In normal times, summer is the quiet season—school is out, we are travelling, relaxing, enjoy a slowed-down rhythm of long days and warm nights. Now, of course, we have been living off-rhythm for months, stripped of our regular routines and timelines. Summer feels different, just as everything feels different.
And yet, while it has none of the “big” days of our tradition, summer isn’t actually quiet in “Jewish time.” Summer—these months of Tammuz, Av, and Elul—is a 10-week journey from destruction to despair to hope, an inexorable march from the 17th of Tammuz to Rosh Hashanah. It is 3 weeks of rebuke, and 7 of consolation. Each day of those three weeks brings us closer to the precipice; each day of the seven carries us up and forward. Just days away from Tisha B’Av, we descend, knowing that there is nowhere to go but ahead, no way to go but up.
— Rabbi Sari Laufer