Blaming the victim
Every year on the ninth of Av we blame the victim. We hold ourselves accountable on the 9th of Av for the calamities that befall us. Every Av is an introduction to a process that begins with national repentance and becomes personal in Tishrei. We remember the destruction of the first and second Temples in Jerusalem, and our long exile from the land of Israel and we, the victims of Babylonian and later Roman aggression assume a major portion of the responsibility for the calamity.
The prophets decry our violence and idolatry, and later the rabbis claim that our fractious enmity doomed us. The land between the river and sea had been promised to Abraham and his children, and with fits and starts, that promise had been fulfilled and lasted a thousand years. Its collapse can be explained politically and militarily, but what the Jews made of the destruction theologically and morally is something very different. Instead of blaming the enemy or God, we blamed ourselves.
Since both destructions occurred in a similar time frame, they came to be commemorated by the rabbis on a single day, eliding the two very different destructions with one day of fasting, biblical recitation and medieval dirges. We asked ourselves how is it that the sovereignty promised to us as a people was lost? When we asked who was to blame for the destructions of the 9th of Av, either in 586 BCE or in 70 CE our prophets and later our sages turned inward.
Jeremiah says it clearly: Thus said GOD of Hosts, the God of Israel: Mend your ways and your actions, and I will let you dwell in this place. Don’t put your trust in illusions and say, “The Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, are these [buildings].” (Jeremiah 7:4)
The repetition of the phrase “the Temple of the Lord” expresses the blind confidence of Jeremiah’s contemporaries that the biblical promise and especially the physical presence of the Temple would protect us from calamity. They believed that God would never let his Temple be destroyed. Jeremiah marks their presumption of invincibility as a dangerous lie and warns them that Temple will not protect them. Their security rests on the righteousness of their behavior, on the justice of their courts. Their arrogant overreach will doom them.
To be sure, the horrific viciousness of the Babylonians and later, the Romans, is not minimized. Their brutality is condemned by the prophets. Babylon may be God’s instrument to punish Judah for its unfaithfulness, but their extreme cruelty and arrogance condemns them too. While Jeremiah laments that “The Lord has abandoned his people like a lion that leaves its cave.” (Jeremiah 25:38) the fundamental reason for the calamities, and their commemoration with a day by fasting is clear. The destructions occurred because of our failures. We repeat it in every holiday prayer service, “because of our sins we were exiled from our land.”
This move to take responsibility is counter intuitive. Self defense would seem best accomplished by blaming others, but just the opposite is true. Had Judea blamed God for the failure, then the covenant would have been over. Had it blamed the enemy’s power or blind fate for defeat then God’s protection would have meant nothing and again, the covenant would have been finished. Israel, while under the thumb of an empire, bears a measure of responsibility when its arrogance blinds it from its overriding duty to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God (Micah 6:8).
For victims to hold responsibility is troublesome for a number of reasons. It is surely challenging in the midst of libelous accusations of genocide for Jews and Israelis to openly admit failings. Our history calls us to defend ourselves against the vicious hatred of our detractors, to stand up to the Islamic Jihadists and the Neo Nazis and still find a way to listen to the prophets and ask ourselves hard questions. The covenant survived because of this turn inward, because we fasted on Tisha B’av and marked our complicity in the destruction of Judea.
As well, this Tisha B’Av insight is difficult for another reason. While blaming the victim may have felt credible for most of Jewish history, in the aftermath of the Holocaust this approach to Jewish suffering was plainly untenable. The enormity of the destruction and its brutality could no longer be justified by failure on the part of the victims. What the rabbis articulated about the destruction of Jerusalem was not utterable in the aftermath of the Auschwitz.
What was more common was a new portrayal of Jewish failure. The sins that lead to the decimation of European Jewry was shifted from abuse of power to the refusal to wield power. Diaspora passivity and the consequent refusal to take direct responsibility for our national self-determination was the cause of our travails. Homelessness was our failure. Powerlessness became the sin for which we suffered, and so we repented and established the State of Israel in our ancestral homeland. There was now one place in the world Jews did not feel powerless and Jewish blood was not cheap.
While there was a moral vision in the appropriation of power we did not fully recognize the costs to others that would ensue. We are no longer suffering because we refuse to trust ourselves and take action; we sin now by trusting ourselves too much. Our accuser is not Jabotinsky, but again, Jeremiah.
So…We will fast this Tisha B’av and carry this complicated, nuanced, and sometimes difficult burden to proudly blame ourselves for our part in this bloody story. It is often forgotten by antisemites that the same prophets who narrate our sins and the destruction that ensues, do not quote the end of the prophecies. The warnings end with a promise of restoration.
The day of Tisha B’av ends with a reading from Isaiah that provides such hope. The transition from defensiveness and resentment to moral responsibility brings renewal. “Let the wicked give up their ways, the sinful, their plans; Let each one turn back to GOD and so, be pardoned.” “Yea, you shall leave [Babylon where you were exiled] in joy and be led home secure. Before you, mountain and hill shall shout aloud, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands…Observe what is right and do what is just; For soon My salvation shall come, And My deliverance be revealed.” (Isaiah 55 and 56)
