Things Fall Apart – Reflections before Tisha B’Av 5785

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

The Irish poet William Yeats wrote those words in 1919 after watching the world tear itself apart in World War 1. He gestured at what would come in WW2 with the chilling ending “and what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

They resonate with me today in this moment of Jewish and human history. On the Jewish calendar, we are approaching Tisha B’Av on Saturday night, a night we remember physical and spiritual destruction, past and present. It’s the saddest day of the year where we sit on the floor, in the dark, read Lamentations and weep for all we have suffered and for all that is broken… within us, beyond us, in our control, and far outside it.

This year Tisha B’Av falls in what feels like the deepest collective Jewish crisis in 2000 years, perhaps ever. Some Jews read this moment as a moral and spiritual reckoning, some as a trial to endure and emerge triumphant on the other side, many of us experience it as a painful confusion, a coming apart.

Coming apart.

I was invited to speak recently for a Christian audience about what it means to be a Jewish leader living through this moment. I thought about what one of my rebbes, Rav Kook wrote 100 years where he named three forces that together animate the Jewish people and must stay in balance for redemption:

The Religious force – yearning for God, anchored in prayer and study.

The Collective force – fierce loyalty to our people and land.

The Humanist force – the universal vision for a world where nation does not lift sword against nation and honors the Divine image in every person.

All three are now so inflamed:

The collective force cries out for our starving hostages, weeps at the myriad wounds still fresh inflicted on the Jewish people after 10/7 in Israel and across the world, and doubles down its commitment to our people and its land.

The humanist force weeps at images of hunger, suffering and devastation in Gaza, wrestles with our own tangled responsibilities and failures, cries out for peace and safety for all.

The religious force intensifies its commitment to prayer and study in the midst of so much uncertainty and change.

And they are all right!

The humanist force is right: Every human bears the Divine image, no child should lack for bread, and every person should feel safe in their home.

The collective force is right: The Jewish people deserve safety and peace in our ancestral homeland.

The religious force is right: The world we all want will only come when we transcend our shared human wickedness and begin to recognize the Divine spark in the other and in our selves.

Rav Kook believed, and I believe, that redemption comes when these three truths merge into one – a truth that holds them all in tension and balance.

But it’s not working. Instead of these three truths coming together, tempering each other’s excesses and merging into a whole, they are tearing each other apart. Each “side” rages at the other for not seeing things the way it does and for advancing its goals at the perceived expense of its own.

It feels like we are failing.

And this time of year we remember that failure is absolutely an option.

As a rabbi, I feel every day like I’m failing. Failing the hostages, failing my brothers and sisters in Israel, failing the innocent Gazans, failing to speak up, failing to keep quiet, failing the world, failing God, failing my community.

How appropriate to spend today preparing myself for Tisha B’Av this Sunday and its texts of failure, exile, pogroms, hungry children, and burning villages. Like never before these words will leap off the page and into today’s wounds. And it will be miserable, as it must be.

Yeats was right: the center failed, WWII came with its unimaginable devastation and reordering of the world.

Ash and devastation for all.

And then… decades of unprecedented prosperity, peace and growth for the planet. Not for all but for so, so many.

What would Yeats have thought had he lived to see the Holocaust and the Atom Bomb, and the Cold War, and then the fall of the Berlin Wall, humans on the moon and the lifting of billions of people from poverty to prosperity? What poem would he have written then?

Who could have imagined any of what the world experienced in the 20th century, the deep lows and the incredible highs??

And who can imagine what is to come now. After so many years of building, it does feel like we are back to that place of undoing.

Today rough beasts lurk again, outside us and inside us. And all we do is yell, yell, yell. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

I pray we make it through this time without much more horror. There has been enough. And there could potentially be so much more. I am afraid.

And… I’m also strengthened by the teaching that the Messiah is born on Tisha B’Av: redemption sprouts in the moment of total brokenness. Ash is an excellent fertilizer.

Somewhere, perhaps in Tel Aviv, perhaps in Gaza, perhaps in Jerusalem, somewhere inside us, new life, new possibilities, new hopes are being born.

Maybe also, in this moment of things coming apart that the center cannot hold, old forms also give way and the circle grows.

If God’s temple was destroyed because of our sinat chinam, our mere, baseless, chaotic hatred, maybe we rebuild it with our love loosed upon the world.

This is my hope and prayer. Please God help us find the way. Return us to You, O Lord, that we may be restored! Renew our days as of old.