Tisha B’Av: Heeding Lessons of the Past
As we enter the 9 days, we begin a process for mourning the destruction of the Temple, which will culminate on the Day of Tisha B’Av.
Tisha B’Av is a reminder of Jewish fragility in exile: Blood libels and murders, the Crusades, Expulsion and Inquisition, Pogroms, and of course, the Holocaust.
It is precisely this type of fragility that Israel is meant to combat, by creating a haven where Jews can live free of religious/ethnic persecution by the governing authorities. This does not guarantee there will be no external enemies, but Israel is designated as the one place that Jews don’t have to worry that “the call is coming from inside the house” -that persecution on the basis of their Jewishness is coming from the government and society of where they live.
But Tisha B’Av is also a reminder that there are more important religious values than having Israeli sovereignty over the land of Israel. In fact, it was because the Jewish people violated these religious values that they were exiled from Israel.
Violations of these values were considered severe enough that if the Jewish government and society of its time, in Israel, were perpetuating those violations, and the only way to stop it was exile, than God would destroy His own Temple and exile the Jews from Israel, destroying the Jewish state. The fact that God was willing to exile Jews from Israel to uphold certain Jewish values teaches us that those values have more religious importance than having a Jewish government in the land of Israel.
God’s behavior is not a surprise, since the Torah is full of warnings of various sins for which the people might be exiled from the land. The traditional rabbinic explanations for why the Jewish people were exiled by the Babylonian is idol worship, and for why the Jewish people were exiled by the Romans is “free hatred” -internal animosity within the society.
At first, these two seem to line up neatly with different categories of sin: The Babylonian exile was for a sin between human and God, and the Roman exile was for a sin between human and human.
However, a traditional explanation for idolatry is that the Jewish people worshipped idols in order to have a theological framework that allowed them to carry out sexual immorality and murder. In this framing, idolatry, in addition to being a theological sin against God, is also a moral sin against one’s fellow humans.
Today, many in Israel are using love of the land and Jewish survival -two messages that do legitimately carry religious weight in our tradition – as a theological justification to carry out grave sins against their fellow humans, turning it into an idol worship of sorts.
If we take Tisha B’Av seriously, we must heed the lessons of the past, and stop this process before it’s too late.
