake, but the covenant itself is never again quite so fragile.

After the Temple is destroyed, rabbinic Judaism redirects holiness into study, local community, and acts of care — building portable forms of Jewish life that can survive exile and change, and ultimately even usher in the Messiah.

For this new moon of Tammuz, I hope you are blessed with moments vivid enough to grab your attention. For every hook life gives you, may you be blessed with the receptivity to hear the action embedded in the call of the moment. May the summer light guide our footsteps towards redemption, individually and together, and may the shortening days, on the other side of the solstice, turn us not only towards the pain of loss but to the promise of rebirth as well.

Hodesh tov – may it be a good month,

Yaakov Ginsberg-Schreck Founder & Executive Director yaakovgs@thisisruach.org

With gratitude to Rabbi Nehemia Polen and Dev Brous for conversations that helped inspire this blessing.