Hunger strike

Ever feel like there was something missing from your life? Something really important, that you almost might've once had, but somehow...?

In Judaism, we call that something the holy temple. That's gotta be it.

Conversely, doesn't it feel like there's some mysterious part of the tradition that's missing? Some context, some kind of detail that would make the whole Torah make sense? As it stands, we trust it and live with it to whatever extent we can and do, but doesn't it feel like we're hidden from some vital part of the story?

I've heard said by Yaakov Sack, quoting Freud, that the most important part of the tradition is passed on in silence. Total silence, all the things that are going on, that no-one can bare to talk about. Or knows how to at all.

Terrence Mckenna holds that, what is the temple we're longing for?
Once, we lived, really lived. Our mother the earth gave us all satisfactions, food and psychedelic drugs, growing all around. We learned what the things we saw growing were and what they did to us and other animals, and together, we grew for generations. Then, came the day...

Once, we had Mushrooms all the time, and would use them, to become better hunters, better seekers, smarter, more creative. Then, one day, some of us didn't feel safe hunting and gathering anymore. For some reason, the awareness of death that most of life is able to ignore in the moments of life became intolerable to Some People, who took responsibilty for individual tracts of land, and began to grow crops on them, in an attempt to have enough, non-poisonous food available all the time. What was the Tower of Bavel, says he, it was a storage house, for our first compiled community stash of grain. tall enough, that if anyone came to steal, one could just drop bricks on their heads.

And so, the three weeks, from the seventeenth of Tammuz to the ninth of Av have long been a canaanite period of morning, since way before any temple was set in Jerusalem. The destruction of the temple was ordained from the day of it's erection, and it's not just so much a period of mourning for a particular catastrophe, as much as a period of high alert going back... to what?

Doesn't it feel like there was something happening before the tradition we have passed on became the template for what's now called the Torah? Couldn't it be there's an older tradition incuded in It that's still available to clarify what G-d really wants, and what we're up with/against?

I've heard R Micha Odenheimer doresh, what's the Chumash about? It starts with a story of how we were introduced to the Etz Ha daas, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. And God tells us, "eat of this, and you will die."

And in the wild, that's very much a reality,
Eat of the wrong fruit,
And you'll die.

How we must have dreamed and prayed
for a safer world
where we'd have stockpiles and aisles
of "safe" food, that we'd never have to worry was poisonous, ha!

And so we were dismissed from the Eden of living in the moment, and were doomed to live off the sweat of our brow, growing a subsistance crop. I gave unto you all the seed bearing herbs, and now you're down to and dependant, on that one grain. Or seven grains, that are included in one.

And so Cain kills abel, ultimately for the same reason that Abraham splits from Lot, ultimately for the same reason a temple would be destroyed-- in the fight to survive, the farmer cannot tolerate danger, lest his field not survive him the winter, lest the crop he now depends on die, and he'll starve.

This is what the three weeks ultimately comes from. Outsiders come and destroy our temple. Why? Because of weakness, and dis-unity? Yeah. And deeper than that, it's because of the memory of something terrible that happened because we were too caught up in our own trips to notice The Others.

want proof? check out the story of Tammuz. I'll get more into that... soon.