I’ll take you back more than fifty years. When I was in high school, one of the first “Lakewood branches,” there was a certain rivalry we had with the younger branches. I won’t name the particular one, both out of discretion and respect, and mainly because we live in a different world today. But we were all out-of-town branches of the same Lakewood tree, established by talmidim of the rosh yeshiva zt”l (there was only one from 1960 to the early 1980s). Even though we held ourselves superior, there was a sense of competition, at least among the high-schoolers.
We felt we were the serious ones. They were not. So the favorite line about them went like this: The day after summer was over, the boys in that yeshiva began preparing for their Purim celebrations and shtick. And the morning after Shushan Purim, they were already preparing for camp.
Whether or not the line was true, many years later, more than I would like to admit in print, I thought a bit about it. In certain ways, the joke was not about them at all. The joke was about all of us. I’m not saying Purim and camp per se, but, in essence, we are all creatures of anticipation.
Look at the calendar. I don’t mean the one on the wall in which dates in June are circled for many weddings be’ezras Hashem. I mean the luach. Yomim Tovim, fast days and the like. That is an emotional calendar, and although it is only Kabbolas HaTorah that gets a countdown, almost like each day that is associated with it, does not live for its twenty-four hours, but rather is only a gateway to a greater goal. Indeed, there is and was nothing greater than Kabbolas HaTorah, and thus the forty-nine days that preceded it, in essence, lived for it.
Even months like Elul, as powerful as it is in its essence, encapsulated and epitomized by the acronym it bears, “Ani L’Dodi V’Dodi Li,” in essence do not exist for themselves. Elul is a runway for Tishrei. The tachlis of Elul is for Rosh Hashanah, and the tachlis of Rosh Hashanah is for the Aseres Yemei Teshuvah, all leading up to the Yom Hakadosh, Yom Hakippurim.
Of course, the Central Avenues (known as Madison Avenue in the secular marketing world) have mishloach manos displays and advertisements ready before the Chanukah candles have stopped burning.
And of course, months before Pesach, the ads are all themed with ideas about how to spend your Yom Tov exotically. That’s not the focus of this column, so I’ll leave it at that. Of course, while the proper anticipation of Shavuos through the forty-nine days of Sefirah is spiritual elevation, and the forty-nine days are, by design, a countdown to the pinnacle of spirituality, there is much angst, anxiety and anticipation, either fueled or calmed by the myriad cheesecake-themed advertisements that appear somewhere around Lag Ba’omer.
And then Shavuos comes. And it is wonderful. And — this is the part nobody warns you about — then it goes.
It is now, as I write this, the back half of Sivan. And I want to ask a quiet question that I do not think we ask often enough: Now what?
Because here is the strange and slightly uncomfortable truth. We are not, as a rule, living in eager anticipation of what comes next. What comes next is the Three Weeks. And whatever else can be said about the Three Weeks, nobody is counting down to them. There is no display in the seforim store. There are no themed advertisements. We may have said it in woe, but nobody has ever excitedly told a friend, “I can’t wait! Can you believe it’s almost Shivah Assar B’Tammuz?”
So, for a few weeks from after Shavuos until the Three Weeks begin, the next stop on the anticipation train is somehow not as exciting. Maybe even non-existent.
We are handed a stretch of ordinary time, with nothing to lean toward. (Of course, you have to get your kids off to camp and your family to the bungalow.) In the world of spiritual anticipation? That stretch is a void. A dead zone. The off-season.
But honestly, if you think any day is a dead zone, you’re dead wrong. There is no such thing.
In fact, it may be the opposite.
Of course, there is enormous beauty in anticipation. Waiting for a day greater than today. Anticipation is one of the great engines of Yiddishkeit. It is how we stay awake. A Yom Tov you saw coming for forty-nine days lands very differently than one that ambushes you. Like Elul before the Yomim Noraim, like Sefirah before Shavuos, even like the Three Weeks before Tisha B’Av, a countdown is a chesed. It works. No one likes to get ambushed by Yom Tov. But anticipation has a quiet cost, and the cost is this: A person who is always getting ready for the next thing is, by definition, never fully in the thing he is in. We become so practiced at leaning forward that we forget the chair has a seat. We anticipate so beautifully that we never quite arrive.
And the back half of Sivan, precisely because it sells nothing and advertises nothing and asks us to count down to nothing, turns out to be the one season the calendar hands us for just living in the day.
These are the weeks for the avodah that has no marketing department. Being present at your own supper table. Actually hearing the answer when you ask a child how his day was. Noticing the people you usually speed past on the way to the next preparation. The plain, un-themed, deeply unglamorous work of being a mentch in ordinary time — the work that no shiur reminds you to do because there is no Yom Tov attached to it.
And here is the thought I cannot let go of.
The Three Weeks mourn a Bais Hamikdosh that was lost, the meforshim tell us, over exactly this — over sinas chinom, over people who looked past one another. Over a nation that, you might say, was very good at the vertical, looking heavenward, but was unfortunately too careless looking horizontally.
So imagine. Imagine a community that took these unmarketed weeks of late Sivan and actually used them. That treated ordinary time as the avodah it is. That time is now.
Maybe it’s not about looking toward loftiness, but rather earthliness. Maybe just being a little kinder to the person in front of you for no reason printed on any calendar. And even in the loftiness area, we can live for the moment. We can live for Tosafos’ kasha, and take it more seriously without the anticipation of the massive celebrations that will soon ensue.
Who knows? Maybe if we truly lived these next weeks for the very moments that they give us, we wouldn’t have the Three Weeks to mourn. And the only thing left on the entire calendar to anticipate, the only countdown left to run, would be the actual rebuilding of the Bais Hamikdosh itself.
That, it turns out, is the one anticipation that was always worth the wait.
Because there is no pre-season and there is really no off-season. There is only the moment we are in. And we better be in it.
Just Saying.
