This time of year lends itself to melancholy, to feelings of being adrift perhaps misunderstood by most as the "lazy days of summer". Our calendar, and the pulse of time as we experience it through our Moadim with the Divine, encapsulates this feeling of breached boundaries (on personal, national, historical, and existential levels, among others) so neatly ensconced in the Halachot of accepting the trappings of mourning on ourselves. No shaving, haircuts, music, new clothing...and while we entertain ourselves with meaningless debates about what the Beit HaMikdash means, and if perhaps with the establishment of the State of Israel the Moadim of Shiva Asar B'Tammuz and Tisha B'Av themselves are no longer necessary, and what it is we are missing in our lives without a Temple, and so on.
I subscribe to the (self-invented) doctrine of "be where you are" - your boundaries of Self, however flimsy and prone to being smashed by external (or perhaps internal) events and stimuli, is your current answer to "Ayekah", and where your interaction with the Universe lies. There is no use trying to artificially move them to something else. Therefore, whatever mitzvot or ideas are in your realm of consciousness, that is where you are - arbitrarily deciding to "concentrate" on another mitzva or idea only succeeds in turning you into an ideologue, a robot performing empty actions, and a hollow self.
(This is not to say I condone not keeping mitzvot you do not "feel", etc. One keeps Halacha as he finds his way along the Path it is meant to be. I am simply saying that where you are is where the magical nexus of Self, G-d, idea, action, meaning and Existence meet, and it is those actions and thoughts that are meaningful within the relationship of Self and G-d/Existence.)
However, entropy is a law in this universe, and all of us know too well the feelings of lethargy and hopelessness for change that this time of year brings, as well as anyone with Existential dreams must face any time they take inventory of their lives. It is hard to leave the path you're on, harder to Know the Path you are trying to walk, and perhaps hardest of all to Walk before Him and Be Whole (Hit'halech lifanai v'heyei Tamim). As Jerry and the Dead once sang,
"There is a road
no simple highway
between the dawn
and the dark of night
and if you go
no one may follow
that path is for
your steps alone"
And it is that Existential loneliness we feel most of all, strongest of all, when trying to find our Way, trying to find ourselves. (It is not an exaggeration to say I have written extensively about this before.)
Switch gears for a moment. The hallmark of the Avoda in the Beit HaMikdash was Korbanot. Today they are seen as antiquated, barbaric, needless slaughter; we live in a world of PETA and animal rights, a world very much formed by a people that used the term "bloody" as a pejorative, a world so determined to surf the surface of things that any reminder of the redness of Life coursing through veins of any living creature, be it human or marsupial, bovine or aquatic, that it immediately attempts to rectify it with "humane" concerns such as painless slaughter for meat production (and EU bans on shechita) or chemical substitutions for animal byproducts or organically raised livestock or whatever the humanist flavor du jour is.
And us, Yisrael, we are told B'Damayich Chayi, we are told Ki haDam hu HaNefesh, we are told of the glory that was the Beit HaMikdash awash in the blood of the Korban Pesach ankle deep. We are commanded not to eat blood, but to cover it - a practice demanding respect for, and awareness of, both blood itself and the soil that we see as its source. We recount the Plague of Blood, the Plague of the firstborn delivered in blood, the blood of the prototypical paschal lamb in Egypt smeared on the doorposts saving us from that plague. On Yom Kippur we read/recount/relive the Avoda of the Kohen Gadol as he catches blood, mixes blood, smears blood...and then throw a lamb off a cliff to meet a bloody end. The Western notions of never spilling blood of any kind for any reason (though look at Western history for how well that has turned out) are NOT Torah in origin, no matter how much apologists and the misinformed call it a "Judeo-Christian value".
What is it about blood that is so central to our practices, to our tradition and understanding of the nexus of human and Divine?
I found my own understanding/answer watching a video out of Syria. Now, I am not a squeamish sort, and perhaps possess the right amount of Cluster B Personality Disorder to be relatively stoic in the face of gore. I have watched many, many videos of torture, beheading, executions, and other gifts to the world by our deluded and subhuman "cousins" (not an inclusive term, simply referring to those of them that are). Yet there was something about this particular video, and my own inner emotional state while watching it, that...enlightened me.
Beheadings, especially those done to inflict maximum pain before death, are of a category of their own when it comes to digesting violence. A small knife hacking away at a person's neck while they are held there, helpless, reduced from free human being to waiting for the release of death while feeling every cut and thrust...it fills one watching with rage on behalf of the victim, and fear that life is so short, so brutal, so fickle, so...final, when it ends.
It was this moment, this realization of carpe diem, mixed with the acknowledgement and awareness of your truly puny mortal self, tinged with a clarion call to ignore the petty and worthless and demand, insist, CHASE realness and reality with every fiber of your being - this was the experiential awareness of one who confessed his fallacies and shortcomings, his being lost in the sands of time, digging for a way out when he should have been walking along the Path, on the head of a living animal and watched it be slaughtered and burned. What a consciousness altering, Self-creating (or re-creating, to be precise) experience! What an existential boundary breaker, a way out of the entropy and into the Path, the Way, the Walking Whole.
That moment of Self-realization (literally - realizing your Self, your Being, your existential essence removed from its cement shoes it had fashioned for itself) is what is meant to be adorned as tefillin each day. The pesukim inside the boxes, themselves made of animal hide and halachically required to be of something edible (which now we can understand somewhat!), revolve around the self-realizing moment when G-d Chose us, individual and nation, removed us from Egypt and slavery and insists Be "where the falling star meets the rising ape"; YOU are Man, Be Mine. Know who you are, and Be One. Tefillin are placed on heart and mind, in the dichotomous nature of emotion and intellect, literally binding those ideas and ideals to the spheres that lose track of it.
And it is this that we are meant to Be, meant to Become, meant to provide the world; this Oneness, this binding (for after all, the Jewish people is G-d's Tefillin) of reality to the day to day, the realization of self and existence, the nexus of man and Divine in the redness and richness of Life, and being aware of it.
Our country, our peoplehood is predicated on this - it is who we are, whether we want to be that or not. The Jew has succeeded in bringing science, reason, balance to the world - the ad hoc explanations of sun gods and divine moods are largely gone from the public mind. Yet the care, the responsibility, and yes, the guilt that is instinctive in a people who know that every action counts, every theory matters, every life an expression of a multiverse of Oneness, and all minutiae needing to be weighed against the Path of progress, of evolution, of Self-realizing Man - that remains to be taught. In some ways, we have begun - an army that aborts objectives for innocents caught in crossfire, an almost pathological need to see every human given a chance to Become themselves, even at our expense(!), a nation that takes its dead so seriously it is prepared to shoot itself in the foot (perhaps literally) to return their blood to the Earth it came from...but there is a long, long way to go, and while it is not politically correct in today's world to speak of this, and it is not fashionable to have a desire for sacrificial rites, the Path ends at a Temple of Prayer for all Mankind, where all can have the opportunity and blessing of breaking the barriers that hold us in our finite, limited, day to day selves instead of Becoming that which we are ALL meant to Be.
May this period of Bein Hamitzarim, between the walls, inside the narrow confines and constrictions of the petty and the meaningless, be the last, and may we reach the plane of Existence where all can see, and want, a Temple that grants us our Selves by teaching us of Life.
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