TAMMUZ

We are in the back end of the month of Tammuz, the start of the hot dry summer.  The grain has been harvested, the sun is high in the sky day after day, the world turns brown, except for what is irrigated. Tammuz, the month, is named after the Babylonian God Dumezil or Tammuz, who dies with the summer and goes to the underworld where he is rescued by Inanna/Ishtar and is reborn in the fall when the rains start again, after Sukkot. He is reborn, our ancestors believed, because the women participated in mourning his death.  And participate they did, as we know from Ezekiel’s complaint about the mourning of the women for Tammuz happening at the temple in Jerusalem. (Ezekiel 8:14-15)

I want to make three points about how we might reclaim this basic narrative.

First, our Rabbis turned this from an earth based alignment with the cycles of the seasons into a memory of historical events with theological significance.  Rather than weeping for Tammuz as part of praying for the rains to return in the fall, we have the fast day of the 17nth of Tammuz, a date ostensibly chosen to commemorate five different disasters that befell our ancestors, leading to five more calamities that we remember on Tisha B’av, the better known holiday. Note that the 17nth of Tammuz is a minor fast, so only fasting from dawn to dusk compared to the full day fast of Tisha B’av. Here’s the text:

Five (awful) things happened to our ancestors on the 17th of Tammuz and five (awful) things happened on the 9th of Av.

On the 17th of Tammuz the tablets were broken, the daily burnt offering was nullified, the City (of Jerusalem) was breached, Apostomos burned the Torah, and he set up an idol in the sanctuary.

On the 9th of Av it was decreed to our ancestors that they would not enter the land, the first and the second temples were destroyed, (the city of) Beitar was taken, and the City (of Jerusalem) was ploughed. (Mishan.Tannit 4:6)

This conversion of indigenous ecologically based spirituality into an historical/theological orientation is something that I think we can seek to reverse as we reclaim our indigenous spirituality.

Second, the wailing of the women was a communal, ritual and non textual practice, whereas there is no prescribed communal ritual for the 17nth of Tammuz and the ritual additions for Tisha B’av are textual readings.  I think we would really benefit from a fast day or a commemorative ritual in which we communally mourned the loss of different species to human overreach and climate change.  We’d benefit from acknowledging these losses and praying for a return to stable ecosystems that didn’t feature things like killing hurricanes and 100 year floods every few years, along with mourning the loss of connection amongst humans and the loss of our connections with the more than human world.

Third, I find myself coming back to the question of timing. On the one hand, being conscious of Tammuz is a way of connecting with and honoring my ancestral tradition.  On the other hand, it is green and in the humidity of summer evenings you can hear the corn growing if you listen very carefully. It’s a great time to be a tomato plant, a cucumber, a green paper, a summer squash, a melon, green beans.  I keep wondering if I should be wailing at the death of the world, a temporary death with a returning God, if things follow the proper cosmic order. I keep wondering if I should be doing all this in December.  Here in a Continental Ecosystem, the world goes to sleep in December.  The trees are bare, the grass turns brown.  The riot of colors of the summer is gone for the starkness of the winter landscape.  Maybe we should be mourning the death of the abundance that was spring, summer and fall, and praying for the return of the life giving warmth of spring.  See, in this ecosystem, the pervasive limiting factor is the coldness of winter, not the dryness of summer. So it feels weird to mourn during summer and not winter.

 What do you think? What does your body feel? 

Tammuz and Ishtar