Once upon a time in the Ancient Near East, the women would lament at the height of the summer, grieving the death of God. Tammuz or Dumuzi, the Mighty Lord of Vegetation - going back to the Sumerian cults, would die each summer, descend to the underworld and rise again in springtime, with the fresh new crops. This public ritual, led by professional keeners - wailers - often women - would enable people to feel grief in every fiber of their fragile being and to cry for loss — knowing that this too will pass. God dies but will rise again.
Scholars think that this is where the Jesus story comes from - From Good Friday’s grief to Easter Sunday’s Resurrection - but the ancient world did it over six months, two seasons - not just a weekend. These rituals also live on in the Jewish world, where Tammuz is the name of a summer month during which we begin three weeks of lamenting for the loss of temple, home, safety — another form of the death of the divine.
Ezekiel is the only one to bear witness in the Bible to this tradition. In chapter 8 he travels through time and space to see the women weeping in Jerusalem:
“Next God brought me to the entrance of the north gate of the House of YHWH; and there sat the women bewailing Tammuz.”
וַיָּבֵ֣א אֹתִ֗י אֶל־פֶּ֙תַח֙ שַׁ֣עַר בֵּית־יְהֹוָ֔ה אֲשֶׁ֖ר אֶל־הַצָּפ֑וֹנָה וְהִנֵּה־שָׁם֙ הַנָּשִׁ֣ים יֹשְׁב֔וֹת מְבַכּ֖וֹת אֶת־הַתַּמּֽוּז׃
And while YHWH does not approve of this competing narrative and ritual — we see here that the people did approve and likely needed this midsummer ritual to let the sorrow sing and the lamenting cut through the daily to connect them deeper to the source of death and life.
We today know grief when loved ones die, when shooting and big tragedies occur, and yes, when war - some more than others - ravage us. What if the ancient wisdom of a summer ritual would let some of the rage and fear and anger out, vent the violent urges, get the grief out, cry for and with god so that we can be more like the divine image to ourselves and to each other?
Ezekiel will keep on traveling through time and space to see the visions of Jerusalem and deliver us glimpses of a world now gone but within it hints at what may help us build a better one, including public rituals for grief, that can, with time, emerge as joy.
Today we weep with all the women and the men in sorrow, the mothers and fathers in Jerusalem and Gaza, all over the world. Would would help us wake up to the fact that we are one family, all made up of the same atomic tears that are the fallen and risen body of whatever god in their many names may be?
‘Those who weep in sorrow reap in joy” the Psalms remind us. May it be so.
Thank you for joining me below the bible belt.
Shabbat Shalom.
Who are the Women Who Weep for God's Death?