1. We are a people that remembers. What would we be without the memory? How can a group of people remember its past if it is scattered around the world without a country or political framework? Jews around the world today, even if they do not practice Torah and mitzvot, can connect to their people and culture through their mother community in the State of Israel. But what did many generations do without a Jewish state, how did they protect themselves from assimilating into the nations around them and being forgotten in the flow of corrosive time?
As far as the Roman Empire was concerned, the destruction of Judea, Galilee and Jerusalem and the burning of the Jewish Temple were other events in a long series of conquests that accompanied Roman rule in the first century. Not so for us. The destruction of our capital, the Temple, and the land were the cornerstone of our existence, especially as the years passed and we scattered throughout the world. The all-encompassing effort to remember the catastrophe that brought us dead and wandered through the desert of nations was the thin thread that connected us with our past and reminded us of who we were and where we came from. He preserved the hope that one day we would return home to renew our old days.
2 Without the religious framework, we would not have been able to preserve the national core. Tisha B'Av was therefore not only a national day of mourning, but also religious mourning: fasting, lamentations, special prayers, walking barefoot, couples sleeping apart. Even on happy days, we broke a glass under the chuppah to declare that our joy was incomplete, as long as our city was destroyed. When we received Shabbat in our postcards, we read in different accents: "Temple of the king of a royal city, get up and get out of the upheaval! You have a great Sabbath in the valley of weeping, and he will have compassion on you."
"Get up, get out of the upheaval." "Lot and His Daughters Fleeing Sodom", by Gustave Doré,
Not only the Temple City but the royal city, the religious vision is intertwined with the political one. Our existence is incomplete without a sovereign life as a free people in our land. But in the words of Rabbi Shlomo Elkabetz, who immigrated to Israel and settled in Safed in the 16th century, there is also a desperate call to get out of exile lest we be too late. He used the story of Lot and Sodom to describe our situation in exile. Just before the destruction ("overthrow") of Sodom, Lot begged his family to escape the catastrophe: "Get up, get out of this place, for God is corrupting the city!" Get out of exile because the greatest disaster of all is approaching. The response to Lot's warning was mockery: "Let it be like a laugher in the eyes of his sons-in-law."
Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, in his book "The Kuzari" (12th century), bitterly remarked about our remaining in exile: "It is not what we say in our prayers... – 'He who restores His Shekinah to Zion' and so on – but rather as the speech of the parrot and the beep of the starling, for without the intention of the heart we say these words." He called this phenomenon "the source of disgrace" for our people.
3. This week marked the anniversary of the death of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, who said: "We want to save Judaism from the approaching lava." He repeatedly warned our people of the impending catastrophe: "Jews, eliminate the exile – and no, the exile will eliminate you." He saw Zionism not only as a national and spiritual movement, but also as "an idea of human salvation for huge masses of people, an almost messianic idea in the simplest sense of these words." In doing so, Jabotinsky joined a series of figures in the history of our people who warned against settling in exile. In the first half of the 17th century, Rabbi Chaim ben Atar called for leaving exile and immigrating to Israel. When he realized that there was no echo of his call, he lamented: "And for this all the great masters of the land of Israel will be judged, and from them the Lord will ask for the insult of the wretched house."
However, even if we did not respond to the call to immigrate to Israel, we continued to mark Tisha B'Av. This is the depth of our sages' farsightedness in the first generations after the destruction. As long as Jews lament barefoot over the destruction of our city and read by candlelight in the Book of Lamentations, there is hope for our end. Because in the memory lies the secret of the redemption of the people, and at the end of a long and bloody historical process, individuals will arise, followed by groups, and take action: they will return home to Zion to raise it from its ashes.
Reading a scroll at the Western Wall // Archive photo: Yoni Rikner
4. And another great thing our sages taught: we are responsible for our actions, responsible for the destruction of the people and the homeland; And therefore are also responsible for their correction. On every holiday we kept saying: "Because of our sins, we were exiled from our land and distanced from our land." Not only religious sins, between man and God, but social sins, between man and his fellow, and between man and his people. The Talmud of Palestine ("Yerushalmi") presents an idea that also appears in the Babylonian Talmud: "We found that it was not the first destruction of the Temple, but that they worshipped idolatry and incest and shed blood; But in the second (house) we know them who were weary of the Torah and careful in commandments and tithes... (So why is the sword of the house?) But they would love Mammon and hate each other with unfounded hatred..."
And what is baseless hatred? The Natziv (Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin, Volozhin, 19th century), in his introduction to the Book of Genesis, elaborates: "Who were righteous and pious and toilers of Torah, but were not upright in eternal walks. Therefore, because of the unfounded hatred in their hearts for one another, they suspected those who saw that they were acting unwillingly in fear of God – that he was righteous and epicurean. And by this they came to bloodshed in the way of sailing, and to all the evils in the world, until the destruction of the house." In other words, they hated the other because of their opinions, and not because the other completely denied our existence, but even small differences in how each saw the destiny of the people and the way the country should be run, caused great hatred. To the point where, even in the face of Roman enemy exhaustion, the various Jewish factions in Jerusalem continued to fight each other. "At first they threw stones at each other in the city and in front of the Temple Mount, and even threw spears from afar; And when one side turned its back, the victor struck with the sword; The killing on both sides was great and the number of wounded was enormous," is how Josephus described the situation in Jerusalem on the eve of the destruction.
5. Our sages made it clear that internal strife and brotherly hatred were the cause of the destruction, not Rome. The Talmud relates that when the oppressor entered the Temple, he was distracted by the victory: "The daughter of Kol came out and said: With a dead man you killed, a burnt hall burned, flour ground a mill."
These are our sages who did not leave a page in the Talmud undisputed, and before the Talmud, our great code of laws, the Mishna, is full of dissenting opinions, which, although not accepted in Jewish law, were embedded in the text by the editor of the Mishna, Rabbi Yehuda Hanasi. This is because the ideological, political, religious, and legal dispute is the secret of our existence and our ancient ethos, but it is certainly not a reason for the separation between us and irresponsible statements about renouncing our mutual responsibility. For almost two thousand years we have mourned our national destruction, and in these years of mourning we have learned a great lesson. One people we are. We will also get through the current crisis together, and in the building of Zion we will be comforted.
Wrong? We'll fix it! If you find a mistake in the article, please share with us