‘After This, Nothing Happened’

How Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai and Chief Plenty Coups Make Tisha B’Av Meaningful – guest post by Tirza Leibowitz

In 1932, the Native American chief of the Crow nation died. Late in his life, after his people were confined to a reservation in Montana, Chief Plenty Coups is quoted as saying:

… [W]hen the buffalo went away, the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After this, nothing happened.[1]

Jonathan Lear, in his book, Radical Hope, is taken by that phrase: “After this nothing happened: what could Plenty Coups’s utterance mean? He seems to be saying that there was an event or a happening—the buffalo’s going away—…such that after this, there are no more happenings.”[2]

Something did occur with the move to the reservation: the disappearance of the buffalo, an end to hunting, and a prohibition on warfare. According to Lear’s convincing account, with these changes fundamental features orienting Crow life ceased to be intelligible acts. It became impossible to attribute meaning to valorous acts or major rituals, or even to smaller everyday acts such as eating a meal, which had until then been located in the larger scheme of purposefulness. It was a breakdown of what had been counted as “happening,” a loss of concepts with which the Crow had constructed their narrative.

In a footnote, Lear recounts a question he often receives, about similarities between this breakdown for the Crows and that of the Holocaust for the Jewish people. His response struck an immediate chord with me:

Crow concepts could, I think, have survived their own holocaust. A more relevant analogy therefore seems to be the destruction of the Temple. With that destruction certain traditional forms of orientation—e.g., toward a priestly caste, toward the Temple, toward sacrifice—became impossible. There were no longer viable ways of so orienting oneself. Unlike the Crow, the Jews had their Book; and the rabbis were able to use it to construct a liturgy that would be specifically applicable in conditions of exile and diaspora…[3]

As Lear mentions, the reorientation of the core of Jewish life toward a Temple-less existence was revolutionary. Lear’s framing gives me tools to better grasp the essence of this act: In striking a deal that would save the learning center at Yavne even as Jerusalem burned, Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai (c. 70 CE) projected new possibilities where Jewish practice, as had been known, became unintelligible. A poignant example is where he infused the practice of the priestly blessing, which could only take place as part of Temple ritual, with novel meaning by moving it into synagogues, everywhere.[4]

We can call on this framing to better understand today’s predicament as well.

For so many Jews, being Jewish has been inseparable from the reality of the state of Israel. Narrative and culture, religious thought and practice, fears and dreams—all have been shaped around an assumption of a sovereign state that preserves a Jewish majority and is a homeland for the Jews.

Being an occupier has become an inseparable component of the Jewish state as we have known it. From a historical perspective, the establishment of the state of Israel was facilitated by displacement and oppression of the Palestinian people, native to the land. These injustices continue in varied shapes and forms, both within the green line and in the occupied territories, failing as well to achieve security for anyone living between the river and the sea. Recent and ongoing horrors meted by Israel against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank, following the horrific October 7 Hamas attacks, are a part of that continuum. These include killing Palestinians in untold numbers rising by the day.

Our Jewish identities have wrapped around a Jewish state premised on oppression and displacement. But that reality is now being shaken. It is no longer tenable to so many Jews who recognize its standing in antithesis to every other belief held. We bear a duty and moral responsibility as a nation to extricate ourselves from the writing of oppression into our identity. And so, we are facing the prospect of a future in which Jewish majority, interlaced with displacement and oppression of Palestinians, will cease to be a part of the story of Israel and the Jewish people.

While many of us look forward to this reality, we should not overlook the power of the fear that may come with that. Losing the fundamental concepts with which we have constructed our narrative might mean a breakdown of a way of life, after which, to follow the narrative of Plenty Coups, things ‘cease to happen.’

But they don’t need to. We, Israelis and diasporic communities, could make “things happen” by reimagining and reorienting the concept of sovereignty, not one based on Jewish supremacy and dominance but encompassing all those living in the Israel-Palestine space. And we do not have to wait for tectonic geopolitical shifts to make this happen. We can begin by normalizing this notion from the ground up, raising this for discussion, debate and action in local communities and educational settings.

Here is where Lear’s understanding of the Temple’s destruction as “a breakdown of a field in which occurrences occur” is so deeply appropriate. It captures the experience of one’s entire orientation crumbling. At the same time, it indicates the keys we have at our disposal to respond, encapsulated in our observance of the Ninth of Av: remembering and mourning past realities, amending what has gone wrong, and creating the possibility of profound reorientation into vibrant new ways of living and being.

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[1] Frank B. Linderman, Plenty Coups: Chief of the Crows (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), p. 311.

[2] Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 2.

[3] Lear, Radical Hope, chapter I, fn 42.

[4] Babylonian Talmud, Sota 40a; Rosh Hashana 29b

Tirza Leibowitz, my sister, works in the area of human rights and international justice. Her article is also featured in the Tisha B’Av compendium of Halachic Left “For These Things I Weep.”