A Time To Mourn, And A Time To Dance
Grief as ally, grief as empowerment
Hello friends. I’m taking you straight from laughter last week to sobbing this week.
Next week, starting the evening of August 12 and into August 13, is Tisha B’Av, the most intense day of mourning on the Jewish calendar. It commemorates a long list of tragedies that have befallen the Jews, starting with the destruction of both the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem—The First Temple by the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 586 BCE, and the Second by the Roman Empire in 70 CE.
In the evening, people gather and sit on the floor, in the dark, reading the Book of Lamentations by candlelight or flashlights. Traditionally, you fast the entire day, and observe other mourning rituals, like not bathing or even greeting people.
Communal mourning is something that mainstream American society doesn’t make a lot of space for. It feels especially jarring to come across it in the middle of the summer, which is associated with vacations and parties.
But pausing for a day like this in August really works for me, for a lot of layered reasons.
First, because August has been a heavy month for my family for a long time.
Second, because it’s increasingly a month of hurricanes, and wildfires, and heat waves, and heavy, gray clouds dropping curtain after curtain of rain.
(Related: I talked to Laurel Tamayo about the destruction of her family home in the Lahaina wildfire, one year ago yesterday, and the film she is making about it.)
In the world of climate emotions, there is growing recognition of the importance and complexity of grief in particular. In this paper, Panu Pikhala, on whose research the Climate Emotions Wheel is based, unpacks the many nuances of climate grief.
He says climate grief, like the grief of infertility, is “chronic” and “nonfinite”—ongoing, with no clear end point.
It’s “ambiguous loss,” and “anticipatory mourning,” like the gradual loss of a relative to dementia, because we are living in the world as it is even while it diminishes, and also dreading the future.
It’s “disenfranchised,” like the grief of miscarriage, because it’s not often officially recognized or commemorated.
We can try to re-enfranchise our climate grief, by creating communal rituals and times to recognize it (I love this story of the funeral for a glacier).
And as Jennifer Atkinson writes, we can start to see our grief as an ally. “Grief is the process of accepting loss.” It helps us feel our love, our sense of connection with the human and nonhuman world.
As I read the scenes of misery in Eicha, the Book of Lamentations, the text for this day, I can’t help but think about the living hell that is Gaza right now.
The Lord has laid waste without pity
All the habitations of Jacob;
He has razed in His anger
Fair Judah’s strongholds.
The intensive care units smelled like rot and death; the corridors stank like a kitchen filled with filth; the hospital grounds smelled of sewage and spent explosives.
…babes and sucklings languish
In the squares of the city.
They keep asking their mothers,
“Where is bread and wine?”
As they languish like battle-wounded
In the squares of the town,
As their life runs out
In their mothers’ bosoms.
Younis lays disorientated on a green mattress in Nasser Hospital, in southern Gaza. His long brown eyelashes rest delicately on his pale sunken face, as he drifts in and out of sleep.
The 9-year-old Palestinian boy lies in his mother’s arms, clearly wasted from severe malnutrition and suffering from dehydration. His blue jogging bottoms hang off his emaciated legs, as his tiny ribcage protrudes from his billowy orange T-shirt.
Her infants have gone into captivity
Before the enemy…
The foe has laid hands
On everything dear to her.
She has seen her Sanctuary
Invaded by nations
Which You have denied admission
Into Your community.
Ruby Chen longs to recover the remains of his 19-year-old son, Itay — a soldier who Israeli intelligence says was killed in the Oct. 7 attack — so that he can be buried and his “soul” finally given “a place to rest” in accordance with Jewish practices.
There are parallels too, with ecological destruction happening right now.
From above He sent a fire
Down into my bones.
He spread a net for my feet,
He hurled me backward…
See, O LORD, the distress I am in!
My heart is in anguish…
But while he fought the massive blaze, his own home turned to ashes…he saw the devastation for himself while on patrol. He could only describe it as "devastating."
Being in mourning can amplify a sense of victimhood. Woe is me! Why me, why did this happen? The word, “Eicha,” means, “Alas!”
On Tisha B’Av, surprisingly, the text pushes back against that idea. The rabbis attribute the destruction of Jerusalem by our enemies to Jewish sins, specifically “baseless hatred.”
“the LORD has afflicted her / For her many transgressions.”
The supposed reason for our suffering is our hatred for each other—hatred that itself has no reason.
What is this? Is it fair? It sounds like victim-blaming, especially of the children, and everyone else who is manifestly innocent and suffering right now.
Why lay a trip of sin and punishment over these horrible acts of destruction?
I feel privileged to hold Jewish identity because it offers me the opportunity to sit with the complexity of being both oppressor and oppressed at the same time, and maybe understand both sides a little better. I am both white and Jewish and I have both white privilege and specifically Jewish privilege. As a group we have education and class privilege; participation in the Jewish community offers me cultural wealth, personal support and affirmation, and access to resources and valuable connections.
And antisemitism also exists, on the right and the left. Including people who still want to destroy us. So does generational trauma and loss.
You can be a victim and also powerful; harmed and also guilty; terribly sad, bereft, in anguish, and also a human being who is responsible, accountable. That is what Tisha b’Av teaches us.
So much of the conversation about Gaza has been twisted into a binary where only one side can hold the victim card or be worthy of empathy.
Somewhat similarly, there is a tiring debate about to what degree we should examine our individual actions on behalf of the climate crisis or whether we should focus all our ire on the people with the most power.
To be clear — yes, the fossil fuel industry must be stopped. Yes, I believe we should use whatever leverage we have as American citizens to stop the war.
What matters is that there is suffering. What matters is that anyone with power to stop suffering, acts and does what we can.
We can dance with our mourning. Rituals of communal grief can be a space to reinforce our sense of collective responsibility and empower us to act. And action, for healing, is as needed as it has ever been.
Some links
In Germany, the term “Hochwasserdemenz,” or flood dementia, describes how quickly even people who were directly harmed by floods go back to behaving as though the floods never happened.
Expose: carbon capture is fake, and the oil companies know it, but they keep paying for greenwashing ads on NYT and NPR anyway.