A New Song For Tisha b’Av

I wrote a new song for Tisha b’Av this year, and even more so for the Three Weeks of grief and mourning, leading up to that greatest day of calamity on the Jewish calendar. And, in truth, I really wrote this song for the lesser known beginning of this hot, narrow stretch of time, the 17th of the month of Tammuz: a fasting day when we commemorate the breaching of the Walls of Jerusalem (by the Babylonian Empire around 588 BCE, and then again by Rome in c. 70 CE). Three Weeks later, on Tisha b’Av, in both cases, the Temple was destroyed. 

Throughout the ages, these days have been catastrophe magnets, and in a year when it feels like the walls of every vulnerable community have been breached again and again… the distinction between history and present and future begins to slip. 

I’m blessed to still live in my hometown of Pittsburgh (Shawnee & Haudenosaunee land) where we have a growing minyan of anarchisty/antizionist/diasporist Jews who meet monthly for a Kabbalat Shabbat. (Join the Ratzon PGH mailing list if you’d like to stay up to date!) The Friday before the 17th of Tammuz, we gathered in a community member’s backyard and I shared my song, “One More Song to Sing”, along with a handout of lyrics, art, and discussion questions. (In the song’s GDrive link you’ll find a lot more journaling, line-by-line commentary even, and a couple of demo tracks, if you’re interested in song-writing process.) 

Now, there’s a bit of an irony to writing a song for the Three Weeks, as there is a curious tradition during this time to fast from listening to, or playing, musical instruments. While some explain that this kind of music is simply too joyous and bound to lead to dancing, which would really ruin the somber mood, the explanation I favour is based on Psalm 137, recounting the Babylonian Exile, which starts with the lines (translation mine, thank you SVARA for helping me build the skills to do so):

עַל־נַהֲרוֹת  בָּבֶל שָׁם יָשַׁבְנוּ גַּם־בָּכִינוּ בְּזׇכְרֵנוּ אֶת־צִיּוֹן׃

By the rivers of Babylon,

there we sat, 

and also wept,

while we remembered Zion.

עַל־עֲרָבִים בְּתוֹכָהּ תָּלִינוּ כִּנֹּרוֹתֵינוּ׃

On the willows/poplars (dark barked trees) in our midst

we hung up our harps / our lyres

כִּי שָׁם שְׁאֵלוּנוּ שׁוֹבֵינוּ דִּבְרֵי־שִׁיר וְתוֹלָלֵינוּ שִׂמְחָה שִׁירוּ לָנוּ מִשִּׁיר צִיּוֹן׃ 

For there they asked us – our captors – for words of songs,

The ones who made us wail, for simcha/joy:

“Sing to us from the Song of Zion.” 

אֵיךְ נָשִׁיר אֶת־שִׁיר־יְהֹוָה עַל אַדְמַת נֵכָר׃ 

How are we to sing a Song of the Eternal 

upon unrecognizable land? 

This explanation gives a sort of paradoxical room for allowing acapella songs during the Three Weeks, unaccompanied songs, which is what I ultimately wrote. 

My response to much of the trauma, shock, and abuse this year has been to pour my energies into projects that cultivate my joy, and hopefully offer that same opportunity to my friends, loved ones, and anyone who happens to stumble by.  Learning, teaching, planning ritual, and theater collaborations especially – full bodymind experiences which leave no room for fear and despair, which otherwise make me shake and ruminate, feel immobilized as much as I feel like I need to run. 

So intentionally taking on a fast from music creates a space to make myself feel the emptiness and lack that I’m scared to think about. I can’t use music as a distraction, or to deepen a mood, or to fill up my attention while working. (My phone alarms during this time have been a playlist of nigunim from The Lubavitcher Rebbe and poetry from Black authors, linked in case you’d like to try this as well next year.) Without music, life is quieter. It’s an actively passive way to feel absence – which is what this time invites us to do: remember loss and appreciate what is precious. 

This Song for the Three Weeks lilts back and forth between many paradoxes:

• The paradox of mourning for a Temple whose structure never had space for our holy queerness, and without whose destruction we’d never be here learning Talmud. (I credit my rabbi, Rabbi Sharyn Henry, for rocking me with this question one 17 Tammuz, when she noticed me fasting as a vocal diasporist; obviously it’s still rattling around enough for me to have made a song about it!) And yet, this is a paradox many of us at SVARA know personally, exiled for our queerness or ethics by institutions we still hold in our hearts. 
• The paradox of punishments and consequences. Our scripture and our sages wrote a version of our history wherein it is our own wrongdoing which provoked The Merciful One to destroy Jerusalem and exile us – simply using Babylon or Rome as a tool. Do we dare draw connections between our own actions or inactions and the continued rise of fascism? What about October 7th and the endless death and destruction which has followed? What will be possible when we once again admit to the hand we have had in our fate? 
• Lastly, one that should hopefully not be a paradox: That this time of mourning our own pain may be exactly what sets us up to recognize the pain of our neighbours. We must never wallow in our own sufferings to the point that we forget to live the lessons that we’re supposed to learn from them: Never to inflict on others the pains we have endured. To join with people facing what we have faced, because we know how terrible it is to be isolated and face calamity alone. We know that the same hand will come for us next, and already is. Just as Sci-Fi is always about the present, the Book of Lamentations (which we read on Tisha b’Av) about the ancient destruction is also about now – right here, right now. (Explore “For These Things I Weep / על אלה אני בוכיה,” a Tisha B’Av Reader, a collaboration of All That’s Left and Halachic Left – a 5784 commentary on Eicha, with devastating first hand accounts of how present our Lamentations are.)

At the bus stop last week, I realized I wasn’t taking in anything from the podcast I was listening to, so I took out my earbuds and just started chanting the nigun part of this Three Weeks song, meditative, repeating:

Yum-bye yai-e-yo

Yum-bye yai-e-yo

Yum-bye, bye-bye 

Yum-bye, bye-mm-bye-mm-bye

When the bus came, a stranger told me how beautiful and comforting the melody was; we talked about where she had moved from, and our frustrations and fears around policy changes. I’m so grateful to have merited to write this song, and to have merited the friends and study partners (especially my chevruta, Kohenet Molly Block) who helped me clarify lines and find new words. To have been able to share this song with Ratzon in sacred community, and to bring our recording to you today. 

May you be blessed with openness to your feelings and loved ones to grieve with.