New Relevance for Tisha b’Av

Tisha b’Av is a holiday that is rarely honored in Reform synagogues.  This Jewish day of fasting commemorates the destruction of both the First and Second Jerusalem Temples; both occurred on the same day in the Jewish calendar, the ninth of Av, Tisha b’Av in Hebrew.   Since then, other tragedies in our history have occurred on or very near that date, including the expulsion of Jews from England (1290), France (1306), and Spain (1492); it is on the 9th of Av that Heinrich Himmler received official approval from the Nazi Party to proceed with the Final Solution, and it is on the 9th of Av that the mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto began. Tisha b’Av grew in importance during the Middle Ages in Europe as the Jewish community was experiencing horrific waves of antisemitism. 

It is indeed uncanny that so many of the worst tragedies of the Jewish past occur on that date.  Summer, apparently, has not been kind to our people.  Given Europe’s history of persistent, pervasive, and violent anti-Jewish racism, it makes sense that a day of national mourning would emerge to meet a profound need in Ashkenazic Jewry. Such a day is also a wise way to put some boundaries on lamentation, lest every day become a day commemorating some tragic day in our experienced past, making Judaism a religion of grief and penance rather than joy and celebration.  Reform Judaism emerges out of a widespread sense by the Jews of western Europe that our tradition was stuck in the past.

There are many reasons Tisha b’Av was largely discarded by Reform Judaism.  The founders of our approach to Judaism were products of their time.  They wanted to look to the promise of the future rather than dwell in the past.  They were products of the Enlightenment, committed to intellectual inquiry, social progress, and the ability of humankind to create a just society.  They most definitely did not want to return to a Temple, a Cohanic Priesthood, or ritual sacrifices.   They did not mourn the destruction of the Temple and did not want to return to a national homeland.   In North America, there was an even greater impulse to break with the past and look forward to building a golden Jewish future here.  Tisha b’Av just didn’t fit our beliefs. I certainly never heard of it growing up.   In my lifetime, Yom HaShoah was our National Day of Mourning.

But I believe there are compelling reasons we, as Reform Jews, should explore Tisha b’Av more seriously.   For the rabbis living after the destruction of the Second Temple, it was not abstract; it was in was living memory.  It would have been very easy for them to simply blame the Romans for destroying their nation, but the rabbis were more interested in asking what we had done to unravel our national fabric to point it that collapse of some sort was inevitable.   In the Talmud, they conclude that Israel lost its national sovereignty and Jerusalem was destroyed because of baseless hatred - sinat hinam - between groups of Jews.  Tisha b’Av was a day to mourn painful losses, but also to remember that it was our own divisions that did us in.

As Israel heads into another early election, the rhetoric there is the nastiest and most provocative in memory.  One side believes the other side is an existential threat to the nation, or to democracy.  Despite a wide range of political views with parties to reflect them, the government still ended up being about two sides.  Each side believes it is good and the other is evil. There is one party running in the election that is violently racist toward Palestinians, and there are Palestinian parties whose effectiveness is undermined by their own deep divisions and the support of some organizations that are violently racist toward Jews.

At the wall, groups of ultra-Orthodox thugs have interrupted egalitarian Reform and Conservative b’nei mitzvah at the part of the wall designated for egalitarian prayer.  They tore up prayer books, imposed a mechitzah, and shouted horrible things to those there trying to celebrate an important milestone. 

Will Israel end up like its ancient predecessor, destroyed not by the powerful enemies around it, but from within by zealotry, fanaticism, and baseless hatred?

Will we?   Watching the January 6 hearings, reading about the deepening polarization in the U.S. electorate, and experiencing my own impulse to give into “us vs them” thinking, I wonder if baseless hatred and internal incivility will be our ultimate undoing.  It certainly makes us vulnerable as a nation.  I don’t think it is doing us much real good as individuals, though it can feel very powerful to be morally certain and have someone to blame for what you see as wrong with the world.  As Jews, we might do well to remember that we are the group most likely to be the victim of that sort of scapegoating, and that sort of moral certainty. 

Tisha b’Av, if we reclaim it, offers us a chance to reflect not only on what we have lost in recent years as Americans and as Jews.  It also offers us a day to consider how the intensity of our own internal divisions, as Americans and as Jews, make us vulnerable to the very losses we are lamenting. 

Another way to think about it might be that Tisha b’Av gives us a day to mourn the tragedies of antisemitism and to consider the ways in which we have internalized antisemitism and made ourselves more vulnerable. 

Saturday night, August 5, we will gather to honor Tisha b’Av, with some traditional songs and readings, but also to lament our losses in the past years and reflect on the ways losses too often become hatreds.  I hope some of you will join us.  

Here is a video of a beautiful Tisha b’Av kinah – a song of lament -:  Eli Tzion sung by Rona Kenan.   Creating great beauty out of great loss is a most profound form of art, one that reminds me of what amazing creatures humans can be. That is something we all need to remind ourselves of from time to time- another modern argument for Tisha b’Av.