Tishah B’Av is nearly upon us.
Tishah B’Av, the ninth day of the Jewish month of Av, is the date on which the destructions of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem are commemorated. It is estimated that the first was destroyed in 587 BCE; the second in 70 CE. In this sense, it is an ancient precursor to other dates that “live in infamy”: December 7, 1941; September 11, 2001; October 7, 2023.
We may wonder why Tishah B’Av retains such prominence, nearly 2000 years later, when it commemorates the loss of a structure that feels so foreign to how we practice our Judaism today — the Temple was the site at which sacrifices were offered to God; today we offer prayers and study and acts of kindness, not sacrifices. And yet, Tishah B’Av continues to serve as an important moment in the life of the Jewish people.
At the time, sacrifice was the way the Jewish people felt connected to God; when that perceived lifeline was severed, the ancient Jewish people felt adrift, disconnected, unprotected by the Divine. We feel the reverberations from the “earthquake in the soul of the Jewish people,” as Rabbi Linda Potemkin put it, to this day.
Meanwhile, the circumstances surrounding the destruction of the Temple, in each case, did not merely result in the destruction of the Temple; they led to exile: the Jewish people being uprooted from their land, dispersed all across the known world. It led to a sense of homelessness and displacement; prayers were composed that remain in our prayerbook to this day yearning for a sense of reunification and return, another word for which is t’shuvah.
Some note that this moment of Tishah B’Av is the period in which our hearts begin to turn toward that ultimate season of t’shuvah (also translated as “repentance in service of renewal”): the Yamim Nora’im, the Days of Awe.
Tishah B’Av has come to serve as the date upon which we mourn the experience of the initiation of exile. Exile, in this respect, does not need, and perhaps is not supposed to refer exclusively to geographic and political exile — though it certainly includes those, too.
Exile is the state of the world: the experience we all have of alienation, and brokenness, and disconnectedness. In this sense, Tishah B’Av commemorates not just exile from the Promised Land, but humanity’s state of exile, as in the foundational exile, from Eden. Rather than living in the peaceful harmonious state that might have prevailed had we remained in Eden, we have the world as we know it now — a world that includes grief and loss and heartbreak.
Still, Nathaniel Deutsch reminds us that there is a Jewish tradition from Hasidism “that teaches us the virtue, even the necessity, of ‘being broken’ (tsubrokhenkayt). As a Hasidic saying paradoxically declares: There is nothing more whole than a broken heart, eyn davar yoter shalem milev shavur. Here… we find the same Hebrew word for ‘whole’ — shalem — that lies at the root of Jerusalem. So what is the wholeness that we seek when we sing [a song like] ‘Next year in Jerusalem’? Is it a return from exile or the embrace of a broken heart? Is exile a punishment that distances us from God or an opportunity to get closer to God? Is it more Jewish to be broken than whole? Or is the point of Judaism the attempt to find wholeness in brokenness?”
We hope you’ll join us tomorrow (Saturday) night, August 2, at 8:15 pm, no pre-registration required, for a special nighttime Tishah B’Av service experiencing the soulfulness of this moment.
There’s no doubt that the world does feel pretty broken right now, if there was ever a question about that. We are 665 days — nearly two years — into the war launched by Hamas on October 7, 2023. 665 days reeling from trauma; 665 days of bated breath for news about the hostages; 665 days of families across this conflict torn apart.
If you can believe it, an estimated hundreds of people have been born in Israel and Gaza on each of those 665 days since the war began in Israel: that’s tens of thousands of human beings born in Gaza, and a few hundred thousand born in Israel, since October 7, 2023, who have never known life not at war; who never experienced life pre-October 7.
Perhaps that’s quite obvious, but I think it’s important to underscore because those lives have nothing to do with how we got here.
I say this in full recognition that I was someone who supported the early stages of this war. Hamas, as demonstrated by the atrocities carried out on October 7 and in their explicitly stated ideology, harbors no hope for peace of Jews and Arabs side by side; they want to see Jews gone from the land; and they are willing to see their own population suffer in service of that vision.
Israel has achieved remarkable military victories, securing itself in this war that Hamas launched — and that Hezbollah, Iran, and others joined — especially against Hezbollah and Iran, two actors that also want to see Israel destroyed, and also against Hamas, which has nowhere near the fighting force that it did prior to October 7. Its military leadership and capabilities are decimated; it is a shell of its former self.
And while Hamas is still a significant presence in Gaza, on Tuesday, Arab states, too — 22 of them, in fact; the ones who make up the Arab League — condemned Hamas’ October 7 attacks and called on Hamas to lay down its weapons, release all hostages, and end its rule of the Gaza Strip. This is to be commended.
Still, at this stage, the cost that Palestinian civilians are bearing from the continuation of this war is too high. The reports of starvation coming out of Gaza should weigh heavily on all of our hearts. Regardless of who is to blame for the initiation of this war — and, make no mistake, it is Hamas — Israel at this stage has a significant degree of agency over the life of Gaza’s civilian population, many of whom, I say again, were born after October 7, 2023.
Israel’s approach to aid distribution has failed, with fatal consequences. This is evident based on its recent policy reversal, which initiates and permits airdrops of aid and also initiates humanitarian pauses to enable increased distribution of aid — welcome news.
Had Israel not failed in this respect, they would not have reversed policy. But they have.
In this reversal, I see two important features: I see Israel, a complex country made up of millions people, demonstrating that it is not the horrific monstrosity its worst critics make it out to be — it does want to improve the horrific situation. I also see in this, as we’ve known, that Israel is not always the infallible entity some of its staunch defenders (like me) wish that it was.
Israel is a complex country made up (depending on which exact borders you’re considering) of around 10 million people, approximately 75% of whom are Jews, 20% of whom are Arabs, with a multitude of other groups comprising the remainder. Deep political disagreements are present within the country, as in most countries. Painting Israel with a broad brush, in any respect, is a mistake. As I wrote last week, 74% of Israelis back an agreement with Hamas that would release all the hostages at once in exchange for an end to the Gaza war, but the government that was elected several years ago is not in alignment with that vision, and the Prime Minister has enabled far-right members of the governing coalition to drag it into policy choices that harm Israel’s standing abroad, that devastate the Palestinian population, and that do not appear to have gotten us any closer to a return of the hostages.
It was one thing when we were in the immediate aftermath of October 7, and Hamas still posed a significant threat to Israel; that threat has now been significantly reduced (albeit not altogether eliminated), and the costs of this war to all involved — to Israeli soldiers and their families, to the Palestinian civilian population, to the fabric of Israeli society, to our own humanity, have become too great to bear.
To be clear, I sometimes resent the way Israel is framed in the press, in public discourse, and in the international community, the double standards that I believe are applied. For decades, the number of UN resolutions criticizing Israel has far outnumbered the number of resolutions directed at all other countries combined. The death toll from the recent Syrian Civil War, to take one example, was over ten times the death toll of this war between Israel and Hamas: over 650,000 people were killed in that war, with nowhere near the public outcry against any single actor in that war as there has been in this one against Israel. I understand that the US did not have an alliance with Syria in the way it does with Israel, and still, the discrepancy is remarkable.
But that doesn’t make me care any less about children who are facing severe hunger in Gaza, a hunger which is solvable, and which I pray is being solved as I write. I pray further for a trajectory that leads to an end to this war, a return of the hostages to their families, and, though it is distant, a peace between these two peoples.
May we have a Shabbat of peace.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi K.
