17th of Tammuz (5781) Reflections on Waikiki, the Crow Nation, and Jewish Continuity

This is more a personal reflection from the 17th of Tammuz (a few years ago) than an analysis of the day and its themes. Still, I think it has value to offer.

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This is a photo I took of the sunset at Waikiki on the 17th of Tammuz in 2021.

I wrote this on Facebook in July 2021 (Tammuz 5781) and have made some stylistic edits since. In the post–October 7^th world we now inhabit, the conclusion may feel quaint. But this was a real reflection, at a real moment, and I stand by its authenticity.

17^th of Tammuz (5781) Reflections on Waikiki, the Crow Nation, and Jewish Continuity

The 17^th of Tammuz is a commemorative day of fasting on which we abstain from food and drink from dawn until nightfall. This fast marks the beginning of the Three Weeks, a period of mourning for the greatest tragedies that have befallen our people. All of these events center around the destruction of the two Temples in Jerusalem: the First Temple by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E., which was followed by a 70-year exile in Babylon, and the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E., which was followed by the present exile, now in its 1,952^nd year.

I'd have to check past calendars to be sure, but I'm fairly certain we've spent every 17^th of Tammuz for the past 12+ years in Honolulu, with the exception of 2020. Spending this fast day in Honolulu is always strange. It’s strange because I’m so far away from any major Jewish community, and even stranger because the majority of people I see walking around are in full-on vacation mode.

Yet here I am, spending most of the day indoors, not eating or drinking, reflecting on the national flaws of myself and my people and the catastrophes that resulted from those flaws throughout the ages. And there, on the beach and in the streets, are the non-Jews: going about their vacation, dining and drinking, dancing and partying. The feeling of being in exile is real.

This year my experience of the 17^th of Tammuz was greatly enriched by my reading of Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006), by Jonathan Lear. The book focuses on Plenty Coups, the last chief of the Crow Nation, who witnessed the collapse of his people’s way of life and managed to lead them through adaptation and cultural preservation in a way no other Indian nation matched. I’d like to share just one small insight from this book that occurred to me as I took a walk along Waikiki, with a few hours remaining in the fast.

First, some background. The Sun Dance was a religious ritual central to the Crow Nation’s warrior culture. It was “a prayer-filled ritual asking for God’s help in winning military victory.” Lear uses it to illustrate the dilemma a people face when their way of life suddenly ends. In this case, intertribal fighting had been outlawed. He writes:

What is one to do with the Sun Dance when it is no longer possible to fight? Roughly speaking, a culture faced with this kind of devastation has three choices:

1. Keep dancing even though the point of the dance has been lost. The ritual continues, though no one can any longer say what the dance is for.

2. Invent a new aim for the dance. The dance continues, but now its purpose is, for example, to facilitate good negotiations with whites, usher good weather for farming, or restore health to a sick relative.

3. Give up the dance. This is an implicit recognition that there is no longer any point in dancing the Sun Dance.

I’m also in the middle of rereading Hawaii (1959), one of James Michener’s sweeping historical novels. Last night I finished the section titled “From the Farm of Bitterness,” which tells the story of a group of missionaries who settled in Maui in the early 19^th century. By that time, the native Hawaiians were already enduring the destruction of their people and their culture—through death, assimilation, foreign disease, and the relentless encroachments of settlers, traders, and colonizers.

So much of the Hawaiian tourism industry thrives on tenuous, artificial, and—let’s be honest—piteous attempts at Choices #1 and #2. For all intents and purposes, Ancient Hawaiian culture is dead. The historical Hawaiian culture, which endured for centuries (if not longer), ultimately succumbed to Lear’s Choice #3.

The pale vestiges of Hawaiian culture I see while walking down Waikiki are shadows of what was once a vibrant way of life, now reduced to a mere source of manufactured nostalgia for a Hawaii that no one alive ever truly experienced. It is sustained only by popular imagination and funded by commercialism.

But when I step back and look at Waikiki tourism itself—which, in many ways, has become Hawaii’s modern culture—I realize that “this, too, shall pass.”

Strikingly, Lear uses something like this as an analogy to illustrate what it means for a way of life to disappear:

Everything in tribal life was organized around hunting and war—but hunting and war have become impossible. There is a crucial ambiguity in this claim that is easily overlooked. When we say “It is no longer possible to go to war” or “It is no longer possible to hunt buffalo” we might mean either:

“Circumstances are such that there is no practical possibility of our performing those acts”

or

“The very acts themselves have ceased to make sense.”

By way of analogy, consider a person who goes into her favorite restaurant and says to the waiter, “I'll have my regular, a buffalo burger medium rare.” The waiter says, “I'm sorry madam, it is no longer possible to order buffalo; last week you ate the last one. There are no more buffalo. I’m afraid a buffalo burger is out of the question.” Now consider a situation in which the social institution of restaurants goes out of existence. For a while there was this historical institution of restaurants—people went to special places and paid to have meals made and served to them—but for a variety of reasons people stopped organizing themselves in this way. Now there is a new meaning to “it is no longer possible to order buffalo”: no act could any longer count as ordering. In general these two senses of impossibility are not clearly distinguished because they often go together. In the particular case we are considering, it is in considerable part because the buffalo herds were destroyed—and thus hunting them became impossible in one sense—that the Crow agreed to move onto a reservation and abandon their traditional way of life—and thus hunting them became impossible in this other sense.

When I see the throngs of tourists on Waikiki—going to bars, dining in restaurants, luxuriating on vacation—I’m struck by the recognition that even this way of life will, one day, fade from existence. America as a whole will fade too, and perhaps even what we call “Western Civilization,” provided the timeline stretches long enough.

And yet here I am: a Jew in exile, fasting, mourning, and reflecting on events that happened thousands of years ago, guided by laws that were meticulously kept for centuries before the first Hawaiians ever set foot on these islands, thinking about myself, my people, and my future through concepts passed down and kept alive, generation after generation, through constant study and thought. My culture, the culture of Torah, predates both Ancient and Modern Waikiki, and will long outlast them, so long as we observe these laws and anchor our existence in these truths and values.

Towards the end of his book, Lear writes:

Plenty Coups had to acknowledge the destruction of a telos—that the old ways of living a good life were gone. And that acknowledgment involved the stark recognition that the traditional ways of structuring significance—of recognizing something as a happening—had been devastated. For Plenty Coups, this recognition was not an expression of despair; it was the only way to avoid it. One needs to recognize the destruction that has occurred if one is to move beyond it. In the abstract, there is no answer to the question: Is the Sun Dance the maintenance of a sacred tradition or is it a nostalgic evasion—a step or two away from a Disneyland imitation of “the Indian”? What is valuable about Plenty Coups’s declaration is that it lays down a crucial fact that needs to be acknowledged if a genuinely vibrant tradition is to be maintained or reintroduced. It is one thing to dance as though nothing has happened; it is another to acknowledge that something singularly awful has happened—the collapse of happenings—and then decide to dance.

The mourning practices of the Three Weeks are our way of acknowledging the destruction of our past way of life: one that centered on the Temple and its service, in the Land of Israel over which we were sovereign. We do not acknowledge this loss in order to “move beyond it,” but to preserve it until the time comes when it can be reintroduced. Our mourning isn’t a nostalgic longing for the past, but a disciplined recollection that binds us to the future.

Unlike Plenty Coups, who had to figure out how to help his people survive in the world-after-the-destruction-of-the-world, we are not alone. Hashem has given us the tools, in the Written and Oral Torah, to preserve our way of life despite the horrific catastrophes we’ve endured. He has given us the promise of future redemption: a promise rooted not in vague hope or the unreliable forces of the imagination, but in the clarity of the mind. And He has protected us in every generation against those who seek to annihilate us—a fact to which all of Jewish history bears witness.

I cannot help but recall the conclusion of Mark Twain's famous essay, Concerning the Jews:

To conclude.—If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star-dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of; but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers.

He has made a marvellous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished.

The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?

Mark Twain didn’t have an answer to this question, but we do:

• The secret of our immortality is observing the fast of the 17^th of Tammuz in Waikiki.

• The secret of our immortality is “sacrificing” a day of vacation in Hawaii to keep Shabbos.

• The secret of our immortality is forgoing the popular restaurants in Honolulu to eat only kosher food.

• The secret of our immortality is living by the eternal Torah, adapting its laws and ideas to the modern world—without withdrawing from it or assimilating into it.

As Lear wrote earlier, “It is one thing to dance as though nothing has happened; it is another to acknowledge that something singularly awful has happened—the collapse of happenings—and then decide to dance.”

Paradoxically, although it was a day of mourning, my reflections today have filled me with gratitude. I have acknowledged that something singularly awful has happened—yet I have decided to dance.

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I’m curious to hear how YOU have experienced the 17th of Tammuz (or the Three Weeks, the Nine Days, and Tishah b’Av) as a modern Jew living in the modern world with an awareness of the long timeline of our history. As I acknowledged in my preface, reading this reflection in 2025, on Day 646 of the war, I was brought to a recognition of how much I took our place as Jews in the modern world for granted.

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