Hi friends,
Six weeks ago I was ordained a Rabbi. Two weeks ago I started a new job. Here are some thoughts on Tisha Be-Av that came out of those first days in my new work. I pray they help to provide some context for this terrible day, and help us all come out of it prepared for Elul and the High Holidays to follow.
Monday evening, July 15 begins Tisha Be-Av, the day marking the destruction of the two Holy Temples in Jerusalem, as well as many other tragedies that have befallen the Jewish people. The day begins in a striking fashion: Together, we sit on the floor as if in mourning and chant the book of Eicha/Lamentations. This very sorrowful book speaks to the ravages of war, to the suffering of our people, and to our collective sense of loss at the destruction of the Holy Temples and our ultimate dispersion from our homes in the Land of Israel. It is a solemn and contemplative day, with the ability to affect each of us differently at different times. Personally, I find it nearly impossible not to weep when this verse is reached:
טָבְעוּ בָאָרֶץ שְׁעָרֶיהָ, אִבַּד וְשִׁבַּר בְּרִיחֶיהָ; מַלְכָּהּ וְשָׂרֶיהָ בַגּוֹיִם, אֵין תּוֹרָה–גַּם-נְבִיאֶיהָ, לֹא-מָצְאוּ חָזוֹן מֵיְהוָה.
Her [Jerusalem’s] gates are sunk into the ground; her bars are destroyed and broken; her king and her princes are among the nations, there is no Torah; and her prophets find no vision from the LORD. (Eicha/Lamentations 2:9)
The experience of bearing witness to utter destruction and the hopelessness that is wrought in such a moment is almost too much to bear. And yet, year in and year out, we are tasked with encountering this pain head-on. In a very significant way, this day has served for millennia to keep one eye of the Jewish people always turned toward Israel, toward Jerusalem. For centuries, we have re-enacted the experience of witnessing this destruction in order to maintain a visceral connection to the physical place itself. The pain is so great that it carries over to the morning, where we come to prayer but do not don tfillin, and do not say a beracha when putting on our talit. We are still too shaken, too broken, to take on the tasks of the everyday.
And then, towards the end of the day–a summer day spent without food or drink–something changes. When we are most tired, most thirsty, most apt to sit or lay on the floor, we get up. We sit on chairs again, we stand a little taller. We recognize that we are not in reality sitting by a destroyed Jerusalem, we are here! Wherever we are.
At Mincha, our talit gets her beracha, we wrap our tfillin, and we take out the Torah. Eicha’s words were but a moment in time. Today, there is Torah! Reliving the destruction lasts but a few hours; Torah–our wisdom, our source–is eternal. The arc of the day takes us from the deepest depths of sorrow back to standing with our feet firmly on the ground. We see the rubble of great tragedy, we sit in it, and then year after year we get up.
This is where we as a people have found ourselves for two thousand years. Holding on to a deep-rooted, real, tangible connection to that part of us which is eternally tied to the Land of Israel, while at the same time being present and grounded in the life that we are living among the nations. Our challenge is: How are we to balance these feelings?
The day, I believe offers some guidance. We begin with Eicha, with lament, with pain and sorrow, with trauma. Much of this day is there to remind us that, for most of our history, we as a people have been a target. And we should conduct ourselves as such. Yet, we end the day at Mincha with a different tone.
וַיֹּאמֶר, הִנֵּה אָנֹכִי כֹּרֵת בְּרִית, נֶגֶד כָּל-עַמְּךָ אֶעֱשֶׂה נִפְלָאֹת, אֲשֶׁר לֹא-נִבְרְאוּ בְכָל-הָאָרֶץ וּבְכָל-הַגּוֹיִם; וְרָאָה כָל-הָעָם אֲשֶׁר-אַתָּה בְקִרְבּוֹ אֶת-מַעֲשֵׂה יְהוָה, כִּי-נוֹרָא הוּא, אֲשֶׁר אֲנִי, עֹשֶׂה עִמָּךְ.
And God said: ‘Behold, I make a covenant; before all your people I will do marvels, such as have not been wrought in all the earth, nor in any nation; and all the people among which you are shall see the work of the LORD that I am about to do with you, that it is tremendous. (Shemot/Exodus 34:10)
The Torah reading for Mincha on Tisha Be-Av ends with a reminder of the covenant, a vision of the future where the works of God and the Jewish people are to be “tremendous.” Certainly our history has pain and suffering in it, but our future holds promise of “marvels such as have not been wrought in all the earth.” And so while our reality may be one of trauma, our faith must always be one of optimism. The day holds both of these sentiments, and, by extension, so should we. We are to live a reality that is constantly vigilant, knowing and understanding that to be Jewish has never meant to be safe; yet at the same time we are tasked with the notion that we must have the full-hearted faith that our future is to be “tremendous.” We are to be cautious and optimistic. We have to be visionary, and watch our backs.
Leon Wieseltier, writing in the New Republic, states the following:
ISRAEL MUST be defended and Israel must be criticized. Almost nobody any longer practices the lost art of doing both at the same time, with similar emphasis, out of equally intense convictions, in a single breath. Instead there is the party of security and the party of justice, as if the country, any country, can endure without both. The debate is a stale contest in cursing between gangs, a tiresome exchange of to-be-sure sentences, uttered by people with anxieties about credibility, or worse, with no such anxieties at all. To be sure, the settlements are a terrible blunder, but centrifuges are spinning in Iran. To be sure, centrifuges are spinning in Iran, but the settlements are a terrible blunder. When I studied the history of Zionism as a young man, I was impressed by Ben-Gurion’s remark, about Britain’s restrictions upon Jewish immigration to Palestine even as Hitler was conquering Europe, that he would fight the White Paper as if there were no war and the war as if there were no White Paper. It seemed almost impossible and altogether correct. There is never only a lone danger or a lone ideal. We should fight the centrifuges in Iran as if there are no settlements and the settlements as if there are no centrifuges in Iran. Welcome to the gang of no gang.
Friends, we are sitting at a moment in history where this challenge is laid at our feet. As Secretary of State John Kerry shuttles back and forth between Washington, Ramallah, and Jerusalem, we are pulled in different directions. Surely, there is historical precedent to be skeptical. Surely, our past experience proves that we have no one to trust but ourselves. And yet, we know better. Our tradition knows better. The wisdom of our people, as evidenced by Tisha Be-Av, teaches us that no matter how disastrous the past has been, we can look to the future with nothing but optimism. Because that is the promise of our eternal covenant.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously referred to himself as “an optimist, against my better judgement.” It is time for all of us, Jewish people everywhere, to live his example. It is time to share with our colleagues and friends the imperative to seize this moment, where the full weight of the efforts of the US government is pushing for the creation of two states living side-by-side, securely, in peace.
As Alan Johnson writes, “the deal is not impossible. To paint it so is not only unwarranted; it is also politically impotent. Despair is not a programme. Let’s hear it for scrupulous optimism. And get to work.”
I wish you all a fast of meaning and depth.