The annual marking of Tisha B'Av invites us to experience our brokenness.
Historically, Tisha B’Av commemorates the destruction of both the first and second Temples, and the subsequent exiles.
The crumbling of the walls of the second Temple was searingly catastrophic. It saw the end of the priestly class with their practices of daily korbanot/sacrifices. However, in the wake of this disaster, something new was birthed - the possibility of a personal relationship with the Divine, a relationship transcending specific time and place, mediated by individual thought, speech and action.
The sages taught that the collapse of the Jewish Commonwealth only occurred because it had rotted from within. The cause was said to be sinat chinam / baseless hatred, which hollowed out a unified people from within.
In the final hours of Tisha B’Av, we are offered a turning. It is taught that messianic consciousness is birthed on the afternoon of Tisha B’Av. The day therefore also marks the re-orientation towards rededication and teshuvah. That manifests in the calendar through the subsequent seven weeks of consolation that culminate in the Ya’amin Noarim/Days of Awe.
Tisha B’Av gives us an extraordinary opportunity to experience the crumbling walls of our internal edifices. It seems to me that so many of the world’s long-held truths are crumbling away as the old ways of doing things are seen to be more and more empty. For me, this process intensified during the years of the pandemic. Climate change, the deep fractures that have appeared in our political and social buttressing, the collapse of so much as what former generations would have taken as given, all appear to me as “the great crumbling”.
My own crumbling feels like a fractal of the global crumbling. My temple walls are no longer fit for purpose. They are being breached. On Tisha B’Av, I can feel the seismic shift from a one-dimensional defended and idiosyncratic photographic relationship with the world, towards a holographic relationship, with its multiple sources of refraction and vibration, multiple points of view, all co-existing and co-creating with the impulse for the creative chaos of the universe. The gift of this solemn fast day is that it allows me to question the temple of my own self-serving, but ultimately destructive, beliefs about who I am. And, from the rubble of collapse, there might emerge something more authentically integrated and connected. Tikkun//healing turns out to be the dark and dusty, buried promise of Tisha B’Av.
Created on Tisha B’Av several years ago, The Mathematics of Crumbling is a collage with torn pieces of paper representing the collapsing walls. Behind the tumbling stones can be glimpsed redemptive gold, rose pink and white starbursts. The title block reads in Hebrew, eyecha/alas/woe, the opening word of the book of Lamentations which is read on Tisha B’Av. Aptly, the same letters spell out eicha/where are you?, the question that God asked Adam and Eve in the garden after they ate from the forbidden fruit, and which remains the starkest reminder of the potential of the Tisha B’Av practice.
Both woe and where are you? find expression through the graffiti scribbled on those crumbling stones. Each stone represents a belief that I can no longer rely on, a belief about myself, who I thought I was, how I operate in the world, how the world works etc. What a relief to let go of the burden of holding up a crumbling edifice, to peel back some of those layers of self deception, to catch glimpses of possibility as the old structures give way. What a relief to remember that I am indeed a fractal of holographic consciousness.
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Chana-Toni Whitmont is a collage artist, crystal sound practitioner, creative, teacher and student whose practice and passions are born from her spiritual connection to her Jewish lineage and the ebbs and flows in the annual calendar cycle. She lives on magnificent Bidjigal, Birrabirragal and Gadigal Country (also known as Bondi), on the Pacific coast of Australia.
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