Tisha b'Av 5783

The Ninth of Av is a solemn date on the Hebrew calendar. It marks the date when the first and second Jewish temple in Jerusalem were destroyed, events that took place more than half a millennium apart, the last one almost 2000 years ago. That the two events are commemorated on the same date is based on the tradition that they were destroyed on the same day, suggesting that it was not simply an act of the empires–first the Chaldean, then the Roman–that caused the destruction, but that those empires merely acted at the behest of the God of Israel, Ha-kadosh Baruch Hu.

The first temple, as the prophets attest, was destroyed either because Israel rejected the prophets and their dire warnings, or because of the sins of King Manasseh (who, at least in the Greek version of Scripture, gets to repent), or because "the fathers had eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth were set on edge." In any case, it was impossible to account for the destruction without blaming the people or the kings of Judah for the stiff-necked disobedience ("since I brought you out of the Land of Egypt, the house of slaves"), their refusal to worship YHWH alone, their worship of other gods, or other transgressions. Whatever the blame, responsibility for the destruction lay with God alone who merely made good on the threat he had issued long before, that the land was to "vomit them out," just as it had vomitted out the Amorites and the other Canaanite people, once the measure of their sins was full.

Eventually (as prophecied by Jeremiah), Jews returned from Babylon and, under Persian tutelage, restored the temple, though not the kingship of David. Henceforth, it was the temple and its priesthood that anchored Jewish existence and provided the ritual condition for Jewish communal life and collective thriving, at home and abroad. The shift in institutions from kingship to priesthood is reflected in the rewritten version of Chronicles, which eliminates the history of the northern kingdom, expurgates the story of David, retroactively establishes the Levites at the heart of the sacred ritual life, and elevates the deity venerated in Jerusalem to the status of God Almighty. This new reading of the ancient legacy of Judahites and Israelites (now contested between Jews and Samaritans), shaped – as it may have been – by the Jews of Babylonia under Persian rule, was firmly in place when Greek traveling ethnographers – before and in the wake of Alexander – extolled the Jews as the "Brahmins of Syria" and a "race of philosophers."

After the second temple was destroyed (in "AD 70"), the rabbis in charge of reorganizing Jewish life under direct Roman rule needed to answer the question, why. They also needed to answer the question of how long, a favorite question of apocalyptists who believed that the history of the holy people unfolded with the predictability of astronomic events. The rabbis of the Mishnah, the so-called Tannaim of the second and early third century responsible for aggregating the Oral Torah in encyclopedic and accessible terms, were no friends of apocalyptic fervor, even though some of the most venerated teachers of the previous generation had supported the abortive Bar Kochba Revolt of 132-135 CE and paid with their lives for their anti-Roman zeal. Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi, the prince in charge of the Jews of the Land of Israel (then: Syria-Palaestina) knew better. The Mishnah projects a deeply apolitical, non-nationalistic, irenic way of life for the "People of Israel." (I am sure not even then everyone was pleased.) 

This does not mean that the Tannaitic rabbis accepted the destruction of the temple as a fait accompli. One retained the memory of temple-related practices, one diligently preserved and studied the commandments pertaining to the temple services and priesthood, one compensated for the absence of sacrifices through prayer and other mitzvot, one prayed for the restoration of the temple, the ingathering of the exiles and the return of King David to be accomplished "speedily in our days," and hence one made every conceivable preparation for the sacrifices to be resumed the moment the opportunity was to arise and a return to Jerusalem and a rebuilding of the temple seemed possible. Meanwhile, the rabbis also taught, if you are in the middle of planting an apple tree and someone says, Messiah is at the gate, finish planting your apple tree and then go and greet Messiah.

When asked, why the temple was destroyed the second time around, their answer was equally sanguine and pragmatic. It was, they said, because of civil war, because disunity among the Jews. Today we might say, because of polarization.

As this year's Ninth of Av approaches –– where I am writing, the sun has yet to set –– civil-war-like confrontations are playing out in the Land of Israel. The Jews, so some say, have returned to the Land of Israel, and there are those among them whose messianic expectations are nourished by their interpretation of the historic events of our times. They hope and expect that the rebuilding of the Temple is imminent. They want to enshrine a love for the Third Temple in the hearts of all school-aged Jewish children. They believe that the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 was a divine miracle, a sign of divine providence acting on behalf of the Jews. That the conquest of the Temple Mount in June 1967, along with that of the ancient regions of Judea and Samaria, was "the beginning of the sprouting of our redemption." That settling the complete Land of Israel is a divine commandment and that negotiating away an inch of holy land conquered by the T'svah Haganah Le-yisrael, the IDF, in her wars with an implacable enemy out to destroy us, is a grievous sin that endangers the path toward redemption. 

Many left wing and liberal Jews in Israel and elsewhere once dismissed as marginal the Jewish Underground that planned to blow up the Dome of the Rock to hasten redemption, the Jewish Defense League that inspired the 1994 massacre at the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, and the young hooligans of La Familia and their ilk who have routinized attacks on Arab property and people and rendered anti-Arab hate-speech endemic. They thought all this was an exception, a passing phenomenon, a temporary aberration in the history of the Jewish people rendered harmless by the "most ethical army in the world" and neutralized by the "only democracy in the Middle East."  

This is now a matter of the past. People have woken up to the fact that the erstwhile underground is now in the government, that what could once be dismissed as a "cancer on Israeli society" – dangerous but operable – has metastasized and threatens to be lethal to Israeli democracy itself. As hundreds of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets for more than six months, while the governing coalition is plowing ahead with legal reforms that, whatever one's political opinion, are rending asunder the social contract among the citizens of Israel, a Ninth of Av is upon us unlike any one we have seen in our lifetime.

In Israel, for those who fast on the Ninth of Av and for those who don't, the choice seems to be this: can we hold more than one truth in our heads and hearts at the same time? Can we pray for forgiveness and lament the destruction of the ancient Jewish temples, while also remembering Isaiah's prediction that Jerusalem was to become a house of prayer for all nations? Can we fervently hope for the coming of Messiah and believe, at the same time, that no real Messiah–or at least not one we should welcome at the gate–will want the Jews to rule at the cost and at the expense of Arab lives? Can we celebrate the ingathering of the exiles as the unprecedented miracle and sign of divine favor that it has been, without giving up the hope that swords will be beat into plough shares?

A man-made, man-willed beyt ha-miqdash can only lead to another hurban. We need Messiah, but we don't need the kind of messianism that led to the destruction of the holy temple in the first place. 

We pray for our friends in Israel who have been on the streets week after week, holding vigil out of hope and faith in a Jewish and democratic state of Israel. It may be time to think new, larger, more capacious thoughts; to repent and start from scratch. Not to fear those who use force! They are losing power even as they believe to have gained the upper hand. Believe in the prophets! לא בחייל ולא בכוח כי עם ברוחי אמר ה׳! The future is now! Revolutions happen. May the People of Israel seize the moment! May the citizens of Israel – all of them, regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation – take back their country! May the Israeli experiment be renewed in the spirit of the Hebrew prophets! May democracy prevail!