VA’ETCHANAN Reviewing our Destiny – Renewing our Destination

When you will bear children and grandchildren and become old-timers in the Land, growing corrupt … doing evil in the eyes of G-D, making Him angry, I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that you will surely perish from the land … G-D will scatter you … you will be left few in number among the nations … There you will serve the idolatrous works of man, wood and stone … but when, from there, you will seek G-D with all your heart and soul, you will find Him; in your distress, when all these things have happened to you, at the end of days you will return to G-D and obey his voice (Deut. 4 : 25-30).

This gripping passage of prophesy extracted from Moses’ passionate peroration in this week’s sidra is also the initial section of the Torah reading selected for Tisha b’Av. Here Moses, having recorded the promise of ultimate return to G-D (end of above quote), goes on to ask the people, rhetorically and rhapsodically, whether any nation could ever expect to see anything like that which the nation of Israel has witnessed these past forty years. Absolutely not! Why not? Because “G-D loved your forefathers and [therefore] chose you, their descendants … to do ultimate good to you and your children after you” (4: 37, 40).

A burning question presents itself. We just noted that this Torah reading is selected for the fast of Tisha b’Av. Lest we forget, the Ninth of Av is the saddest, most tragic day in the Jewish calendar. So mournful a day is it that even Torah study is proscribed, except for certain doom-laden passages from Jeremiah and elsewhere.

We may be certain that the Scriptural sections chosen for public reading on this day were selected by our Sages of old with thoughtful care with the aim of capturing the mood of the day. Certainly there is little to cheer us in Megilat Eikha, the Book of Lamentations, or in the singularly depressing selection from Jeremiah (8:13-9:23) read as the haftara on Tisha b’Av morning. Yet on this same morning when mournfulness is at its height, what do we read from the Torah? Verses promising return, rehabilitation and redemption!

Why was this passage chosen? Surely a more cheerless section of the Torah could have been found, such as the Tokhakha (Chastisement) verses of Leviticus or Deuteronomy. In fact, if we look in the Mishna (Megilla 3:6) we find that the prescribed reading for a public fast is indeed the tokhahka passage at the end of Sefer Vayyikra. Yet this was never adopted in practice for Tisha b’Av (or, for that matter, the other three Temple fasts). Why not?

I would venture to suggest a possible explanation. Both tokhakha passages, hair-raising and goosebump-inducing though they may be, have one ‘saving grace’ – their imprecations (like those in the second paragraph of the Shema) begin with the word im, ‘if’. “If you do not listen … then these curses will overcome you”.

 It should not escape our notice that the Tisha b’Av reading from our sidra opens not with ‘if’ but with ‘when’. Ki tolid banim. “When you will bear children … and grow corrupt … and do evil …”.

One may now better imagine the reaction of the dor ha-kibush, the generation about to conquer the Land of Israel, on hearing these fateful words of the supreme prophet of
G-D. This was no mere conditional warning – it was presented as a heart-wrenching certainty, a bleak future scenario, a time when the nation would (not might) be exiled from its land. True the language here is not tempestuous like in the tokhakha; true, too, that the dire prediction is stated not at length, like there, but with stark brevity. But it is in this very starkness, as well as the apparent inevitability, that its effect and effectiveness lies.

When we read these words on Tisha b’Av, we relive the brutal intensity of our 2,000-year exile replete with tragedy and torment, pogrom and persecution, struggle and strife. If on Pesach it is we, not our ancestors, who came out of Egypt, it is no less true that on Tisha b’Av we are the universal galut Jew, spanning the centuries, exiled from our land and yearning for redemption. That redemption could have come aeons ago. But because of our sins we were exiled, and as they persist so does the galut.

When, however, we will read these same words on Shabbat Nachamu, the Shabbat of Consolation, we shall read them with historical perspective. The direst of dire predictions have, alas, all come horribly true. We sacrificed one-third of our people eighty dark years ago. Surely we have suffered enough!

 If, echoing the sentiments of Rabbi Akiva, the worst curses have come true, the most bountiful blessings surely must! We are now approaching the akharit ha-yamim, the end-of-days of which our sidra speaks. The footsteps of Mashiakh are just around the corner. Can’t you hear them!