Tisha B'Av Pick Up

By Rabbi Mark Hurvitz

I’ve been fasting a good deal this past month. I’ve fasted to call attention to the situation in Darfur and also Gaza. This week, my CSA pick-up at the 14th street Y in Downtown Manhattan, occurs on the 9th of Av before sundown and the end of the fast, calling our attention to the destruction of the first and second Temples in Jerusalem and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (and other calamities). This year, the end of the fast coincides with my CSA pick-up. Can we use this time of commemorating the laying waste, to what was at one time glorious, to help us focus our regard more intently on the richness we have about us? Our classic sources (Talmud Bavli Berachot 17a) teach that fasting is compared to sacrifice: an offering up of our own blood and fat; the prophet Isaiah rhetorically asked us thousands of years ago (58:6-7): Is not this the fast that I have chosen? Is it not to deal your bread to the hungry, and that you bring the poor that are cast out to your house? When you see the naked, that you cover them, and that you hide not yourself from your own flesh? Here we are, even in this severe economic downturn “The Great Recession” still in the richest country in the world. Very few of us have direct contact with people who suffer malnutrition or hunger. Perhaps those who don’t face health risks by not eating can hold off on our own food and experience a bit of hunger. Tisha B'Av might be a time when many of us who usually experience plenitude will deny ourselves sustainable in recollection of the suffering and destruction the Jewish people have experienced. Many people in our community are also fasting to call attention to humanitarian crises around the world. We can even turn what we might have spent on our own food to contribute to those various agencies that work to prevent hunger such as Mazon (http://www.mazon.org). This is by no means the end of our work for justice, but one step towards calling attention to the ways in which our world, in ancient times and now, needs all our efforts in the process of tikkun, of repair. Rabbi Mark Hurvitz is a shareholder at the 14th Street Y in Downtown Manhattan Read more of the writings of Rabbi Mark Hurvitz on his blog (www.davka.org) or on Hazon’s blog The Jew and the Carrot (www.jcarrot.org).