In case you missed it, this weekend marks the saddest day on the Jewish calendar- Tisha B’Av, the commemoration of the destruction of both Holy Temples, and when lots of other terrible things happened, too (the Jewish expulsion from Spain, Germany entering World War I, just lots of awfulness).  But don’t worry!  In less than a week from now you’re going to be super cheered up— you don’t have a choice.

See, Tisha B’Av literally means the Ninth of Av, though this year we observe it the tenth so that it doesn’t coincide with Shabbat. The 15th of Av, Tu B’Av, is a love holiday that the Mishna asserts ties for the happiest day on the Jewish calendar. So that means that this year in five days after the sorrow of Tisha B’Av, we have to snap all the way to great joy. Mind you, we have three whole weeks of buildup to get into dour spirits before fasting and mourning on Tisha B’Av.

(You’d think Sukkot closely following Yom Kippur would be a similar situation, but actually, according to the rabbis, Yom Kippur is supposed to be the day that ties with Tu B’Av for most joyful, since our sins are, in theory, forgiven. …Sure.)

But these days, the month of Av isn’t even the most dramatic example of emotional whiplash in the Jewish calendar.  In contemporary Israel, their sorrowful Memorial Day turns into their celebration of their independence with no buffer time at all.

So is it easier for people in general (and Jews in particular) to force emotions of sadness or joy? The obvious answer is sad, since, you know, you generally try to avoid that sort of feeling, but you might be surprised.

I tend to be skeptical of pop psychology in the news, but all the same, the Washington Post reported that trying to force yourself to be happy is likely to backfire. As in, constant self-reflection as to your own mental state can make you more neurotic? Yeah, that sounds like some Jews I know.

Furthermore, the article says that it’s healthier to have a relative balance of emotions, so that maybe wallowing a bit on sad holidays like Tisha B’av prime us to shake ourselves out of a funk. (I know by the end of Tisha B’Av I can even be bored of being sad.)

Jews are famously a resilient bunch. Maybe if anyone is primed to knock our emotions back and forth like a tennis ball, it’s us.

In any case, remember, if you need help enjoying Tu B’Av, Jewcy is throwing a wicked awesome party.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYpcFHtxm60

Image credit: Oscar65221 via DeviantArt

The post Tisha B’Av and Emotional Whiplash appeared first on Jewcy.

Hannah Szenes has become a near-legendary figure in Jewish heroism: After escaping Nazi-Europe in 1939 and making it to Palestine, she decided to volunteer as a paratrooper and return to her native Hungary to rescue Jews. She was then arrested, tortured, and ultimately executed for treason at age 23.

But what makes her legacy so enduring is her writing; she was a poet from a young age, and her most famous work, “Towards Caesarea” (often called “Eli, Eli,”) was put to music, and can be found in summer camp songbooks,  Regina Spektor concerts, and playing over the ending of some versions of Schindler’s List.

But here’s the thing: Szenes had other work. She didn’t have the time to be prolific, but during her short life, she wrote in multiple languages: poems, diaries, and at least two plays.

Here’s the translation of a poem she wrote when she was only thirteen, which reads sort of like the emo poetry you wrote when you were her age, only better:

“Life is a brief and hurtling day, pain and striving fill every page.
Just time enough to glance around,
Register a face or sound
and—life’s been around.”

In retrospect, sure, the poem seems prophetic, but the darker work was yet to come. Though it’s really a shame that Szenes is known as a tragic figure, when some of her writing was joyous, and even hilarious. Take this adolescent diary entry:

“Do boys interest me? Well, yes, they interest me more than before, but only in general because I didn’t see a single boy I really liked the entire summer. True, I didn’t meet very many. This is my idea of the ideal boy:

“He should be attractive and well dressed, but not a fop; he should be a good sportsman, but interested in other things besides sports; he should be cultured and intelligent, but good-humored and not arrogant; and he should not chase after girls. And so far I have not met a single boy like this.”

She didn’t make it far past being a teenager, but maybe her stint on a kibbutz found someone at least approaching that standard.

Szenes continued to write in captivity, and after she died, a poem, likely from early on in her imprisonment, was found written on the wall of her cell. It’s sad, and resigned, but not regretful.

For this one Jewish girl, from worrying about boys, to facing her own mortality head-on, Szenes fit a lot into a short life.

The poem reads:

“One – two – three… eight feet long
Two strides across, the rest is dark…
Life is a fleeting question mark
One – two – three… maybe another week.
Or the next month may still find me here,
But death, I feel is very near.
I could have been 23 next July
I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost.”

Image credit: Wikimedia

The post Hannah Szenes’s Last Poem appeared first on Jewcy.

Is a memory something you have or something you’ve lost? – Woody Allen (Spoken by Gena Rowlands (as Marion) in ‘Another Woman’)

Today we think of who we do not have and why, and then what that lack demands of us.

Tomorrow, about how we celebrate being alive to meet those demands.

Today is Memorial Day in Israel, honoring fallen soldiers and victims of terror, observed here a day before Independence Day. The connection is essential since it is widely recognized that without the former, celebrating the latter would be impossible, while always hoping that one day, this will not be the case. That there will be no more names on next year’s list of the fallen. It is, in other words, a sacred day we wish with all our hearts we didn’t need to observe, and in fact grapple with its necessity all the time.

Here’s something I wrote about potential loss and war when my husband was commanding an APC in Lebanon II. I was essentially the least supportive war wife ever, because I didn’t believe in the war. I later learned, from the Disney franchise of all places, that Hassan Nasrallah was counting on people like me to behave exactly as I did. (What does Disney have to do with the IDF and Hezbollah? Think Mufasa / Scar / Simba / Pridelands / Hakuna Matata / Circle of Life… Or just read the essay.)

In any event, Israel is not quite Western and also has a very small population – death by war is not something distant and abstract, since everyone has either lost someone or knows someone who has. As such, there are no Memorial Day sales and no Memorial Day home games and no Memorial Day picnics. There are, instead (not in addition), countless public ceremonies, school observances, lots of sad TV documentaries (and little else on) and public moments of silence when traffic stops all along the nation’s highways. It’s not a case where some of the country mourns its fallen sons and daughters and some of the country shops or watches baseball.

Memory is pervasive around here, fraught. It is as much something as it is a lack of something.

The mood shifts dramatically sometime around 5 pm, as people get ready for Independence Day, an out and out celebration, complete with picnics, barbecues, parties, fireworks, etc. Much like the Fourth of July.

(But stores: Still closed.)

It seems that Israeli memory is about a conscious decision to always be remembering and forgetting all the time, in the same instant, a constant argument between absence and presence that sometimes results in the type of massive virtual memory overload that can causes one to freeze. Independence Day is, to continue that metaphor, like one big national reboot.

In truth, I sometimes miss the days of memory being something you celebrate at Macy’s, unless, of course, you had someone die in Vietnam or Iraq, in which case your day might look a little Israeli.

In any event, this silence and seriousness and restraint and celebration of life that nearly everyone does around here is very intense and it makes me want to hide some days.

But then I forget that I need to. Memory is like that.

This post originally appeared on The Word Well and is reprinted with permission.

(Image: ChameleonsEye / Shutterstock.com)

The post Yom HaZikaron: On Memory appeared first on Jewcy.