There is a particular kind of discomfort that lives in waiting.
The test is done. The results are coming, but they are not here yet and you do not know what they will say. We hope it will be good but we won’t be sure until we find out. Life continues around you. Work, messages, meals, carpools, the ordinary tasks that still need to happen. But inside, you are suspended. Not in crisis. Not yet. Just waiting for an answer you cannot control. That is its own kind of instability. The terrifying in-between.
The Da’as Zekeinim, the commentary of the Ba’alei Tosafos on the Chumash, traces the seventeenth of Tammuz all the way back to an earlier moment in history. Long before there even was a Beis Hamikdash to destroy.
The world has been destroyed with a flood. The rains have stopped and the waters are receding, and we are not sure if the world is livable yet. Noach sends out the yonah. And the Torah tells us what the dove could not find:
וְלֹא מָצְאָה הַיּוֹנָה מָנוֹחַ לְכַף רַגְלָהּ. No rest for the sole of its foot. Nowhere to land.
That day, says the Da’as Zekeinim, was the seventeenth of Tammuz.
What does a dove circling over floodwater have to do with the breaching of the walls of Yerushalayim? The yonah is restless and can’t find firm ground. The Da’as Zekeinim is telling us that the seventeenth of Tammuz has always been a day of restlessness, a day of instability. The Jewish people are compared to a yonah.
That is what Shiva Asar B’Tammuz asks us to address. Not destruction. That comes later, on Tisha B’Av. At the beginning, there is the feeling of that dove. Suspended between what was and what comes next, circling without landing.
But there is another layer that makes it sharper still.
The pesukim in Yirmiyahu contradict each other regarding the date. Some point to the ninth of Tammuz, others to the seventeenth. The Yerushalmi says it was really the seventeenth. Why the difference? The Yerushalmi answers: kilkul cheshbonos. The count itself broke down. The contradiction reflects the feeling the people felt in that moment. When we aren’t grounded, we lose track of time. We do not know where we are, what day it is, what comes next.
And this is not the first time. The Cheit HaEigel begins the same way. Moshe seems late. The people miscount the forty days. The waiting becomes unbearable. The Jewish people panic and build a golden calf. They reached for something solid. Confusion makes us desperate for certainty. Any certainty.
So here is the question Shiva Asar B’Tammuz puts to us: What do we reach for when we have no menuchah? Do we pretend everything is fine? Do we go numb? Do we build our own small certainty, our own quiet eigel, so we do not have to feel the ground moving underneath us?
This is where the Three Weeks begin. In that uncomfortable space. After our footing is gone. Before we know what comes next.
Maybe the first thing being asked of us is simply to name it. To tell the truth about where we are.
I am not settled. I am waiting. I do not know what comes next.
Because pretending we have our footing when we do not will never bring us closer to geulah. It only makes us more desperate for false certainties that were never real to begin with.
But there is a crucial difference between Noach’s story and ours.
Noach waits. He sends out the dove. And then he gets to leave the ark. He gets to rebuild. The waiting has an endpoint.
The Three Weeks do not promise us that timeline. We circle through the weeks without knowing when solid ground returns. The past few years have felt exactly like this. Circling, looking for firm footing, finding moments of rest but never quite landing.
So the question becomes sharper: How do we live meaningfully while we’re still in the in-between? How do we build, love, work, raise children, show up for each other when the ground itself feels uncertain?
This is where the real avodah is. The real avodah is learning to plant seeds in uncertain soil, having conversations that may not resolve, showing up to people and community and prayer even when we ourselves are unsettled.
This is what these weeks ask of us. This is what this moment asks of us.
Many of us from the community will be traveling to Poland this upcoming week. I have been thinking about the survivors, my grandparents, the stories I’ve read in preparation. They never got solid ground. They circled through horrors we can barely name. They lost everything. And yet they built anyway. They had children. They created community. They made meaning in the rubble through resilience and necessity.
We are the people of the dove. We have circled before, and we have found our footing before. Our grandparents found it in the darkest possible circumstances, without the luxury of waiting for the ground to dry. And even now, in our own waiting, we are not passive. We are Am Yisrael. We are a people that rebuilds not because we can see the final structure, but because we know how to make meaning in the rubble.
That is our resilience. That is our strength.