New Moon / Rosh Chodesh Av

The moon is dark tonight.

Not gone — never gone — but turned away, the lit face pointing somewhere else, leaving us in the full dark of a midsummer night.

The summer solstice has just passed. The longest day is behind us now. The light has already begun its slow retreat toward winter, even though the heat tells you otherwise, even though July in Texas doesn’t feel like anything is retreating.

But the sun is turning.

And the question the dark moon always asks is:

What direction are you turning with it?

WHAT THIS MOON ASKS

Tonight is also Rosh Chodesh Av — the new moon that begins the Hebrew month of Av.

The rabbis say: when Av enters, joy decreases.

This is not a suggestion. It is an observation about what this month carries — what it has always carried for a people who know how to hold grief without being destroyed by it.

Av is the month of catastrophe remembered.

The Ninth of Av — Tisha B’Av — falls two weeks from tonight. It is the darkest day in the Jewish calendar, the day the tradition sets aside to mourn the destruction of the First Temple, and then the Second Temple, and then the expulsion from Spain in 1492, and then other losses too many to name that somehow keep falling on the same date as if history itself is trying to tell you something.

What the tradition is trying to tell you is this:

Some grief is too large for one person. Some losses belong to everyone who carries the name, or the story, or the memory. Some mourning has to be communal before it can be personal, public before it can be private, ancient before it can be present.

You are allowed to mourn things that didn’t happen to you personally.

You are allowed to sit with a grief that belongs to a people, a city, a community, a diaspora of strangers who found each other in the dark and decided the loss was theirs too.

In October of 2017, a city that was barely a city yet — Las Vegas, full of transplants from everywhere, people who hadn’t been there long enough to call it home — suffered something unspeakable.

And a hockey team, the Golden Knights in their inaugural season, none of them from there either, all of them transplants like the city itself, did something remarkable.

They inserted themselves into the grief without reservation.

They said: this happened to us. Not because they had to. Because that is what community does when it decides to be community.

The victims — some of whom the world tried to render unimportant, tried to weigh and measure and find insufficient — were mourned by strangers who had just arrived and decided that these particular strangers mattered completely.

That is the theology of Av.

That is what sitting with communal grief looks like when it’s done right.

FOR EVERYONE

You don’t have to be Jewish to observe this month.

You don’t have to light a candle or fast on Tisha B’Av (starting sundown, July 22) or know the full weight of what the Temple meant to sit with what Av is asking.

The question is universal:

Is there a grief you’ve been avoiding because it doesn’t technically belong to you?

A loss in your community. A tragedy that happened to people you don’t personally know but that has been sitting with you anyway, uninvited, persistent, the way grief does when it’s real and you’ve been pretending it isn’t yours.

Av says: let it be yours.

Sit with it. Don’t skip to the rebuilding yet. The rebuilding comes — it always comes — but only after you’ve actually sat in the dark long enough to know what you’re rebuilding from.

The new moon tonight is the beginning of that sitting.

Twenty-eight days from now the moon will be full again.

Between here and there: the Ninth of Av, the darkest day, and then the slow return of light.

That is the arc this month follows. You are welcome to follow it with them.

And if you work with crystals — the new moon asks something different of them tonight. Don’t set them out for charging. Set them somewhere dark and quiet instead. Let them rest. Let them hold the intention of what you’re sitting with. The full moon will come for the charging. Tonight is for the sitting.