Tisha B'Av begins tonight, when we mourn and mark the destruction of the Temple. In fact, the first nine days of Av are to be a mourning period; many Jews refrain from eating meat and from celebrations of any kind during this period.
This is complicated for me for a few reasons, one descriptive and two normative:
1) I grew up with no real understanding of Tisha B'Av. We didn't observe it in my synagogue or family, and it has never been a part of my Jewish identity.
2) I cannot see the destruction of the Temple as an unmitigated tragedy. It is, in some sense, a "mixed curse". For it was that destruction that allowed (facilitated, even?) the transformation of Judaism into a rabbinic religion that could flourish in the Diaspora. I am a product of this diaspora Judaism. Hence, my American Jewish experience and identity is thanks to, traced back far enough, the destruction of the Temple.
3) I do not yearn for the rebuilding of the Temple and the return to Temple worship practices.
Quite insightfully, a classmate of mine suggested last night that mourning for something does not necessarily imply yearning for its return. Mourning, rather, involves learning to live with loss. On that reading, the past 2000ish years of Jewish life would seem to attest to a successful mourning process, i.e. learning to live with the loss of the Temple.
Perhaps it is appropriate on Tisha B'Av to mourn the loss of a naive conception of a perfect Israel. The early Zionists dreamed of a land without a people for a people without a land, an Israel living in harmony with her neighbors, an Israel where discrimination and oppression were buried with the ashes of the Holocaust. It is (well past) time to mourn for that dream -- not to yearn for its complete return -- and in mourning to prepare ourselves to live with and address reality.
p.s. Some pictures in the Old City, including a day at the Temple Mount
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2 comments:
I actually agree with David's first statement on a very personal level: until last year, Tisha B'Av was an observance that never captured my attention and was not part of my Jewish identity growing up.
But his "failure to see the destruction of the Temple as an unmitigated tragedy," I think, falsely injects a modern state of affairs (i.e. the beauty of Diaspora Jewry) into a historical (or narrative) justification for the story of the Temple's destruction.
Tisha B' Av is a time of uniquely Jewish introspection. David put it correctly: we don't desire a time when we can return to ritually slaughtering goats and rams (and to be perfectly honest, neither do the vast majority of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews - even the ones who seek a physical rebuilding of the Temple!).
And honestly, that's not what ancient Israel was all about. The split between the Pharisees and Seducees was already well under way even before the Temple was burned. That is to say: the roots of Rabbinic Judaism and a return to the Torah (in contra-distinction to the authority of the Temple) was already in the throngs of religious and social discourse (even resulting in violently pitched battles) at the time. To put it another way: Jews at the time were still pre-occupied with the "right questions" apart from ritual cleansing and burning incense.
What we mourn and reflect upon during Tisha B'Av is how, by our own sins (as a people and individually) we lost our direct connection to God (for the secular humanists out there, read: a connection to natural justice, human dignity or higher-order morality). Because we were licentious, self-indulging, cheating, lying, stealing, deceptive ... we were disowned by God and kicked out into the Diaspora, completely disconnected from the very essence of what was ideally embodied by the Holy Temple.
Have we made gains since the time of our expulsion? Absolutely! But it cannot be argued that our growth as a people and as a religion was due specifically to the act of kicking out. We would be faced with the same question "who are we and what do we do next?" had the Temple been burned and had we all been allowed to continue living our lives in the Land of Israel. Hell, I'm here right now (only about half a mile from the old temple) and I have plenty to contemplate.
I don't think we should mourn, at least theologically, the loss of early ideals (zionist or what not) for the physical land of Israel. If anything, implementing religious ideals to the geographical and political distribution of rights/property/livelihood will only do worse for the situation at hand!
We should instead turn our mourning, both personally (as I do) and communally to a sense of a lost people of Israel .
Of parents too embroiled in the hang-ups of modernity to sit the family down for a Shabbat dinner. Of a relinquishing of our duties to educate our children about our texts, in the original Hebrew and with full knowledge of our entire chain of scholars throughout the ages, so that they may study, sing and pray (or choose not to pray) with the benefit of first-hand knowledge. We should mourn a declining interest (and regrettably, even a fear) of calling oneself a "Jew" in a world that scorns "religion" as too tribalistic and incompatible with norms of civility, justice and modernity.
I am also conflicted about Tisha b'Av, because I too think the destruction of the temple, while a tragedy, was necessary. We also had to go into Egypt and become slaves, but we don't mourn that -- we recognize that if that hadn't happened none of the rest of our history would have. So, too, with the destruction of the temple, which led to a new kind of Judaism that may well itself be merely transitional. (Or so I understand the Rambam to believe.)
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