New Life in the Ruins: A Bite-Size Blessing for the New Moon of Av

On one foot: The Temple fell. The world hurts. We still carry absurd hopes. Here we are. That’s Av.

Busy people tend to like (and know how) to get right to the point. This is the month when the Temple was destroyed, and our Reparative Work Era launched. Hence also the month that the Jewish diaspora really became a Thing. It’s also said in the Talmud that this is the month the messiah is born.

What is the messiah? Definitely a fraught historical term, at the least. The Talmud itself has a bunch of thoughts on it, including a fascinating story about an Arab telling a Jewish farmer that the Temple is gone, and then that the messiah has been born, all on the same day. (There is also a rabbinic tradition of “ruach” itself – breath, wind, and spirit – being called “messiah,” as well as one prominent opinion, Hillel’s, that there is no future messiah. It’s all very Jewish.) Like the Christians, in our way, we have this stubborn hope of world redemption, epochal transformation. Epic, Star Wars type dreams on a sustainable, earthly scale.

But this is still the month the Temple is destroyed. So what that redemptive potential is born in the midst of crisis. The crisis is causing suffering now – and even if it’s not ideal that gathering in community these days can mean a constant awareness of pain, it’s even less ideal when we have to act like the pain isn’t there at all.

In the month of Av (“Parent”), Jewish tradition asks us to sit beside what has been broken – not to move too quickly to fix it, not to rush toward redemption.

Somehow, when we pause in the ruins, something new always appears.

— By Yaakov Ginsberg-Schreck, Founder & Executive Director