Rupture: dancing in circles around our own closed illusions

We are taught that in the olam haba/the world to come, all of the fast days will be transformed into days of festivities. The 17th day of the month of Tammuz is one such fast. It marks the beginning of three weeks of being "between the straits/bein hametzarim". On that day, we are put on notice. It is now three weeks until Tisha B'Av, that time of the year when we are at our most alienated and exilic. We have just three weeks to get ready for the hard work of teshuvah ahead. 

So what happened on the 17th of Tammuz, and how could it be a secret pointer to something redemptive?

On that day in 69CE, the walls of Jerusalem were breached. Half a millennium earlier to another Tammuz 17, and there was another rupture with the First Temple daily offerings/way of connecting to the Divine suddenly being blotted out. And nine hundred years earlier still, the primal breaking on that date. Moses came down the mountain with the first set of tablets, only to smash them in frustration on seeing the people dancing around the golden calf they had made in his absence. Think about it. There they all were, dancing round and round but never going anywhere, attaching themselves to the glorified illusion of eternal youth and strength at their centre. 

So much rupture, so much brokenness. 

According to the The Chernobyler Rebbe, Menachem Nachum Twersky, those two tablets represent our hearts, and our hearts needed to be broken. Reb Noson of Breslov expands on the idea, teaching that in fact, God tells Moses that his act of breaking the tablets is his (Moses') greatest act. In other words, Moses understood that the people's hedonistic circle dance was their attempt to escape their pain, to avoid their reality instead of facing it. 

It all makes sense. With Moses having been absent for more than a month, the people no doubt felt lost, confused and abandoned. We get stuck on our golden calves too.

"When we don't get it right - when we look for the dopamine hit, the comfort, the crutch, the temporary relief that doesn't really take us where we want to go - then the path is to break open and start again as an act of compassion for ourselves" explained Rabbi Daniel Raphael Silverstein to the AJS community. 

Our opportunity for healing comes when we turn and face our pain, rather than when we do a circle dance around our own closed illusions. But we have to hold ourselves carefully, to titrate our pain rather than being overwhelmed by it. Only then do we begin the journey towards teshuvah, towards the promised land, towards the re-set and re-calibration openings afforded by the high holy day cycle. When we use our brokenness, our rupture, to break through, we get a glimmer of the future, of festivals emerging from fasts.

"Rupture" was created on the 17th of Tammuz, 5786 (2026), inspired by that morning's teaching of Rabbi Daniel Raphael Silverstein. It is a 30cm square mixed media work on paper, using ripped and torn AB Studio patterned papers with various embellishments from my own stash. 

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Chana-Toni Whitmont is a collage artist, crystal sound practitioner, creative, teacher and student whose practice and passions are born from her spiritual connection to her Jewish lineage and the ebbs and flows in the annual calendar cycle. She lives on magnificent Bidjigal, Birrabirragal and Gadigal Country (also known as Bondi), on the Pacific coast of Australia.