I walked on the beach today and saw a beautiful conch sticking out of the sand. The sea had just retreated, and I could see the perfect spiral glistening, beckoning me to pick it up—which I did. It was a fragment of the shell, with its top broken and without the rest of the body. In its brokenness I could see in my mind’s eye what it must have looked like—an imposing, large conch, with beautiful light colors. The conch did not have the strength to withstand the breaking of the waves, the force of the tides, or maybe an encounter with a boat or a surfboard. My first reaction when I picked it up was to feel a sense of longing for the wholeness of the shell. How beautiful it must have been! If only I had the good fortune of seeing it in its glory! Impulsively, I looked for the pieces of this shell, imagining I could glue it back together. Although there were a good bunch of shell pieces with similar colors, the reality sunk in quickly. It is impossible to glue back together the pieces of a shell. Once it is broken, it cannot be put together as it once was.
Yet the broken piece, in and of itself, was beautiful. The colors, the perfect shape, the admiration I felt for nature for creating such an amazing thing was not diminished because it was broken. I ran my finger on it, feeling the bumps and the smooth surfaces, marveling at the perfect proportions and pleasant texture of this fragment. The more I looked and touched that fragment, the more I understood that the part of that conch I had in my hand was perfect, with its own beauty, with its own power.
In the Jewish calendar, we are now at the end of the three-week period between the day in which the first breach of the Second Temple walls on the 17th day of the month of Tammuz and the day of the destruction of both the First and the Second Temples in Jerusalem, on the 9th day of the month of Av.
The 9th day of the month of Av is a very sad day in our tradition, a day of mourning the lost grandeur of the past, the beauty of what had been, once, an imposing structure dedicated to creating and maintaining a relationship with the Divine.
Once upon a time the building was beautiful, and the Jewish people felt its power. Our sources tell the story that explain the destruction, the infighting, the idolatry, the ways in which our ancestors behaved and brought upon them the disaster. The building and the rituals could not withstand the behaviors of the people nor the attacks from the Babylonians and the Romans.
From the destruction came something beautiful.
Without the First or Second Temples, we exercised our creativity in order to connect with the Divine, creating services that did not depend on a building and also a system of back-and-forth discussions that shape the way we think. Something beautiful came out of this destruction, something that would be a great loss if it did not exist.
This coming Wednesday evening and Thursday will be Tisha B’Av. We will have services on Thursday morning at 7:30am, online only. If you wish to join us, please do not hesitate to contact us at info@jilli.org, and we will send you a link to the services. As a reminder, we do not wear a tallit or tefillin during the morning services, we wear white, we do not wear leather shoes, eat, drink, use lotions, bathe, and we fast for 25 hours. I hope that, even if you do not join us, that you will take some time on Wednesday evening or on Thursday to reflect upon losses and the space they have created, to be filled with something new and positive.