17th of Tammuz Reflections on Waikiki

I originally wrote this as a Facebook post during the summer of 2021 (Tammuz 5781), and subsequently decided it was worthwhile to publish on my substack.

Jul 15, 2022

The Torah content for these two weeks has been sponsored by Judah and Naomi Dardik in loving memory of Rabbi Moskowitz zt''l, who taught his students to pursue truth by asking questions, who modeled love of Torah and learning, and who exemplified living a life of the mind.

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

17th of Tammuz Reflections on Waikiki

The 17th of Tammuz is a commemorative day of fasting on which we don't eat or drink anything from dawn until nightfall. This fast kicks off the period of The Three Weeks, during which we mourn the greatest tragedies that have befallen our people. All of these events are centered around the destruction of the two Temples in Jerusalem: the First Temple by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E., which was followed by the 70 year exile in Babylon, and the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E., which was followed by the present exile, which has lasted for 1,951 years and counting (and now 1,952 years).

I'd have to check past calendars to be sure, but I'm fairly certain that we've spent every 17th of Tammuz for the past 12+ years in Honolulu, with the obvious exception of 2020 (and now, in 2022).

Spending this fast day in Honolulu is always strange. It's strange because I am so far away from any major Jewish community, and it's even stranger because the majority of people I see walking around are in "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 these 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 17th of Tammuz was greatly enhanced by my reading of Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006), by Jonathan Lear. The book is about Plenty Coups, the last chief of the Crow Nation, who witnessed the end of his people's way of life, but who was able to lead them to adapt and preserve their culture – something that no other Indian nation was able to do with such great success. I’d like to share just one small insight from this book that was on my mind as I took a walk along Waikiki just now, with a few hours remaining in the fast.

First, some background. The Sun Dance was a religious ritual that was integral 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 as an example of the dilemma faced by a people when its way of life suddenly comes to an end. 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 currently rereading Hawaii (1959), which is one of James Michener's epic novels. Last night I finished the section entitled "From the Farm of Bitterness," which follows the story of a group of missionaries who settled in Maui in the first half of the 19th century. Already by that time, the native Hawaiians had begun to suffer the destruction of their people and their culture, through death, through assimilation, and through the many abuses and encroachments of settlers, traders, and colonizers.

So much of the Hawaiian tourism industry thrives on tenuous, artificial, and (to be frank) piteous attempts at #1 and #2. For all intents and purposes, there is no actual living Ancient Hawaiian culture left to speak of. The historical Hawaiian culture - which lasted for centuries, if not longer - fell prey to option #3. The pale vestiges of Hawaiian culture I see when I walk down Waikiki are shadows of what was once a vibrant way of life, but are now merely a source of artificial nostalgia for a Hawaii that was never experienced by anyone living. 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." Ironically, 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, etc. etc. I am struck with the recognition that even this way of life will, one day, fade from existence – along with America as a whole, and possibly even what we call "Western Civilization," provided that the timeline continues for long enough.

And yet, here I am: a Jew in exile, fasting and mourning and reflecting on events that happened thousands of years ago, following laws that have were meticulously observed for many centuries before the first Hawaiians ever set foot on these islands, thinking about myself, my people, and my future through concepts that have been kept alive in generation after generation through constant study and thought. My culture – the culture of Torah – has outlasted Ancient and Modern Waikiki, and will continue to do so for as 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 which centered around the Temple and its service in the Land of Israel over which we were sovereign – not so that we can "move beyond it," but so that we can maintain it until such a time that it can be reintroduced. Unlike Plenty Coups, who had to try to figure out how he was going to save his people and help them to survive and thrive in the world-after-the-destruction-of-the-world, we are not on our own. Hashem has given us the tools, in the Written and Oral Torah, to preserve our way of life despite the horrific catastrophes suffered by our people. He has given us the promise of a future redemption – one which is rooted in the certainty of the mind, rather than the unreliable forces of the psyche and the imagination. And He has protected us in each and 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 per cent. 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 17th 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 to forego the hundreds of popular restaurants in Honolulu to eat only kosher food. The secret of our immortality is to live by the eternal Torah, to adapt its laws and ideas to the modern world instead of withdrawing from it or assimilating into it.

Lear wrote that "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.

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. I’d also like to hear any other thoughts you have on this topic. Let me know in the comments!

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