"Staying in the Sun" Congregation Kehillath Israel, Brookline MA June 27, 2020

This week, we entered the Hebrew month of Tammuz. Tammuz is a month that flies pretty under the radar on our otherwise packed Jewish calendar. If it’s known for anything, it’s the minor fast day on the 17th of Tammuz that marks not only the day on which the Israelites worshiped the golden calf and Moshe broken the first set of tablets containing the ten commandments, but also the first breach on the walls to Jerusalem. This fast day initiates a three week period of increased communal mourning, culminating on Tisha B’Av, the day we commemorate the destruction of the Temple. As a result, Tammuz is a pretty heavy time. Those engrossed in the ebb & flow of the Hebrew calendar spend the first part of the month anticipating the grief and sorrow that comes with its 17th day and beyond.
But Tammuz is also the brightest month of the year. It comes as the first new moon after the summer solstice, and its long summer days also invite the warmest temperatures of the year. Given this, I want to talk for a moment about heat.
I don’t love the heat. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy warm days and playing outside in the sun, but I prefer a coolish breeze to keep me going. My fair skin burns in no time, so I’ve never been one to lay out on the beach for hours on end, and in terms of vanity, sweating just isn’t a good look on me. On hot days, I’m more irritable, my head aches, my patience is short, and my energy is depleted. Frankly, I’m just not at my best.
As a midwesterner, my temperament tends to avoid metaphoric heat just as much as my body wants to avoid the literal kind. Tension, interpersonal conflict, and fiery conversation bring actual heat to my body, sweat to my brow, and a nagging desire to do anything to lower the temperature in the room as soon as possible.
But heat also carries a generative power. Heat enables us to cook our food and boil water to make it safe for drinking. It allows us to fuse metal together and bend that which seems stubborn and rigid. Driving through rural Kansas as a kid, I would often see fields set ablaze as an agricultural practice for rejuvenating the land, and on trips to the Rocky Mountains I learned about small forest fires that the Park Rangers would intentionally set to clear dead trees and invite new growth—even the destructive heat of fire can serve a productive purpose.
As a Wexner Fellow, I had the opportunity to learn with Marty Linsky from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, who taught about the power of a heated moment. He urged us to take note of the emotional climate in the room and told us that exercising leadership means strategically raising and lowering the temperature. Too cold, decision makers becomes frozen, unwilling to take risks or enact change. Too hot, on the other hand, leaves relationships scorched and people feeling burned. So effective leadership demands understanding the temperature in the room and inviting enough heat to generate productive discomfort.
As I mentioned earlier, Tammuz is the brightest month of the year. Light and heat go hand-in-hand. As the light shines bright, it exposes our imperfections, illuminating the cracks that we’d prefer to avoid. The vulnerability of this makes us sweat. But sitting with the discomfort of our failings is the first step in progress.
Joshua seemed to know this. As tradition teaches, on the third day of Tammuz, Joshua and his army were in a battle against the five Amorite kings and all their forces. As the day went on, it became evident that the Israelites needed more time to defeat them. Joshua cried out to God, “Stand still, oh sun!” And miraculously, the sun halted, hanging in the highest point of the sky for a whole day.
I can only imagine the stress and terror of battle, but then to add even more heat to that moment…it seems brutal. By calling on the sun to stand still and the temperatures to rise, Joshua could expose the weakness, insufficiencies, and brokenness of his enemy, pulling at their resiliency and forcing their vulnerability. At the same time, by stopping the sun and standing in relentless brightness, Joshua also knew that he would have to face the reality of his own deficit, his own failings. He would be standing under that same brutal sun, but the difference is that his victory would come from his courage to invite discomfort as a productive force, rather than running from it.
In many ways, we are in the throws of at least two major battles as a country right now. While the global pandemic has ripped through nearly every nation, ours stands out as the least contained, with the most devastating number of cases and deaths—far exceeding anywhere else on earth, and those numbers only seem to grow exponentially by the day.
It’s natural to want to deny the fullness of that. We are only 4% of the global population, yet we account for 25% of all COVID-related deaths—just sitting with these numbers is enough to feel the anxiety and temperature rise in our bodies. Our tendency is to avoid the reality these feelings expose, focusing instead on our sense of relief to be able to gather with friends and enjoy food at restaurants. But raising the temperature of this moment may mean sitting with the hard reality of returning to more stringent restrictions and coming to terms with rolling back re-openings. As hard as it’s been to be removed from one another for so long, we cannot let our discomfort in that make us reckless. Lives are too valuable to not err on the side of protection.
And of course, there’s the reckoning with racial injustice that has erupted throughout our country, not at all disconnected from the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on people of color. For those of us who are read by others as “white,” this is an uncomfortable time. We are being called to confront not only our whiteness, but the role we’ve played in and the benefits we’ve drawn from the systems of white supremacy that have enabled our generations to own property, accumulate wealth, attend highly resourced schools, receive police protection, and so much else.
As the news cycle will try to move on to the latest in celebrity break-ups and outrageous tweets, we will feel those as a kind of cool breeze, lowering the temperature of this moment. But, like Joshua, we must insist on staying in the heat of the sunlight, inviting it to expose our individual and collective role as a Jewish community in perpetuating grave injustice.
What does that look like? It means educating ourselves: reading about the history of racism, learning from the words of Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, bell hooks, Yavilah McCoy, Ibram X. Kendi, Tiffany Cross, and others. It means grappling with Judaism’s intersection with race: our relationship with policing, our history of assimilation as an expression of our desire for whiteness, our exclusion of Jews of Color. It means offering our time to phone-banking efforts. It means giving our money to support politicians and organizations who are working to change systems of oppression. It means asking our friends what they’re doing for racial justice, and inviting them to hold us accountable to our own commitment to stay in the sun.
Because when we sit with discomfort long enough, the heat it generates can work its productive power. It will nourish us, baking together a palate of diverse flavors we could have never experienced at room temperature. We will see it fuse together individuals who otherwise couldn’t fully grasp how intertwined our liberation is. The heat will begin to bend even those systems and cultures which seemed so impossibly set. And while it may even burn hot enough to catch fire at times, its flames will leave a fertile ground on which to plant a more healthy crop for future generations to harvest.
So my blessing for us this morning is that this Tammuz, we can be like Joshua. May we have the passion to demand that the sun not set on these battles. May we have the courage to remain in the sunlight, exposed and unsettled. And may we sweat it out, knowing that our sustained commitment to this work will leave a legacy that future generations can point to with pride and gratitude for a world more whole than the one we entered.
Read more sermons by Rabbi EBC at https://baseboston.org/sermons