Av 5785: Get Ready

We are not ready for the brokenness of Jewish consciousness. Not just the historical wounds we revisit every year in the month of Av, but the raw, contemporary rupture we are living through right now. We are not ready for the unbearable complexity of a world where Jews have been stalked and killed on American streets, while a war rages in Israel and Gaza with no end in sight, where hostages remain in captivity and entire neighborhoods are turned to ash. We are not ready for the moral disorientation—where grief and guilt, rage and helplessness, love and complicity all live side by side. We are not ready for the rising tide of antisemitism, or for the ways in which our pain is politicized, dismissed, or used to justify more violence. We are not ready for the silence of those we thought were allies, nor for the weaponization of our own story. Meanwhile, in America, a sweeping new bill is quietly reshaping the landscape: gutting clean energy initiatives, expanding fossil fuel infrastructure, and pouring billions into ICE, making it the sixteenth largest military force on the planet—larger than the militaries of Canada or Italy. We are not ready for the scale of injustice being codified in law, or for the spiritual numbness that sets in when cruelty becomes routine. The month of Av does not offer us comfort. It confronts us with collapse—personal, political, planetary—and dares us to look straight at it without turning away.

For medicine Jews living through a destruction, it’s critical to embrace an old-new model of working holistically toward the healing of ourselves, our relationships, the world surrounding us, and Reality as we know it. We have to get ready.