We all have events from our past which cause us pain. The question is how to deal with them. Today is the 20th of July, but it is also the 17th day in the month of Tammuz, according to the Jewish calendar. That means it is a little-observed fast day (about 10% of Jews, including me), commemorating five specific tragedies in Jewish history, including the breaching of Jerusalem’s ancient walls in the year 70 CE, by Roman legions that would sack the city and destroy the Temple three weeks later on the 9th of Av. But it’s also the beginning of a three week period in the Jewish calendar which holds great wisdom about how to deal with the pain that each of us carries through life.
One choice in confronting past events which continue to cause us pain, is to wallow in them, allowing them to control our every move and decision. But I don’t know anyone who really wants that. Even when we feel that we have no other choice because the pain is so overwhelming, it’s not something we would choose.
The other option, to “just get over it”, is often offered by quick fix psychologists and New Age healers who wrap their fundamentally insensitive advice in the language of self-empowerment and personal responsibility. But their approach hinges on the assumption that we should never “allow ourselves” to be in pain, and that feeling pain is somehow not a healthy part of human experience. But that’s not right either.
To be human is to feel, and sometimes that means to feel pain. There’s nothing wrong with that and there is nothing to be ashamed of about it either.
The real question is how to honor the pain we feel, finding an appropriate place for it in our lives, without being enslaved by it. And, when in the course of time we are ready and able to let it go, we will. That is what the three weeks beginning today are all about.

The rabbis of Jewish history pack every imaginable tragedy into these three weeks. From Moses breaking the original stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments, to events surrounding the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, to the Bar Kochba war which cost the lives of hundreds of thousands some sixty five years later, and all the way to the Spanish Inquisition.
If it was bad and it happened in Jewish history, you can bet that someone tied it to this three week period. Does that mean that all of these events really happened during that period? I have no idea, and it doesn’t matter! What matters is a culture that developed a mourning period that was elastic enough to absorb every tragedy, allow us to mourn it, and then move on.
This way of remembering invited every generation to acknowledge its pain and declare it worthy of experiencing it and memorializing it. There was no talk of “just getting over it”, or of minimizing its significance. There was no mandate to “calm down”, because we all know how pointless, if well-intentioned it is, to be told that, in the midst of our suffering. Instead, there was the implicit message that all of that collective pain could fit in that three week period, leaving the other forty nine weeks of the year to focus on the joy and meaning that can be found in any life, no matter how much pain has come before.
So I am fasting today, but I am also aware that in beginning this traditionally somber three week period, I am affirming that all suffering has an end and that there is always a light at the end of tunnel which is that suffering.