TEVET HOLIDAYS & DARKNESS

There are two holidays in Tevet.  There’s the back end of Hanukah, the last two or three days, depending on whether there are 29 or 30 days in Kislev. There’s also a minor fast day on the 10th of Tevet, Asarah b’Tevet, which I discuss below. I also want to share some traditional midrash or non legal aphorisms on darkness in Jewish tradition that validate the importance of darkness.

Asarah B’Tevet is a minor fast day.  That means we are instructed to fast from sun up to sun down and, at least in this case, we are allowed to work—the only commandment here is to fast.  It’s the shortest fast of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, because it’s the fast day with the shortest day.

The origin of the fast is that the tenth of Tevet is the day that the siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonians began in 587 BCE (Ezekiel 24:1-2).  Zechariah who comes about 60 years later, is the first reference to it being a fast day (Zechariah 8), so this fast day is a quick response to the tragedy of exile of the Jewish people from our land. The Talmud states that at some point this fast day and others will be days of rejoicing in times of peace and will only be fast days when there is no peace. (Rosh Hashanah 18B).  As far as I know, there has never been a time when this fast was declared a day of “joy and gladness” which says something about our history.

The fast day has taken on additional significance in Israel where it is the day for the observance of yahrtzeits for people whose date of death is not known such as Holocaust victims.  Thus it can be construed as a general day of mourning. The mourning is marked by communal recitation of the Kaddish, a variety of appropriate readings and lighting yahrtzeit candles.

I’m going to divide my questions here between ones for personal reflection and communal reflection.

On a personal front, where do you feel under siege?  Would it be meaningful to you to have a day where you spend some time doing mourning practices?  What would those mourning practices be? What lessons do you need to learn from being under siege?  How do you think you can break the siege? 

Our usual instinctive response for how to break a siege is to attempt to use some kind of force. One of the things I love about Starhawk’s book “The Fifth Sacred Thing” is that the progressives who control Northern California recognize that they need to resist the siege of the military ethnic nationalist forces from Southern California using a different method. They find a path of non violent resistance that actually works—hey it’s a novel.

On a communal level, what is under siege?  As a Jew, I certainly feel that we are collectively under siege.  If I were an anti-Zionist, I would feel under siege—I certainly felt so as a critic of settlement policy in the West Bank.  Democracy and tolerance are under siege throughout the human world..  Add to the list.  What would break the siege or how would you think to go about breaking it?

The more than human world is under siege through climate change and other human activities. Think  about the millions or billions of species that are suffering from human activity.  Think about farmland. The area around Salina Kansas supported more people in the 1700’s then it does now according to the research of Wes Jackson of the Land Institute because of the way we Western, technologically advanced humans have degraded the land.  Climate change threatens the very physical fabric that makes our human lives possible.  How do you grieve the losses already suffered?  What actions can you take—not what actions do you think others should do, but what actions can you take to ease the siege on the more than human world, even a small bit?

QUESTIONS

Where do you feel under siege?  Would it be meaningful to you to have a day where you spend some time doing mourning practices?  What would those mourning practices be? What lessons do you need to learn from being under siege?  How do you think you can break the siege? 

What is collectively under siege? What would break the siege or how would you think to go about breaking it?

SOME TRADITIONAL COMMENTS ON DARKNESS

 “He who is in the dark can see what is in the light, whereas he who is in the light cannot see what is in the dark.”  (various Talmudic sources) (Bialek and Ravnitzky Book of Legends p.509 story 45)

When is it really dark?  Only in the hour before dawn “and in that hour, the Holy one answers the world and all that are in it: out of the darkness he brings forth the dawn and gives light to the world. (smorgasboard of Talmudic sources,  Book of Legends, p. 761 story 18)

“From this we learn, though how is a mystery, that using darkness and death, Adam brought light into the world.” (Howard Schwartz Tree of Souls p. 137)

This first bit of Talmudic wisdom is developed in the context of a discussion of the nature of the eye and the fact that the seeing part of the eye is the dark part, not the colored or lighter part.

I bring forth these three bits of wisdom because they all share the idea that the banishing of the dark is not just impossible but undesirable.  If we could ban or repress or eliminate whatever we thought was dark, there would be no light in the world. Even more, without the dark, we could not see the light.

This is the darkest time of the year, analogous to the darkest time of the night.  There’s a human desire to add light and banish the scary dark, and I certainly understand it.  But one part of our spiritual development needs to be to learn to sit with the dark, to dwell with the dark because there are certain things we can only see if we do not suppress the dark. And we live in a culture that suppresses the dark and associates it with evil.  So dwell with your inner darkness and connect the darkness and the light.