Not enough
An open letter to me and you
At what point is just showing up not enough? When is whatever you’re doing, even if it’s “the best you can do,” just not good enough? That would depend on whether you think there’s supposed to be an identifiable result or not. If you are convinced that the point of showing up is showing up, and the point of doing is having done it, then what you are doing is enough. But if you think your actions should bear some specific kind and amount of fruit, then, if it is not producing that kind and amount of fruit, then no, what you are doing is not enough. No one who’s starting a business that’s not going well says, “well, I showed up today, and that’s enough for me. What else can you do?”
What we are doing as a nation is not enough. It’s not enough. Full respect to the people who show up and do their best, but it’s not enough. I know this because the Temple hasn’t been built yet. And “every generation in which it is not built, it is as if they destroyed it.” And though “Temple” might be hard to relate to, I believe you can substitute “true, lasting peace on earth, the great age of benevolent humanity in which God’s Presence resides on earth like it did in the Garden of Eden” to the same effect.
We have to turn it up a notch. Whatever we’re doing, we have to add a layer to it, some depth or intensity. Or maybe we need to do something else entirely. But something needs to shift. It seems like the specific parameters of change are, to some degree, up to each of us, but that’s as long as the standard is “this needs to bear a specific kind and amount of fruit. This has to lead to the Temple.”
Of course change needs to be sustainable, and we should take it slow, and one step at a time, and slow and steady wins the race and all that. But there’s a difference between slow and tectonic. You might have convinced yourself that you are moving at the fastest sustainable pace of growth, but maybe you’ve actually just stopped, and you’re lying to yourself. Are we there yet? Every so often we need to take a good look at the odometer and make sure we’re at least going the speed limit.
9th Av is that time. It is the nadir of the Jewish year. It is like the summer solstice. The aphelion (look it up). It is the day when, by certain metrics, we are farthest from God. We are sitting in ashes. We are not greeting each other. We are not eating. Some people sleep on the floor with no pillow. Davening is the most un-davening davening we have. No tallit or tefillin, We don’t say titkabel tzelotehon - “may our prayers be answered” - in the full kaddish. Every kaddish is like mourners’ kaddish.
It’s not that our prayers don’t count on 9th Av. It’s that davening is not the point of 9th Av. The point is to look in, and look around, and to fully, deeply notice that we live in a broken world, and the extent to which we are showing up, or the “best” that we think we are doing is not enough, and something needs to change. And 9th Av is the day to do it - not because I feel an overwhelming sense of God’s Presence and I am in such awe that I will do anything, anything for Hashem. No. The opposite. Within the space that God gives us on that day, we have the space and the time and the mandate to actually look around, no rose colored glasses, no illusions, no manipulation or coercion, no Deity breathing down my neck. Just looking around at a broken world and acknowledging that, whatever it is we’re doing, it’s not enough, and it’s time to stop pretending it is.
Of course we’ll have to resist strong temptation to believe that, if we mumble medieval reference-laden acrostic poetry all morning, then we have somehow fulfilled our obligation. Sorry. Unless you are one of the rare people for whom mumbling medieval reference-laden acrostic poetry is like stepping hard on the gas, then you owe it to all of us to carve out some time on that day to look, hard, at how things are going, and adjust, perhaps substantially adjust, accordingly, in a way that bears the right kind and amount of fruit.
May this finally be the year when we bury our kinot forever because we have seen what we need to see and made the moves we need to make in order to bring about that heaven on earth.