17th of TAMMUZ Bein Hametzarim
The 17nth of Tammuz marks the beginning of three weeks until Tisha B’av called Bein Hametzarim—between the narrow places. There was originally a ritual or a series of rituals during Tammuz tied to the agricultural cycle. We don’t have much exact information about this because the rituals were tied up with Babylonian Gods and Goddesses. Thus the rituals were viewed as abominations by the prophets and our memories of them largely suppressed. Instead we have the historical theological meaning of three weeks of grief for all that has befallen us as a people. And grief is hugely important, so I don’t want to gainsay the practice of grieving. Grief and praise, I believe following Martin Prechtel, are two sides of the same coin and in order to extravagantly praise our beautiful world, we must also be willing and able to grieve.
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 in Hebrew. In the Babylonian myth which was celebrated by our ancestors, Tammuz 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. This participation in healing and maintaining the cosmic order of rain in season is exactly the same kind of project as Jews influenced by Lurianic Kabbalah undertake when they work to repair the world, what we call Tikkun Olam.
We know the women participated in mourning Tammuz from Ezekiel’s complaint about them. ‘Next He [this refers to the Presence of God who is guiding him during a vision that starts chapter 8] brought me to the entrance of the North Gate of the House of the Lord, between the portico and the altar and there sat the women bewailing Tammuz.” (Ezekiel 8:14). Further, Jeremiah, a slightly older contemporary of Ezekiel has this dialogue: “Thereupon they answered Jeremiah, all the men who knew that their wives made offerings to other Gods; all the women present, a large gathering, and all the people who lives in Pathos in the land of Egypt. “We will not listen to you in the matter about which you spoke to us in the name of YHVH. On the contrary, we will do everything that we have vowed to make offerings to the Queen of heaven and to pour libations to her as we used to do, we and our fathers, our kings and our officials, in the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem. For then we had plenty to eat, we were well off and suffered no misfortune.” (Jeremiah 44:15-17). Susan Ackerman argues persuasively that the Queen of heaven is the same Goddess as Inanna. (Ser her wonderful book about polytheism in ancient Israel Under Every Green Tree)
As we have seen in our examination of other holidays, the typical approach our Yahwist ancestors, the prophets, priests, scribes and Rabbis who wrote and edited our sacred texts, the typical approach is to overlay an historical theological meaning onto the more ancient spirituality rooted in our agricultural cycles. 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)
The three weeks became a time when certain mourning customs were observed. Observant Jews do not have weddings, nor any other joyous celebrations including anything involving music. Some do not cut their hair and avoid reciting the prayer shehechyanu because it is about joy and gratitude for something new. (Strassfeld p.87). These mourning rituals accelerate when the calendar turns to Av, but we’ll discuss that next month.
I believe that we can reclaim the indigenous ecologically based spirituality of the 17nth of Tammuz, while also maintaining the historical/theological orientation of grieving. I’m gong to offer two considerations.
First, the wailing of the women was a communal, ritual and non textual embodied practice. We should absolutely think about how to perform embodied grief rituals as a way of hoping that we can maintain the cosmic order including the climactic stability which has blessed our lives and which we are busy destroying. We might communally mourn 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.
Second, 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 frequently green in July in the ecosystem in which I live. In the humidity of summer evenings (that is missing in Mediterranean ecosystems such as Israel’s) 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 pepper, a summer squash, a melon, green beans. It’s just not a time of death with everything turning brown.
I keep wondering when 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 about when it is time to mourn?
