The Contradictions of Summer

By Judith Bolton-Fasman

Summer is a contradiction. The days are long yet the season is short. Summer experiences are like gossamer--try to hold on to them and they vanish. During the summer you take stock, look back and marvel that you survived winter's forced hibernation or the frenzy of the calendar. And then the days line up to form an endless horizon.

Summer is a relatively quiet time in the Jewish calendar. There is slow but steady movement towards the high holidays. And there is Tisha B'av--simply translated as the Ninth day in the Hebrew month of Av. Tisha B'Av is a day of remembrance filtered through bereavement and mourning that is both private like a yahrtzeit (anniversary of a death) and public like yizkor (the prayer service commemorating the dead). Tisha B'Av is a crater you stumble into that contains both ancient and modern traumas. Two of Israel's holiest Temples were destroyed in different years on the same date. The symbolism of that wholesale destruction comes back to haunt us even on the happiest of occasions as in the breaking of the glass at the end of a wedding ceremony.

Other historical tragedies befell Jews on Tisha B¹av as well. Pope Urban II declared the First Crusade in which tens of thousands of Jews were killed, and many Jewish communities were annihilated. Jews were expelled from Spain on Tisha B'Av in 1492. World War One broke out on Tisha B'Av in 1914 and set the stage for the Holocaust. Jews in the Warsaw ghetto were deported to Auschwitz on the ninth day of Av. Old and new history are omnipresent during a month that the Talmud instructs that we must reduce our joy.

In the summer the buzz of Jewish heritage may seem lower, but it is just as constant. On Tisha B'Av my mother never let us swim. We sat on the side of the town pool, dunking our feet. This was random punishment for nine-year-old me. Under ideal circumstances there was no swimming for at least two hours after lunch. Tisha B'Av was the equivalent of continuously digesting a meal. We ate lightly but more hungrily on that day. The holiday also took on personal dimensions for our family when my mother's Uncle B., who always ignored Tisha B'Av, died in a car accident on the very day. A few years later another uncle was run over by a street car in Havana on the same day. Or so she told us.

Tisha B'Av always seemed to sneak up on us, and then as an adult I lost track of it altogether. Only when I went to work for a Jewish organization was I aware of it again. For some of my colleagues it was a day of true mourning. On the eve of Tisha B'Av they recited Lamentations on the floor of their synagogues. They went to work without eating and fasted all day. They wore cloth shoes and eschewed comfortably sitting at their desks. I remember my boss consciously trying to stand for most of the day. It was an austere yet functional shiva (seven-day period of mandated mourning for a close relative).

I now see that my family and I were in the clutches of a makeshift Judaism, unable to understand its more profound implications. We were, I suppose, on automatic pilot. Practice may have made what we did perfect, but we never achieved transcendence from it.

There was one summer when I wanted my conception of Judaism to go beyond things like bans on swimming, and I decided to keep kosher. This made my parents very anxious about many things, including our annual summer vacation. Was there any place within a reasonable distance that we could go to for those two weeks where I would eat? The answer came to my father in a flash. The Catskills. My parents had honeymooned there, and fifteen years later--1975--most of the big hotels were still open. There was still palpable nostalgia for and loyalty to the Catskills. We stayed at Brown's Hotel, owned by relatives of Jerry Lewis. It was a fact you could never forget because his picture was plastered everywhere.

That summer my sister learned how to ice skate and my brother perfected his diving. I ate kosher food until I couldn't eat anymore and fell madly in love with the waiter for my table. R. was an aspiring doctor from New Jersey. I was a fourteen-year-old as terrified of mixing meat with milk as I was of kissing a twenty-one-year-old. Brown's became the quintessential summer experience--the past bypassing the present and heading seemingly straight for the future.

This July 22 will be the first time that I will be aware of Tisha B'Av in a long time. But there will be no bans, no lamentations, no uncomfortable standing. I will work on breaking away from rote religious thought and try to concentrate on achieving faith, honoring memory and living in the present.