It was that time of the year again. The Potzker pulled his menorah from the shelf, blew the dust off of it, and began to fill it with the special cone shaped candles he had bought for the occasion. One by one, he slid them into their receptacles. Red. Green. Blue. Red. Green. Blue. Red. Green. And a blue candle for the shamash.
He lit the shamash, and guided it to share its fire with the other candles, proceeding from left to right, in silence.
It was another erev Tisha B'Av in the Potzker's household.
The Potzker meditated on the symbolism of the moment.
The light, well, that could take all day if he just marvelled at the light, so he moved beyond the light to the candles themselves, each colour representing the cones of the retina of the eye. He stood in awe at how these receptors for just three colours, for red, green and blue, created the full spectrum of colours that he experienced on a daily basis. He then, in his mind’s eye, pictured the four lettered name of God, the Tetragrammaton, and the colour that emanated from that word each time he read it. A colour that he could not describe to anybody, because, after all, it was a colour, and how does one go about describing a colour to another person? To the Potzker, the colour of God was the most beautiful colour in the world, an intimate experience that he could not share with anyone but its Creator. Sure, his physician explained his experience to be one of synaesthesia, a cross-modal awareness whereby the reading of letters or words is accompanied by other sensations, like colours or sounds. But to the Potzker, the colour that vibrated at him was not a perceptual phenomenon but a spiritual one, one that connected him to the moment of the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, because it is recorded that at that moment the people of Israel collectively shared a synesthetic experience by seeing the thunder and hearing the lightning of Sinai.
And then he blew out the flames and began his fast.
The Potzker taught that Tisha b'Av is the happiest day of the Jewish calendar, because it is the one day of the year that people can completely experience the joy that comes from absolute, unrestrained, honest communication between man and God.
The Potzker taught that Tisha B'Av is the saddest day of the Jewish calendar, because it was the one day of the year that people could completely experience the distance between those partners.
Tisha B’Av.The Potzker taught that Tisha B'Av is the saddest day of the Jewish calendar, because it was the one day of the year that people could completely experience the distance between those partners.
The only day of the year that the Potzker, no matter how hard he tried, could not see the colour of God.
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Neither An Egg Nor A Bagel, But Some American Pie
The 9th day of AV was the day designated by the rabbis to remember a fully functional Jerusalem, the Ur of Shalem, the City of Unity, and to imagine its future restoration as a world centre to serve man’s need to be inspired to serve God. He tried to imagine what that day would be like. He would look at the state of the world and feel despair as to that possibility. It was enough to give the Potzker indigestion, but just in case his thoughts failed to do so, his actions guaranteed it. The Potzker had a tradition of eating symbolic foods for his final meal before the fast of Tisha B’Av. He based his meal on his teaching of Deuteronomy 7:16: “And you shall eat all of the nations that the Lord Thy God gives unto thee.”
And so, he would begin his meal preparation by raising a glass of water in a toast to Hezekiah’s “victory” that saved Jerusalem from destruction by Sancherib just a few centuries after the completion of Solomon’s temple. The Potzker visualized the time that he himself had stood in the technological wonder that constitutes the tunnels of Hezekiah, and pondered the “miracles” involved in that event. He wondered why the only commemoration of that moment in history was just a brief mention in the Haggadah at a point in the seder where most people miss it. The Potzker would say: “The caged bird sang his song, and the Jewish people have done him wrong.” And with that, he felt that he had corrected a historical injustice by remembering the waters of Hezekiah.
He then proceeded to chop, and then fry some onions in olive oil. With tears in his eyes he would inquisitively listen to the onions as they were frying until he could hear voices rise from within the pan. As soon as he heard the sound of the babbling onions, he was satisfied that he had properly remembered the Babylonians and the destruction of the first Temple at their hands.
Setting the onions to the side, he meditated on the olive oil and its connection to the Maccabean “victory” described in the Chanukah story. He then drizzled some honey left over from Rosh Hashanah into the onions. He did so in memory of Miriam, the last of the Maccabeans, whose body was preserved in honey by her husband Herod the Great (Killer), but whose memory is preserved in Talmudic legend.
He then opened a can of Romano beans, in recognition of the Roman Empire’s destruction of the second Temple that Herod had massively renovated.
From there he proceeded to commemorate the destruction inflicted by the Nazis upon the Human Temple of Torah by heating up some vegan sausages. He chose this food to remind himself that Hitler was a vegetarian who enacted animal protection laws, but refused to see Jews as human or animal.
He then combined the sliced sausages and fried onions into the beans, ate his feast, and when he was satiated, picked up his bottle of the extra virgin, fair-trade, Israeli/Palestinian grown olive oil that he had cooked the onions in, studied its label, and sighed a sigh that stretched back almost three thousand years, to the building of the first Temple by King Solomon, his sigh resonating with the sighs of the workers who toiled for Solomon, unaware that the product of their labours would still resonate in the human imagination to this day.
While it is customary to not listen to music prior to and during Tisha B’Av, it was the Potzker’s tradition to permit listening to music that he deemed as dirges (and thus being permissible) while eating the pre-fast meal. The Potzker chose to listen to an endless looping tape that he had made of Don McLean’s version of Babylon from the album American Pie over and over again until he finished his meal, at which point he did not need to eat on Tisha B’Av, because the earworm of that song ended up eating him until the end of the day. Throughout the day, it is reported that the Potzker could be heard muttering to himself “I am an endless loop, I am an endless loop…………………….”
