July/August 2025 Clergy Column

In Judaism, too, the distinction between space and time is sometimes blurred. We praise the Source, melech ha-olam, Sovereign of the universe. This is usually understood as a reference to space, but our praise extends l’olam va’ed, for ever and ever, i.e. to the ends of time and space. In our speech, too, we mix up the imagery of space and time. When we have not been in communication with someone for months or years, we use a spatial metaphor to describe the time-lapse; we say that we have been “distant” or “out of touch.”

We can find our ourselves “out of touch” in time because we have taken ourselves “out of reach” in space – physically, emotionally, or psychically. Even when we’re nominally present, we can be hidden behind the firewall of our phone, our laptop or our Facebook page, and remain unknown to ourselves and to others – and closed off from the world. 

In the late summer of the year 586 BCE – and again 650 years later, in the year 70 of the Common Era – the city of Jerusalem was destroyed and our people went into exile. Tisha B’Av, the ninth day of the month of Av, commemorates the destruction of Jerusalem. [This year, Tisha B’Av begins on Saturday night, August 2.] The destruction of the holy city and the hope for its future restoration have been, for the last two thousand years, the primary metaphor for our people to express alienation, distance, and exile. A medieval Jewish poet who was struggling with lost love, personal disappointment, or loss would typically not express his grief directly, but instead speak of the sadness of being so far away from Jerusalem. It was not just the exile from Eretz Yisrael that was marked on Tisha B’Av, but the experience of alienation from God, the fear that the trust and relationship at the heart of the covenant were lost. The Book of Lamentations, which we read on Tisha B’Av, opens with the geographic image of the abandoned city: “Aicha! Alone the city sits, weeping,” cut off from all her beloveds. Exile, absence of connection, alienation, severe depression, “out of touch” within and without – these are the tears in our space-time fabric.

Our tradition’s response to exile, to the distance and alienation in space represented by Tisha B’Av, is the high holy day season. These ten days of awe culminate in Yom Kippur, when reconciliation and covenant renewal happen in time. After Tisha B’Av, we read from the latter parts of the Book of Isaiah on each Shabbat. For seven weeks, we are offered hope and the promise of reconciliation. It is for this reason that, according to our rabbis, the month preceding Rosh HaShanah is called Elul – it is an acronym for the phrase from the Bible’s Song of Songs (6:3): “Ani l'dodi v’dodi li — I am for my beloved and my beloved is for me.” From the distance and alienation represented by Tisha B’Av, the High Holy Days invite us toward reconciliation and reconnection. However and wherever we may be out of touch, our tradition invites and challenges us to move toward honesty and intimacy.

The Jewish response to exile — in all its forms — is teshuvah: mindful, attention, turning and engagement. Through doing our teshuvah-work, we may discover renewed strength, along with new resilience and courage, which, in turn, we might then bring to the entirety of our lives, addressing the breaks and the distances in space-time.

Our awakening and turning is not exclusively private and internal; beginning on Tisha B’Av, we refine our ears and expand our hearts, widening our capacity to see and name the pain and suffering and injustice around us and in the world, deepening and lifting up our human capacity for healing and responding.

The High Holy Day season peaks on Yom Kippur. It is the day of maximum intimacy and connection, a time of deep rootedness and awareness. It is a solemn day yet a joyous one – we begin with she-he-chi-anu, the blessing we use to celebrate the peaks in the space-time fabric of our lives. The intimacy of Yom Kippur is primarily internal; we connect with our own selves and the transcendent Source which links us all together. This closeness is symbolized by our retelling of how, before the destruction, it was on Yom Kippur that the High Priest would enter the Holy of Holies and, just this once each year, say out loud the otherwise unpronounceable Name of God.

Our practice of teshuvah during this period, when we cultivate and deepen our capacity for listening, for seeing, for visioning, and for imagining also deepens our capacity for hope. While we sound the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, it’s last call is not heard until the very end of Yom Kippur, when we sound a tekiyah gedolah, a great blast. Tekiah gedolah is the promise of return, the future announcement of the end of all exile, the sewing together of the tears in the space-time fabric — it is a summons to hope.

On Tisha B’Av, we unflinchingly name and face the reality of the broken, incomplete and challenging time-space which we inhabit. But on Yom Kippur, having acknowledged all that is broken and need of repair and reconciliation, we conclude with a joyful affirmation of hope for ourselves and our world. Vaclav Havel, The Czech dissident who became President of the Czech Republic, wrote about the tekiah gedolah of Yom Kippur, the hope which is the ultimate Jewish answer to the anguished despair of Tisha B’Av: 

Hope… above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons… its deepest roots are in the transcendental, just as the roots of human responsibility are…

Hope, in the deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. Hope… is something we get, as it were, from "elsewhere." Teki’ah gedolah!

Rabbi Yoel Kahn
rabbi_kahn@betham.org