Very Unorthodox Views for 9 Av
Should a Holocaust survivor who visits a death camp with his daughter and grandchildren weep for all those who died, or should they dance to the music of ‘I Survived ‘? Some say only tears are kosher; others say the joy and satisfaction of survival is also kosher. I say both are not only kosher, they are Mitsvot. On Pesach we remember that our ancestors were slaves in Egypt.
We also celebrate that some of them (only a minority left Egypt according to one midrash) were redeemed. In the same way we should observe Tisha B’Av with both sorrow and joy. Joy, but not self righteous triumphalism. After all, another midrash relates that God told the angels not to sing and dance when the Egyptians were drowning in the Sea of Reeds.
In the centuries after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the Holy Temple our sages could have noted with satisfaction that the most important of Rome’s Temples was also destroyed again and again. The most important religious temple in the whole state of Rome was the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (best and biggest) dedicated c. 509 BCE (a few years after the Second Temple was dedicated in Jerusalem). That Temple burned down in 83 BCE, during the civil wars under the dictatorship of Sulla. Rebuilt in 69 BCE, it was burnt down again in December of 69 CE when Vespasian battled to enter the city as Emperor in the Year of the Four Emperors.
The new emperor, Vespasian, rapidly rebuilt the temple on the same foundations but with a lavish superstructure. This third Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus was dedicated in 75 CE and burned down 5 years later, during the reign of Titus, who was in charge when the Jerusalem Temple burned down 10 years before. Domitian began rebuilding the Temple of Jupiter again on the same foundations, but with the most lavish superstructure yet. This Pagan temple lasted more or less intact for four hundred years, until the fifth century. Since that time it has been in ruins.
According to Virgil, writing in the 20’s BCE, the Roman God Jupiter declared, “To Romans I set no boundary in space or time. I have granted them dominion without end.” (Aeneid 2:277) Yet only five centuries later Rome’s dominion in the west was over, and a century and a half after that, Muslims severely restricted the Roman empire’s boundaries in the east. Perhaps the fact that the Romans could rebuild their Temple, and the Jews were not permitted to do so, made all the difference. Yet as rabbis and synagogues replaced priests and The Temple, the Jewish people acquired a boundary-less domain. We are still here and they are gone. Virgil was wrong and Moses was right.
A special day to commemorate the Shoah was opposed by many Orthodox Rabbis who claimed that Jews already had a day for mourning the great tragedies that befell the Jewish people: Tisha B’Av. The majority of Jews however, felt that the Shoah was different, not only in size and scope, but also in its meaning. The orthodox view of Tisha B’Av, expressed in the Musaf Amidah of the holidays, declares that: “because of our sins we were exiled from our homeland”.
This could have applied to the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE and again in 70 CE, but it should not be applied to what happened to Jewish communities living in Europe during WW 2. The Shoah fit much better into the Zionist analysis of the inherent vulnerability of all Jewish communities living as a minority in countries outside of land of Israel. The Six Day War seemed to confirm Zionist ideology, but the decades long conflict with the Palestinians makes many Jews in Israel today feel more insecure than many Jews in the diaspora, thus reversing Zionist ideology.
When peace comes to the Middle East someday, many things will change, including how we think and feel about Tisha B’Av. There are few, if any, modern Jews, who feel any loss at all because a hereditary, male only, priesthood no longer offers animals on the sacred altar of a Temple in Jerusalem. Many rabbis have struggled to make Tisha B’Av relevant to their congregations by including references to terrible events occurring in our own lifetime like Hiroshima, Cambodia, Rwanda, or even climate change. This reforming of the focus of Tisha B’Av does help make it more relevant, but in the last two decades I have found it useful to use a different approach to Tisha B’Av.
I used to think that Tisha b’Av was a service dedicated to self centered self pity as shown in the following passages from the midrash: “”When punishment occurs Jacob alone experiences it” (Eicha Rabbah II :7); “Don’t the Gentiles sin? But although they sin, no punishment follows. Israel, however, sinned and was punished.” (I:35) and “In Egypt there were more than 70 peoples, and of them all only Israel was subjected to slavery” (Deuteronomy Rabbah IV 9). I now think that correctly taught, the annual occurrence of Tisha b’Av has a potential to serve as an occasion for teaching some alternative and lesser known views of Jewish historical tragedy, as valuable lessons for 21st century Jews today.
Midrash Eicha Rabbah is a collection of midrashim that overwhelmingly supports two popular views in Orthodox Judaism. One view is “because of our sins we were exiled from our homeland” i.e. it was all our fault. The other view is “Ever since the Temple was destroyed there is no day without a curse.” i.e. exile is hell. (Sotah 49a) But there have always been some dissenting sages. One especially important Orthodox Jewish belief is that Israel could not have been defeated unless the God of Israel let Israel’s enemies win, in order to punish the Jewish people for its sins.
God’s attribute of justice made this inevitable, even though it saddened God. God tells Israel “Behold what your iniquities caused Me to do: to burn My Temple, destroy My city, exile My children among the nations of the world, and that I should sit solitary.” (Eicha Rabbah proem 10 & 20).
Yet only a few pages away we find an alternative view, “Were it not explicitly stated in Scripture it would be impossible to say such a thing…the Holy One blessed be He, lamented saying, ‘Woe to a king who succeeded in his youth but failed in his old age!’” (Ibid. Proem 14) This introduces the concept of a God who is weakened when we do not do Mitsvot and strengthened when we do, We are partners with God and we can’t simply expect God to automatically save us from defeat.
It is better to discuss this alternative way of thinking about why God doesn’t rescue all victims of mass slaughter on Tisha B’Av rather than on Yom HaShoah, and to make a major distinction between the power of a national community in its own land to influence its fate, and a small weak community in the diaspora. Sometimes bad things do happen to good people.
Our generation lives at a time when Jews have once again returned to the land of Israel and revived an independent state. A Jewish government in Israel is once again responsible for making decisions about how diverse groups of Israelis such as ultra-Orthodox, Reform, Conservative and non-religious Jews, as well as Muslim and Christian Arabs should live together in a tolerant and peaceful society. In addition, Jewish leaders, for the first time in more than 19 centuries, have to decide how much to risk for war or for peace, and how to relate to Israel’s Arab neighbors. We, as individuals and as a community have much to learn from Jewish texts that provide us with wisdom from our sages.
The Talmud (Shabbat 119b) relates that Rabbi Hanina said, “Jerusalem was destroyed only because its inhabitants did not reprove one another. Israel in that generation kept their faces looking down to the ground and did not reprove one another.” Rabbi Hanina doesn’t mention any one specific action that was so reprehensible that it doomed the city. It is an attitude that he condemns. An current example of that “ not my business” attitude could be the rabbinic silence that greeted the recent decision of some ultra-Orthodox Rabbis to declare null and void the conversions of thousands of Jews, by proclaiming the radical innovation of ‘retroactive annulment’ of thousand of orthodox conversions that took place in Israel in previous years.
The sad fact is that most Rabbis in Israel failed to publicly reprove these zealots for violating the Torah’s commandments to both love converts, and not in any way oppress them. Why would any of the tens of thousands of Russian non-Jews who, like Ruth, moved to Israel with their Jewish family members, want to identify with a people whose religious leaders passively abide such a disgraceful action? Who can tell what the consequences of this repulsive act of rejection will be in determining the loyalty of future generations of Israelis? Three different historical examples of the negative consequences of rejecting even potential converts are given in rabbinic sources.
First, Me’am Lo’ez – Ruth 1:14 relates that when Naomi discouraged her daughter-in-laws from returning with Naomi to Judah, Orpha stayed in Moab, remarried, and had children. Among her descendants was the great warrior Goliath, who had to be killed by David, the descendant of Ruth the famous convert who did go with Naomi. If Naomi hadn’t discouraged Orpha, her descendent Goliath would have been fighting on the Jewish side; not on the other side. Second, the Talmud says that when the Avot refused to accept Timna as a convert she distanced herself greatly from the Jewish people, married Elifaz and gave birth to Amalek, who grieved the Jewish people greatly. (Sanhedrin 99b) Third, the Jews suffered from being enslaved in Egypt because Abraham failed to give some non-Jews an opportunity to convert. (Neddarim 32a)
There was one unconventional view of two well known Biblical sins that did became somewhat orthodox in the Middle Ages. The Medieval victims of Gentile fury were guiltless because, as a minority community, they had no political power to engage in social injustice or public institutional corruption; and they were far more personally pious than Jews in the days of the First and Second Temple. No one could claim that the sins of these generations could have caused their destruction. Therefore, the sin that caused their destruction was transferred into an archetypical one in the distant past that still doomed them: the making the golden calf or the selling of Joseph.
A medieval midrash Ele Ezk’ra explains that the martyrdom of ten great sages after the failure of the Bar Kochva rebellion was “due to the selling of Joseph, whom his (10) brothers sold.” (1) Also a late medieval midrash anthology states, “On Tishri the seventh it was decreed that the sin of the golden calf be visited upon the Israelites in every generation, and that they should die by sword, famine and plague.” (Me’am Loez- Deuteronomy 4:26)
This later view may have already circulated in the days of R’ Joshua ben Levi who opposed it by teaching: “The Jews only made the Golden Calf to open the way for repentance.” (Talmud, Avoda Zara 4b) The golden calf represents public apostasy. The selling of Joseph represents disloyalty to one’s Jewish brothers. Both of these sins did exist in Medieval times and were sometimes the stimulus for pogroms. Nevertheless, since this concept is opposed to the belief in Zechut Avot-the beneficial merit of our ancestors, it never became a major theme of Tisha B’Av. However, it is evidence for how far some rabbis were willing to go in order to avoid saying that God could not, or would not, save the innocent victims of Europe’s pogroms.
Another alternative view is that history itself has up and down cycles. Some empires are severe and others are lenient. Babylon and (Seleucid) Greece were harsh while Persia and Rome were lenient. The Byzantines were harsh but Ishmael is lenient. (Eicha Rabbah 1:42) There is no attempt to say that Israel’s sins determine the nature of the empire. Jewish activities might influence the timing of local events but empires have their own character. Some are just worse than others.
Maybe we should not always think that whenever Jews encounter hostility and violence it is because we, or our enemies, are total sinners. Maybe some conflicts are normal and in time will pass. If oppressed religions survive they usually come out stronger. When the Temple was destroyed, the synagogue thrived. When Israel was exiled, the opportunity to bring people into the Jewish community increased.
Indeed, a rather unorthodox view of the exile is taught by Rabbi Eleazar, “The Holy One exiled Israel among the nations only in order that proselytes might be multiplied among them.” (Pesahim 87b) It is true that there were many more converts to Judaism in diaspora Jewish communities than in the land of Israel. The strong anti-Roman feelings of many Jews in the land of Israel not only flared into two disastrous revolts, in 66-70 CE and again in 132-135 CE, but also must have expressed itself among some Jews in ongoing suspicion and hostility toward non-Jews who had converted as well as those who were interested in becoming Jewish.
Rabbi Eleazar’s teaching that gaining converts was so important that God sacrificed Jerusalem and the Holy Temple in order to multiply converts is truly radical. Of course, it is possible that Rabbi Eleazar was simply trying to make the best of a bad thing. But he must have thought making converts was of extraordinary importance. Perhaps Rabbi Eleazar thought that if the Jewish people was much more numerous (like the stars in the sky or the sand on the beach) we would be a lot less likely to be defeated and oppressed by others. Thus, the failure to make large numbers of converts in the past led to the subsequent vulnerability of the Jewish people.
Another view of Rabbi Eleazar proclaims “On the day when the temple was destroyed, there fell an iron wall, which had raised itself up between Israel and their father in heaven.“ (Berachot 32b). This is the translation found on page 451 of the Machzor published in 1985 by the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain (the Conservative movement in GB). That the Jerusalem Temple had become an iron wall interrupting communication between Jews and God seems so radical that almost everyone avoids translating Rabbi Eleazar’s statement in its plain meaning. The Soncino Talmud translates “Since the day the Temple was destroyed a wall of iron has intervened between Israel and their Father in Heaven”, the exact opposite meaning from that of the conservative Machzor.
The verb is to interrupt, but what is being interrupted: the barrier created by corruption in the Temple or communication with God through the Temple? It is true that criticism of the Temple and its priesthood by the prophets in the generations prior to 587 BCE was well known. Hosea proclaims, “I desire goodness, not sacrifice; obedience to God, rather than burnt offerings.” (6:6) Even the pious book of Psalms says, “You desire no sacrifice or I would give it. You do not want burnt offerings. The sacrifices of God are a humbled heart..(Psalm 51:18-19).
Actually, both opposing meanings of Rabbi Eleazar’s teaching are reflected in his proof text from Ezekiel (4:2-3) . “Take an iron (serving) platter and place it as an iron wall between you and the city, and set your face against it (the city)”. Rabbi Eleazar thought that if the religious and political leaders had not ignored the moral message of the prophets, the moral walls of prophets like Jeremiah (1:16-19) and Ezekiel would have protected the people more than the city’s walls of stone. The iron platter could be a wall blocking communion with God, or if rotated 90 degrees, it could be a serving platter facilitating communication.
It is up to us. Rabbi Eleazar taught that the altar, which should have been a horizontal serving platter bringing God and Israel together in a shared meal, but instead had been turned ninety degrees into a vertical “iron wall” of false security provided by the Temple, was now shattered again. Now our spiritual relationship with God would depend on our own personal efforts.
Rapprochement with God through prayer, repentance and good deeds would always be possible, but not automatically available through a Temple ritual. Now, without the sanctuary altar, Israel could energetically focus on turning the Temple’s vertical iron wall into a horizontal serving platter without the interference of political and religious corruption by a powerful priesthood. The Talmud reports people crying out “Woe is me because of the House of Ishmael, son of Phiabi, woe is me because of their fists. For they are the High Priests, and their sons are treasurers, and their sons-in-law are trustees, and their servants beat the people with staves.” (Pesahim 57a, Tosefta Minhot 13, 21) The Talmud also relates that rivalries between some priests led to bloodshed and that “The purity of their utensils was of greater concern to them than the shedding of blood.” (Yoma 23a)
This is why Rabbi Eleazar said, “Since the day the Temple was destroyed, the iron wall between Israel and their Father in Heaven has been shattered.” (Berachot 32b) Rabbi Eleazar sounds like an early Reform Rabbi when he also teaches (Sukkot 49b) “Greater is one who does charity than one who offers all the sacrifices, for it is said (Proverbs 21:3) ”To do charity and justice is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.” The mass spirituality of the three annual pilgrimage festivals to the Holy Temple was ended.
A more individual spirituality could now only be experienced from time to time in secular lands (including Israel) within holy communities that put their energy into praying, studying Torah, doing good deeds and living a pure worldly life. (Berakhot 32b) Many of these activities are not considered to be really religious by many people. Tisha B’Av should become a day devoted to understanding Reform Judaism’s view of Judaism.
Notes 1. Gates to the Old City by Raphael Patai p.360
The source seems to be Zechariah 8:19: “And the word of the Lord of Hosts came to me, saying: Thus said the Lord of Hosts: The fast of the fourth month, the fast of the fifth month, the fast of the seventh month, and the fast of the tenth month shall become occasions for joy and gladness, happy festivals for the House of Judah; but you must love honesty and integrity.” Zechariah, a contemporary of Haggai, lived in the post-exilic word of the late 6th century B.C.E. Living after Darius’ edict, Zechariah writes about the return from Exile, a time of restoration that he sees as paving the way to future redemption.
The four fast days that will be converted to days of “joy and gladness, happy festivals” are generally identified as follows: the fourth month is the 17th of Tammuz (commemorating the breach of the walls of Jerusalem); the fifth month is the 9th of Av; the seventh month is Tzom Gedaliah (postponed a day to Sunday this year because shabbat takes precedence); the tenth month is the 10th Tevet (when Nebechadnezzar began the first siege of Jerusalem).
The Yerushalmi (Berakhot 2:4) tells the story of an Arab man who tells a Jews that when his ox bellows it is a sign that the Mikdash was destroyed; when it bellows a second time, it will signal the birth of the messiah, whose name will be Menachem and who will be born in the vicinity of Bethlehem.
