by Savannah Lipner
We are currently in the days leading up to Tisha B’Av, the ninth of the Hebrew month of Av. This day is considered to be the saddest day of the Jewish year.
It’s a day of mourning that commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem, as well as many other tragedies throughout Jewish history. For centuries, Jews have gathered on this day to sit low to the ground as an expression of our mourning, to read Eicha (the Book of Lamentations), and to allow ourselves to feel the weight of loss.
The three weeks leading up to Tisha B’Av, known as “Bein haMetzarim” – between the narrow places – are marked by a tone of sorrow and vulnerability. During this time, many Jews will refrain from celebrations, music, or joyful gatherings, because we are attuning ourselves to collective grief. The message of this time is that brokenness and loss are real, and that we can’t pretend otherwise.
And I want to suggest that, in our climate movement, we are also in a season of mourning.
We are grieving the passage of the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which eliminated billions in clean‑energy funding, cost tens of thousands of jobs, and benefitted fossil fuel interests. It repealed key clean energy tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and it cut federal support for solar, wind, electric vehicles, home efficiency, and climate-related infrastructure.
And personally, I am still mourning the fires that tore through Los Angeles this past January. For me, this wasn’t just something I read about in the news – it happened in my own community. I saw friends and neighbors forced from their homes, families displaced, and hillsides I have hiked countless times reduced to ash.
Thousands are still recovering – physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Bearing witness to that devastation so close to home makes the grief of this climate moment even more real and urgent. And disasters like this are only becoming more and more frequent.
But our tradition does not leave us abandoned in despair. Even amidst ruin, Jewish tradition has always carried seeds of hope.
One midrash tells us that after Moses shattered the first set of tablets in his anger following the incident with the golden calf, the Israelites didn’t just leave the broken pieces behind. They carried the broken shards alongside the new tablets within the Ark of the Covenant.
That image resonates now: we carry brokenness. We do not deny its weight. And yet beside that brokenness, we carry the possibility of repair.
The Book of Eicha says: chadesh yameinu k’kedem “Renew our days as of old.” This cry at the very end of the book is not only lament, it’s a plea for restoration, for rebuilding, and for a future beyond the ashes. Our rabbis teach that Tisha B’Av, though it’s a day of mourning, is also the day on which the seeds of redemption are planted.
So here is our moment: bearing climate grief – the devastation of legislation, the trauma of fire, the assault on public lands and green infrastructure, and also bearing the dream of renewal.
That image resonates now: we carry brokenness. We do not deny its weight. And yet beside that brokenness, we carry the possibility of repair.
The truth is, there is no single action that will fix the climate crisis. None of us alone can reverse the scale of destruction. But together, if each of us brings what we can, our collective power can move mountains.
That is what Sun Day is about. It’s about rising up as a movement, not in spite of our grief, but because of it. When we look honestly at the devastation around us, it’s easy to feel powerless. But now we have the opportunity to come together to remind ourselves that despair is not the end of the story, that we are not alone, and that we are stronger together than we could ever be apart.
Every action we take, no matter how small, builds toward something larger. Just as our ancestors carried both the broken tablets and the whole ones, we carry our grief alongside our commitment to build a different future.
So as we move through this season of mourning and toward Sun Day and the coming Jewish new year, let us honor the broken tablets we carry: our climate grief, our mourning, our fear. And let us also hold fast to the whole tablets: the vision of a just, livable, and sustainable world that we are working to build.
savannah lipner
Savannah is a third-year rabbinical student at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in Los Angeles. She is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin – Madison where she studied Jewish Studies, Geology, and Environmental Studies, and she has focused on the intersection of environmental justice and Judaism in her Jewish leadership. She founded the student organization Jews for Climate Justice, previously interned for GrowTorah, co-created a sustainability guide for Hillel International, and worked for the Rising Tide Network. She recently completed a Faith Rooted Organizing fellowship with Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE) and looks forward to continuing her work as an organizer with Dayenu.