On Erev Tisha BAv Dear Friends, There is an ancient rabbinic tradition that predicts the messiah will be born on Tisha B’Av, on the day of mourning that begins tonight, marking the destruction of the first holy Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587 BCE and the destruction of the second Temple by the legions of Rome in 70 CE – a day that in later centuries saw the Edict of Expulsion of the Jews from England, in 1290, and the Alhambra Decree expelling the Jews of Spain, in 1492, both issued on the ninth of Av, as well as the beginning of the mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to the concentration camps, in Operation Reinhard, which began on the eve of Tisha B’Av in 1942. Whatever we today may make of the messianic tradition in Judaism, the rabbinic teaching that looks for the birth of the mashiach on our day of deepest grief seems to suggest that it is precisely at a moment when we most understand desolation and despair that there exists the possibility of comprehending redemption, how fragile its beginnings are, and how in need of nurturing. Tonight, we read biblical Lamentations that not only recall but also cause us to experience abandonment and devastation. As a people, we can never forget what it is to feel forsaken and surrounded by violence – the sword raging outside, the taste of death within the home. We know exactly what it feels like to be able find our articulacy only through describing our loss in unbearable detail, to find ourselves able to express hope only in terms of its vanishing – and we know what it feels like, at the soul-shattering low-point of our own experience, to will desolation on others, to wish for a turning of the tables. Listen to our Lamentations tonight. When I come home from work most days, I turn on Israeli radio. The music, the political squabbles, the legal dramas, the traffic and weather reports – the fact that traffic and weather are each done in thirty seconds for the entire country – the punctilious grammar and diction of the news-readers, as though each hour’s events were being read into in a sacred, masoretic chronicle under the reproachful eyes of the most exacting synagogue beadles or, more realistically, their inheritors, the old-time secular Hebraists – in all of this, as it all plays out in the language of Genesis and Exodus, and of Lamentations, I feel a wondrous rebirth and onward questing of my people. It is an extravagant miracle, beyond any dream I can remotely imagine having been conceived by whoever it was who first rendered Herzl’s “If you will it, it is no fairytale” from the German original (“kein Märchen”) into the translation-defying, “Im tirtzu ein zo agadah.” I never get over the wonderment. The feeling of improbability, and of gratitude – ironically, of agadah – of living Jewish legend – never goes away. These days, as you may know all too well, the radio programming is often interrupted – matter-of-factly, and with remarkable lack of comment – by a dissonant series of tones and the announcement of an alarm for one part of the country or another, the farther South the more frequent. Two thousand eight hundred and seventy-four rockets, by one count, fired into Israel from Gaza in the month of July – in any case, the interruptions are not rare. First of all, I do a mental inventory of students and friends who may be in the place named in the alarm. Then, each time, inevitably and somewhat absurdly, I imagine dropping whatever I am doing and heading down to my own basement in Brookline along with all my neighbors. I ask myself what we would say our government should be doing at such a moment. I think of my mother recovering from hip replacement surgery, and of how long it would take her to reach shelter. I think of those who argue that military aid to Israel should be withdrawn as a way of inducing peace. The radio program resumes. I keep counting – thirty seconds, sixty. No horrific follow-up announcement – usually. I exhale. I shake my head. Each time, I find myself thinking that very few people listening to other kinds of broadcasts in the world can really understand. It is not a delusion that we – yes, we, Israel – feel menaced and besieged, that specters of our biblical Lamentations hover far too close for comfort in our consciousness. A look at the map of the Middle East, zoomed out a bit from what we see these days on most nightly newscasts about Gaza and Israel, and a glance at history, ancient, medieval, and modern, on shores near and far, swiftly dispel misgivings of sheer paranoia. “None is too many” – that is what William Lyon Mackenzie King’s Canada said when Jews were clamoring to escape Nazi Europe, and the chief official then in charge of immigration noted proudly, in 1938, “Pressure by Jewish people to get into Canada has never been greater than it is now, and I am glad to be able to add, after 35 years of experience here, that it has never been so carefully controlled. Only five percent of those seeking entry were admitted – we know the terrible fate of most of the ones turned away – and those lucky ones admitted faced exclusion from the professions of law, pharmacy, mining, logging, and fishing, as well as from the minimum wage and welfare benefits. I am a proud child of a later, much more exemplary, liberal country – one in which Rabbi Gunther Plaut, Knight Companion of the Order of Canada, co-wrote our national policy on refugees – but my familial Zionism springs from a search for light in darker times whose penumbra persisted in some still-distinct ways in the Toronto of my own childhood, not to mention my father’s Montreal. Some vital part of our Jewish spirit lives in clear view of desolation – and that is a matter of sobriety, of sanity, not merely some residual, national psychosis intoxicated on the distillate of its own trauma. However much we take to heart the call in our biblical Lamentations to search and examine our own ways and return to the Divine as best we can, we still bear animus and antipathy toward us in this world, far beyond any calculus by which we might rationally blame ourselves alone. The word “enemy” is not as archaic or outlandish in our experience as it has come to sound to many young Americans and Europeans. But what kind of hope is there in enmity? There is such a thing as the vanquishing of foes; but redemption comes with the recognition of humanity, and the image of God, in one another. There may be a certain kind of hope in an iron resolve, an iron dome, an iron wall – but every Yom Kippur we pray that God “remove the partition of iron that divides between You and us.” We are all descended from one primordial human being, rabbinic lore concludes, so that nobody may say, “My father is greater than yours” – every unique human life bears the imprint of divinity. Find yourself among the pursued, a Talmudic teaching admonishes, and not among the pursuers, for there are none more pursued among birds than pigeons and turtledoves, and they are the ones scripture declares fit to be sacrificed upon the altar. God save us from the altar upon which we have all too often found ourselves aflame; but God grant us the peace and wholeness, the integrity, for which our sacrifices have been offered! May the Blessed Holy One keep our hearts open to the humanity of those who declare themselves our enemies, and who act as such, even as we face them accordingly. There is terrible vulnerability in recognizing humanity in one other, we risk experiencing every iota of the anguish expressed in our Lamentations; but therein, too, is the possibility of redemption. Horrifically, our scriptures affirm that there is “a time to kill,” but there is also “a time to heal.” May we see the former end, and may we see the latter come speedily and soon to us and to all Israel, together with those children of Adam from whom iron implements of war now divide us. My friends, tonight is two thousand six hundred and one years since the destruction of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, and one thousand nine hundred and forty years since the burning of Jerusalem by Rome. It is nothing short of a miracle that we are still here, and still there, and yet we must look toward a greater wonder still. May a day come when we each can be sure that the other’s dream of happiness is not a vision of our own devastation. May redemption come to Zion and to all nations – and may we go out toward it all together, in a sunrise of righteousness with healing on its wings. I wish you a meaningful fast of Tisha B’Av, Jonah
Posted on: Mon, 04 Aug 2014 21:48:14 +0000
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