Acute Angles: Why No Fast for the Sho’a?

Dear Rabbi. We fast each year on Tisha b’Av for a Temple destroyed 2,000 years ago. Why don’t we fast for the loss of a third of our people three generations ago?   Yours, Marika

Dear Marika,

Implicit in your question is your puzzlement that we mourn for a building, albeit the most sacred one that ever existed, but not for wholescale Jewish communities.

If that is indeed your implication, allow me to set you straight.  We aren’t mourning for the Temple or Bet Mikdash building as such, but for what its loss represents, namely the distancing of G-D’s Indwelling Presence (known as the Shekhina) from Am Yisrael.  To allegorise in human terms: while G-D Himself, in His Essence, did not divorce from us when the Temple fell, His Shekhina did. This is what is known in philosophical literature as hester panim, or a “concealment of G-D’s ‘Face’”, an estrangement the causes of which we are already forewarned against in the Torah as I’m sure you are aware (Deut 31:16-18).

Our Sages declare that in every generation in which the Bet Mikdash isn’t rebuilt – reason being that the failings we had 2,000 years ago we still haven’t put right – it is as though it was destroyed in that generation (Talmud Yerushalmi, Yoma 5a). Thus we are grieving not only for the events of 2,000 years ago but for the calamities which have beset our nation in each generation in our Shechina-less exile from the Churban (Temple destruction) onwards, and for the resultant gargantuan losses of Jewish lives which have prevented us from being a nation of several billion strong instead of just 15.7 million .

So indeed Tisha b’Av is about mourning the Sho’a – and  every calamity that has occurred to us in our long galut which still persists.

It is more than just coincidence that so many tragedies in our history occurred on 9^th Av including the order of expulsion from England in 1290, the expulsion from Spain in 1492, the mass massacre of 3,000 Jews by Chmielnicki in 1648, the expulsion from Austria in 1670 and the first killings at Treblinka in 1942  (the order from Goering to Heydrich for the “final solution” to take effect occurred on 7^th Av in 1941, close enough to the 9th). However the fact is that every tragedy we have experienced in our long galut, whatever its calendar date, has its roots in the Churban Beit haMikdash.  Had it not been for that, we would have been a sovereign nation in our land and not subject to the capricious whims of the nations.

Those who advocate for a separate fast day for the Sho’a do so because they see the tragedy of the Holocaust as unique and therefore distinct from any other affliction that has befallen us. But in truth its distinction is one of degree, not of kind. As we declare in the Hagada “In every generation, our enemies have tried to destroy us!” In one way or another.

All these are reasons why, as the author of the kina (lament) over the massacres of the First Crusade in 1096 declares, ein le-hosif mo’eid shever vetav’eira, “it is not appropriate to add a new day [in addition to Tisha b’Av] of mourning over ruin and conflagration”. All our existential heartache and heartbreak, all our crying and sighing, our despair and desolation is poured into one unwanted, unloved day of the year – Tisha b’Av. All our national suffering has but one source.

The Talmud suggests several causes for the destruction of the  Temple: baseless hatred, contempt for the Torah, an unwillingness to compromise above and beyond the letter of the law in human-to-human judgements, Shabbat desecration, lack of connection to G-D, neglect of children’s Jewish education, shamelessness, lack of respect for elders and disparaging of Torah scholars and failure of leaders to rebuke (see Shabbat 119b).

Based upon the Yerushalmi source we cited earlier, the solution is quite clear. If we remedy the above, the Galut will end, and the most mournful day of the Jewish calendar will become the most joyous!

With continued heartfelt and passionate prayers for the wellbeing and success of the IDF, the imminent and safe return of the hostages and the physical and spiritual healing of the wounded