This year, the 17th of Tammuz will be observed on Sunday, July 17. According to the tradition, this is the day that the walls of Jerusalem were breached, ushering in the Three Weeks of Affliction and leading up to Tisha B’Av. In preparation for this time, this week’s Kavanot are reflections on hope, anxiety, and the challenges and opportunities of these summer days.
Whenever I teach about the Jewish calendar, I am struck by the wisdom of our ancestors, who did a remarkable job identifying new moons and fixing the calendar without the benefit of Google or Greenwich Mean Time. At the same time, the rabbinic logic around the passage of time and the confluence of events is … a bit far-fetched.
According to the Mishnah (Ta’anit 4:6), five calamitous things befell our ancestors on the 17th of Tammuz (and five more on Tisha B’Av, but that’s a teaching for a different day).
First on the list is this: “On the seventeenth of Tammuz, the tablets were broken by Moses …”
They arrive on this date by a circuitous path, but within that path—or the description of it—we have a remarkable teaching, one that I first heard taught by my beloved friend and teacher Rabbi Elianna Yolkut. It is a lesson that I always carry with me, especially in painful or challenging times. There is a conversation within the rabbinic texts about whether Moses broke the Tablets of the Ten Commandments of his own accord, or whether he did so because God told him to. Here, the rabbis come down on the side of the former: Moses acted of his own volition. They use that to teach:
And from where do we derive that the Holy Blessed One, agreed with his reasoning? As it is stated: “The first tablets which you broke [asher shibarta]” (Exodus 34:1), and Reish Lakish said: The word asher is an allusion to the phrase: May your strength be true [yishar koḥakha] due to the fact that you broke the tablets. (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 87a)
Yishar Koach, the phrase used here, is a familiar one to synagogue goers. These are the words that we speak to those who lead services and read or teach Torah. Literally meaning, “May your strength be firm,” it is an expression of praise and gratitude, a way of saying: job well done. The rabbis imagine that, seeing the shattered tablets, God is not angry or disappointed, but rather proud of Moses. “Well done,” God says.
Of this moment and this teaching, Rabbi Dr. Erin Leib Smokler writes:
God was offering tacit approval, even praise, for that bold move. Sometimes things, even the holiest of things, need to be shattered. Sometimes rupture is called for precisely to reconstitute a relationship.
We are poised to enter our liturgical days of brokenness, the days in which we are meant to sit in discomfort and in rupture. For many of us this summer—whether personally, nationally, globally, or all of the above—those feelings are not hard to conjure. The beauty of the calendar is its cyclical nature. It reminds us that these days do not last forever. Walls are repaired, and so are relationships. Holiness will be rebuilt. What comes next can be even more beautiful than what was before.
—Rabbi Sari Laufer