Tisha b’Av – A Different Take
I see Tisha B’Av as an annual warning concerning what we have done to ourselves in our history.
In my study I have Rembrandt’s Jeremiah, the Biblical figure I most identify with. He stood up to a king and his court when they were planning to revolt against their Babylonian overlords because Egypt promised to aid them. Jeremiah was repeatedly rejected and thrown into prison. The revolt took place and Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed and the people exiled.
For Tisha B’Av this year I recommend reading Jeremiah chapters 28 and 38. The warning is clear.
In the year 66 there was a revolt against Rome and we all know how that ended. During the siege of Jerusalem the Zealot terrorist extremists fought other Jews and burned the city’s food supplies. In the end, a few years after the Hurban they were defeated at Masada (I do not believe Josephus’ account of mass suicide) and they represent a dead end in our history.
It was Yohanan ben Zakkai who saved us by going to the Romans to create Yavneh. Of the Merssianist Zealots he said, “If you are planting a tree and someone comes and says, ‘the Messiah is here, let’s go greet him,’ first finish planting the tree and then go greet the Messiah.
Half a century later Bar Kochba, another false Messiah, arose against the Romans. There is not one positive word about him in the rabbinic literature. When Akivah declared him as Messiah, his colleague, Yohanan ben Torta said to him, “Akiva, grass will grow from your cheeks and still the Son of David will not have appeared.”
Both Hurbans[1] were the result of nationalist hubris and the second from messianism.
When Israel prevailed in the Six-day War in 1967, it was regarded as miraculous. In terms of such a new and small nation against several larger foes, it was a welcome and amazing turn of events. However, certain religious Zionists at the time declared it the footsteps of the Messiah, a sign of the coming of the End.
One of the wisest voices against such thinking was Yehoshafat Harkabi in a book called The Bar Kochba Syndrome: Risk and Realism in International Relations. In this book Harkabi, who had served as Chief of Military Intelligence for Israel, was concerned about what would happen to Israel is the territories taken in the Six-Day War were kept by Israel. He referred to a Talmudic maxim: One who seizes too much has seized nothing (tafasta m’rubeh lo tafasta). Others, including this writer, foresaw the danger to the Jewish state resulting over governing a population that rejected that governance.
Now we see Israel in a war that endangers Israel, not from its foes, but from its own government giving in to the messianic politics of some of the parties in the government coalition. This war, which began as a response to a truly heinous attack on Israel, has expanded into a wider conflict while the government refuses to do anything in a search for ending the conflict through peace.
As the well-known George Santayana quote, “Those who cannot remember thre past are condemned to repeat it.” I see Tisha b’Av as an annual warning. It is one thing to mourn the tragedies in our history and quite another not to learn from them.
[1] Hurban is the Hebrew term referring to the destructions of Jerusalem and the Temples in 586 BCE and 70 CE
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