July 2006 Archives

Why should we care that in 586 BCE (Before the Common Era) the Babylonians destroyed the First Temple and in 70 CE the Romans destroyed the Second Temple?

The Temple was the central address for Jewish worship and assembly for hundreds of years. Each conqueror thought he could destroy the Jewish people, our identity, and our commitment to our God through such destruction. Needless to say, they were wrong.

We Jews are still here, even if the Temple is not. So why should we continue to remember its destruction with a series of self-afflicting traditions that include 25 hours of fasting (in the heat of the summer), refraining from washing (in the heat of the summer), and reading the Biblical Book of Lamentations by candlelight while sitting (uncomfortably) on the floor?

Judaism is generally a joyous religion. We celebrate weekly on Shabbat with good food, a nice nap, and fellowship, in addition to the requisite prayer services. We have a celebratory holiday almost every month. Such a focus on joy allowed our ancestors to transcend the often desperate conditions in which they lived, helping them not only to survive but also to transmit to their children, and to us, an attitude of self-respect and respect for others. I believe that is why most Jews are not driven by hate and anger: because the joy of the Sabbath taught us that we need not be defined by what others say about us or do to us.

Judaism sets aside one day each week, the Sabbath, as a taste of the world to come, of how the world can be filled with harmony, peace and plenty. Nevertheless, Judaism is not a religion to deny reality. That is why Judaism also sets aside one day each year, Tisha b' Av, to mourn all that remains unjust, violent and wrong about the world.

Tisha b'Av is more than a commemoration of the destruction of two buildings. Long ago, the rebuilding of a Jerusalem Temple at peace became a paradigmatic symbol of a time when all people can live in peace and security, each sit under his or her vine and fig tree and not be afraid. Although grounded in our particularly Jewish historical experience, Tisha b'Av is the acknowledgement that much of the reality of human experience is tragically and needlessly violent. This is why Art Waskow of the Shalom Center years ago linked the commemoration of Tisha b'Av with the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Life can and should be filled with joy. However, life is not about partying. Life does contain its horrors, its mourning, and its fears, as these last three weeks have reminded us. For our ancestors, it was the fears of pogroms and blood libels. For us it may be ecological disaster, poverty, avian flu pandemic, the debacle in Iraq, Iran's nuclear threat, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah rockets striking Haifa and Safed. There certainly is more than enough to be depressed about regarding the state of the world and our future. Tisha b'Av continues to serve as a reminder of all that continues to be wrong with the world. It gives us a chance to have a good cry over the helplessness we feel in the face of the pain we see around us and around the globe. But we don't stay there in that helpless morass of depression. On the tenth of Av we return to doing what we can to remake the world in the image of Shabbat, moving the world from where it is to where it can be.

Posted by Rabbi Susan Grossman

Tisha b'Av (the 9th of the month of Av), the day Jews mourn the loss of the Temple and their subsequent exile, is one of those holidays that never made too much sense growing up. Let me explain by recounting a story told to me by my teacher Rabbi David Hartman. Following the Six Day War, Hartman, who was a rabbi in Montreal, was commemorating Tisha b’Av with his congregation. He had just been in Israel celebrating its glorious victory. As he looked out into his congregation he became increasingly disturbed. Shaking his head and saying to himself, "What are they mourning for? We have returned! We have returned to our homeland." Hartman got up from his seat, walked over to the podium, and asked for his congregation's attention. They were sitting on the floor saying over lamentations, but they looked up from their prayer books and gave their ears to their spiritual leader. Looking at them in shock and disbelief Hartman exclaimed, "I want you all to know that the Jewish people are singing and dancing in the streets of Jerusalem while you are sitting here and crying." He then went back to his seat and the bewildered congregation went back to mourning.

In recent years, Hartman's enthusiasm has become tempered by the reality that we have not been fully redeemed and maybe we are still in a state of mourning. The tumultuous events of the past few weeks in Gaza and Lebanon remind us just how important that reality check is. It's a shame, but this year we all have so much to be mourning about.

These past few weeks have been so full of pain and strife. Each new headline brings fresh waves of sorrow at the human and political toll that the current conflict in Lebanon is taking. With Israeli ground troops now entering southern Lebanon to create a buffer zone, the casualties only promise to increase. Our hearts break over and over again as each new tragedy comes to light – a Lebanese family killed by a missile as they flee the war-ravaged South, ever-greater numbers of Israeli soldiers killed going house to house in an attempt to uncover Hezbollah strongholds.

This is the season of Tisha b’Av, the day of fasting and mourning that marks the destruction of the two Temples that stood in Jerusalem. At root level, Tisha b’Av is an attempt to make meaning in the face of destruction. The Temple was the heart of Judaism’s religious, spiritual, judicial, and political life. It was a tangible reminder of God’s presence in the people’s midst. The destruction of the Temple led to intense soul-searching. What could have caused such a devastating blow? The destruction of God’s house.

The answers led back to ourselves. “Because of our sins we were banished from our land,” reads the traditional liturgy, and the Talmud blames the destruction of the Second Temple on baseless hatred – on acts of thoughtlessness between neighbors. The smoldering ruins of the Temple stood as a reproach – not to our enemies, but to ourselves. The rabbis tell us it was our faithlessness that caused God to withdraw. In the wake of the destruction of all we held most precious, we were called to examine, to question, and to build anew.

Would that the destruction of Tyre in Southern Lebanon and the missile craters throughout Northern Israel could call forth this same degree of reflection and self-scrutiny. What if instead of blaming others, we could look at this situation with the clarity and courage of the ancient rabbis and attempt to understand our own role in the destruction? What if Israel could understand the genuine anger that Arab countries feel at the plight of the Palestinians? What if Lebanon could understand its complicity in hosting a violent terrorist organization? What if people on both sides of the border could look at the destruction around them, decide that they didn’t want to live that way anymore, and ask what they could do differently?

These aren’t questions that can be reasonably put in the heat of battle when passions are enflamed. But perhaps when the flames die down, when we’re faced with embers, smoldering ruins, and the grim prospect of rebuilding, we can pause first to ask questions. The prophet Isaiah famously exhorts, “Because you fast in strife in contention and you strike with wicked fist, your fasting today is not such as to make your voice heard on high…. No, this is the fast I desire: To unlock the fetters of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free.” (58:4-6) As we afflict our souls this Tisha b’Av, may the fresh destruction strengthen our prayers that people on both sides of the border can take Isaiah’s message of the true fast to heart.

I am not sure if there is much more to say about this issue, Prof. LeVine. Your problem seems to be more with the people at Pew.

To sum up: Your position expresses little difference between evangelicals, Muslims, and Israelis regarding these groups' relationship to politics and religion. Doing the math, you might say, evangelicals=Israelis=Muslims. I am sorry, but something here just doesn’t add up.

I appreciate the detailed statistics from the rabbi. However, they are not relevant to the question at hand.

The question is not whether Islam or religion more broadly is not relevant to people's lives or to the political process. Large numbers of Americans, and it would seem most evangelicals or at least those evangelicals who vote Republican, define themselves first as Christian, and then as American. This does not mean that people want to live in a religious state--that is, a state dominated by a religious elite that removes sovereignty from the people and subjugates the universal human and political rights as defined in the U.N. charter and declaration on human rights to a particular and necessarily narrow reading of Islamic law.

More specifically to your comments, I specifically do not disregard Hamas's Charter, since I quote from it in my piece to demonstrate the anti-Jewish sentiments at the core of the group's, and Hezbollah's, ideologies and politics.

You also neglect to mention from the Pew Report you cite that the majorities of those who see Islam as playing a major role in their country's politics are also worried about the implications of this process for extremism. That is, they don't feel it's necessarily a good thing to have a strongly religiously determined political ideology governing their countries political systems. This is backed up by the Human Values Survey I cited in my original comments, which shows that Muslims around the world support the fundamental values of democracy and other "liberal" notions to roughly the same degree (in some cases more, in some less) as their counterparts in the United States and Europe.

So what do these statistics tell us? This is my problem with the way they are being used. It comes back to the church-state dilemma in the United States.

The framers of the Constitution never expected that religious views and the ethics/morality derived from them would be excluded from reasoned public debate or politics. In that sense, religion has a powerful role to play in political life. But most did not want religion to determine politics, to create a Christian state of the sort that too many Americans seem to be striving for today.

This is the same issue in the Muslim world. To say that most Muslims think Islam plays an important role in politics is not the same thing as saying that "most Muslims don't distinguish between the spheres of religion and politics," which would seem clearly to argue that they think that politics has to governed, legally, by Islam. As the part of the report that you cite argues, people distinguish between a strong role for Islam and the extremist advocacy for an Islamic state.

But anyway, this is not the main point. The main argument would seem to be that if we read the statements of Hezbollah and Hamas we can see an implacable hatred of Israel that constitutes a mortal threat to the Jewish state and therefore justifies Israel's massively violent response.

Isn't this what we're really arguing about? Whether a Jewish state should be bombing a neighboring country into the Stone Age because of the actions of a militant movement that everyone knows the government cannot possibly control even as Hezbollah is part of the political system? Whether in response to two enemy resistance movements who've kidnapped its soldiers--a practice, it cannot be stressed enough, Israel routinely engages in itself--Israel has the right to kill hundreds if not thousands of civilians, make hundreds of thousands of people homeless, destroy billions of dollars of infrastructure? This is collective punishment pure and simple and is not just a war crime as defined by the Geneva Conventions (Articles 33 and 147), to which I believe, Israel is a signatory. It is a complete betrayal of the prophetic inheritance of Judaism.

Forget that Hamas leaders have long said that they'd be willing to cut a deal for a two-state solution (as Israeli scholars Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela argue in their important book "The Palestinian Hamas") Forget that Hezbollah has neither the power nor the incentive to engage in any kind of long-term war to destroy Israel. Their texts say they want an Islamic state and they clearly are anti-Jewish so we can kills all the Palestinians and Lebanese we want to--young or old, civilian or fighter, Muslim or Christian, part of the problem or the solution (as the million Lebanese who marched against the Syria-Hezbollah order last year, many of whom are now homeless and could well be dead soon as the IDF is now attacking non-Hezbollah areas regularly)--in order to stop this supposed threat? If most Jews think this is okay, which would seem to be the case, then what does this say about Judaism today?

Tomorrow Israel apparently will again bomb southern Lebanon and continue to flatten entire villages out of existence. Is this okay with you? Is this the way Jews behave? Isn't Judaism, as Steven Spielberg has one of his characters--who tellingly dies anyway as part of the tit-for-tat violence of which he played a part)--say in "Munich," supposed to be about "righteousness"?

Does anyone understand how Israel's actions are mirroring the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages in 1948? How this is going to strengthen the hatred that will feed the very extremism about which we are all afraid?

During the 1999 Israeli election campaign, Ehud Barak admitted that if he were a Palestinian he would have probably joined a terrorist organization because of everything Israel had done to Palestinians (as reported in the Jerusalem Post, March 12, 1998). At least he was honest.

How many Palestinians and Lebanese do you think will join Hamas and Hezbollah because of the latest violence? To not address these questions, and to not realize how Israel is dooming itself in the long term by these actions, and the occupation that feeds them, is the really "dishonest and disturbing" thing, as the rabbi accused my article of being.

The arrogance of Israel's use of its military power and the dehumanization of Arab life that has become the common currency of Israeli military and political discourse are a far more dangerous threat to Judaism and the Jewish state than Hamas or Hezbollah could ever dream of being. In that sense, with each bomb and bullet Israel showers on Gaza and Beirut, its two enemies will grow stronger.

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