This August 12th will be celebrated as Tisha B’av—the ninth day of the Jewish month of Av—the second most important fast day in the Jewish year, and one which commemorates the destruction of the Temple by Titus in the year 70 C.E. Historically, that is the origin of this fast day. But since that time, as MARK RAVEN here shows, it has come to encompass more and more of all that is tragic and hopeful in Jewish history.
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How many of us, I wonder, are going to fast this year on the ninth day of Av—August II, but this being a Sabbath the fast day is the 12th—or even give much thought to this solemn anniversary, the day of the destruction of the Temple? Yet the grief that for centuries engulfed the people of Israel on this day was not related exclusively to a far-off disaster, nor even to the recurrent tragedy of Jewish suffering. Historically, Tisha B’av stood for a national anniversary; but to the individual it was an annual reminder, expressed with all the intimate force of myth and mystery, that every person’s life had a core of sorrow which must be transmuted, in some way or other, into courage and hope.
We Jews are perhaps beginning to lose the passion that once plucked chords of deep emotion out of our history as a people. It has not all vanished; a word, or a song, in the right mood, can bring tears—or thoughts too deep for tears. But the feeling may soon be gone, which once was so strong, that the drama of the Jew has some application not merely to ourselves but to all existence: that as a people we are a sounding board for history.
This was once the unconscious power that gave Jewish life, for all its tragedy, a never-failing sense of poetry and passion. As a people, the Jews were able to interpret the miseries of the world around them in terms of an absolute order, not of happiness, but of meaning. For more than two thousand years, events, persons, periods changed with endless variety, but the pattern was unchangeable; the exodus from Egypt was the flight from Spain; the martyrs of Hadrian were the victims of Kishineff. There was little satisfaction in the external story, nor even much in the memory of resistance and personal heroism; yet in the abiding consciousness that this was a monumental backdrop to a deeper history, the Jews could feel that their struggle had dignity—and poetry. It had to be seen as a whole to have meaning. Living and dying, happiness and sadness, were all equally part of the design.
It was the Jew’s burden—and still is—to turn over in his soul an insoluble problem of history: how could one people above all others become heir to such sorrow? Many never got beyond the Jewish aspect of this problem: what infliction or privilege lay in God’s selection of the Jews for this role? But there were many who went deeper and, like Job, could see in their own suffering a mirror of all men’s suffering, the helplessness of all men in the hands of an inscrutable Providence, the need of all men to find a way of explaining to themselves what they know instinctively to be true—that life is still worth living.
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At most times, the Jews carried on this philosophizing unconsciously. In their endless praying, morning, noon, and night, before and after every meal, and on the myriad special occasions of public and private life, they were mouthing words of enormous poetic and tragic significance; and though there were always some whose minds could grasp or whose emotions could feel the mystic quality of these prayers and who would dwell on the words with a lingering mystified sadness or a holy joy, it was for the majority a mere ritual. Not on Tisha B’av, however. This was one day in the year when the meaning of Jewish life and history imposed itself on every mind as firmly as when death faces one at a parent’s grave.
On Tisha B’av—the ninth day of the fifth month—the Jews fasted a day and a night in memory of the destruction of the Temple. Though not in any way the most sacred of the Jewish Holy Days, this was one whose power, in an observant Jewish community, seemed in some ways to transcend them all. Certainly on the Day of Atonement the Jew felt more deeply his individual relation to God; but on no day more than Tisha B’av could the riddle of Jewish existence, in relation to God and man, receive such heart-searching. No other day symbolized more intensively the poetic consciousness of Jewish history, and the conviction that there was somewhere an answer to the riddle.
As early as in the Mishnaic period—the first centuries of the Christian era—the rabbis had attached mystical as well as historical meaning to the Fast of Tisha B’av by teaching that not one, but the five major calamities of Jewish history, had happened on this day. It was not only the day of the year on which, by a curious coincidence, both Temples had been destroyed, the First by Nebuchadnezzar (586 B.C.E.) and the Second, six hundred and fifty-six years later, by the Romans (70 C.E.). It was also the day on which, hundreds of years earlier, the Israelites under Moses had been doomed to wander in the wilderness for forty years. It was the day on which, fifty-five years after the destruction of the Temple by Titus, Bar Kochba’s revolt was finally ended with the destruction of his last stronghold, Bethar; and it was the day on which, one year later, the Romans began to plow up the Holy City and the Temple area in order to turn Jerusalem into a Roman colony.
There is no need to follow learned speculations as to which event—if any—really happened on this precise day, and how early the fast began to be observed. The significant thing is the way in which, to the rabbinic mind, Jewish history, like the Bible itself, was timeless. Since it was all an expression of God’s will in relation to His chosen people, an event in one year could be mirrored perfectly by a description years earlier, just as surely as it would be echoed in years to come by events of the same dread significance. In giving way to their sorrow, then, after the destruction of the Second Temple and the fall of Bethar, the rabbis took as their text always the classical dirge written when the First Temple was destroyed. Looking back to the Book of Lamentations, where the prophet Jeremiah tears his heart out in anguish at the rape of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, the rabbis found implicit every detail, remembered or recounted, of their own tragedies. Sitting in the synagogue rehearsing their sorrow, they would take a single verse of the Book of Lamentations and talk on it for hours, recalling various legends about the suffering of the Jews in the Roman period six hundred years later, and interweaving it timelessly with memories of happier times and of earlier imagined glories.
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On verse 16 of the first chapter of Lamentations, the stories were unending: For these things I weep; mine eye, mine eye runneth down water. One rabbi told of three ships being filled by Vespasian with Jewish captives for Roman houses of prostitution, and how on their voyage first the men and then the women threw themselves into the sea. Another told of Jews in hiding being forced by starvation to eat the bodies of the slain, and how one man, having shared a body with others, suddenly found with horror that it was that of his own son, fulfilling the verse from Ezekiel: “Therefore the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee, and the sons shall eat their fathers.” Always a Biblical verse clinched the anecdote. Here is another of the rabbis’ stories:
For these things I weep: The wife of Trajan—may his bones be crushed—bore a child on the eve of the Ninth of Av, when all Israel was in mourning. On Chanukah the child died, and the Jews asked themselves: ‘Shall we kindle the Chanukah lights or not.’ They finally decided to kindle the lights, whatever happened. But somebody went and made a slanderous report to the wife of Trajan, saying: ‘When thou didst bear the child, these Jews went into mourning, and when the child died, they kindled lights.’ So she wrote a letter to her husband, saying: ‘Instead of conquering all those Barbarians, come and subject these Jews, who have revolted against thee.’ Trajan took ship, expecting to arrive in ten days, but a favorable wind brought him in five days. He went up to the synagogue and found that they were studying the verse from Deuteronomy: The Lord shall bring a nation against thee from afar, from the ends of the earth, as the eagle flieth. ‘I am that eagle,’ he said, ‘for I expected to arrive in ten days, but the wind brought me in five’—and his legionaries surrounded the Jews and slew them. Then he said to the women: ‘Give yourselves to my soldiers, for if not, I shall do to you what I have done to the men.’ They replied: ‘Deal with the weaker ones as thou hast dealt with the strong.’ The legionaries fell upon them and slew them. The blood of the men mingled with the blood of the women, and the stream of blood poured on and on as far as Cyprus—and the Holy Spirit bewailed them, saying: For these things I weep. . . .
It was no exaggeration that the myth should speak of Roman cruelty in these terms: this barbarism was just one more evidence to the rabbis of the eternal pattern, established in the Bible, by which evil and corruption were an inevitable part of this world, to be conquered fully only in a Messianic Age by the fully r`ealized Brotherhood of Man and the Return to Zion.
The brotherhood of man—of all normal men—was the archetype of the good of the world, standing out clearly against the monumental evil of Oppression, the Babylonian or the Roman. The return to Zion was a symbol of what was perhaps an even deeper feeling, a nostalgia for the Temple as a pure holy symbol, transcending all the primitive ceremonies and traditions recounted in the Bible, and standing out in the minds of the rabbis as a perfectly obvious and direct manifestation of God’s will, in contrast to the horrors of the heathen world around them.
The feeling that the pattern of Jewish life had been divinely set, with the longing for Zion as its central force, gave the Jews at least one comfort: they were at home with history. As history unfolded, they had been there before; and the notion of timelessness, of endless repetition of, and mystic unification with, the pattern of the Universe, lent itself readily to poetry. No one who has not read post-Biblical Hebrew writing in the original can imagine what tenderness and joy, what love, earthly and divine, what personal nostalgia and hope are evoked in all of these writings by the one word: Tsi’on, And as Zion, ever unattainable, was turned to more and more, in contrast to the horrors of the world around, so Tisha B’av became more and more the day which could symbolize, as no other, the mystery of Jewish existence.
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Just as the rabbis of the Midrash had looked back to the Book of Lamentations, so, hundreds of years later, the Hebrew writers of the Middle Ages saw in the Midrash the perfect reflection of their times. In the poetic laments—kinot—which they began to write, they turned for inspiration to the same legendary events of the Temple’s destruction described in the Midrash; but as time went on they could see little difference between these and their own tragedies, just as in later generations, the victims of Hitler lived once again through the slaughters of the Crusades. Yet like the Fast of Tisha B’av itself, the kinot were never all sorrow. The immediate occasion of a kinah may be one of the many mass “punishments” or expulsions meted out to Jewish communities, or the open massacres of the Crusades in the 12th or 13th centuries; but in all of them Zion—undefined, undefinable—is the hope, the comfort that lies ahead. In the Jewish calendar, the “Sabbath of Comfort” always follows Tisha B’av—the obverse of the evil in which they live.
It is a joyful poem on Zion, therefore, and not a dirge of destruction, that holds pride of place in the prayer book for this fast. The dirges are there in number, and the Book of Lamentations itself, recited traditionally in a beautifully sad chant, fits into the surrounding aura of sackcloth and ashes. Yet at the still center of the day is a happy paean of love, the long Zion poem of the 11th-century poet Judah Halevi.
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“Zion! Wilt thou not ask if Peace be with thy captives. . . .” The poem, when it is recited, falls into the anguish of the day “like the dew of Hermon falling on Zion’s hills.” The sorrow is transmuted into a mystic happiness because Halevi, more than any other poet, has recaptured the pure love for Zion that flowed through the Psalms and through all Jewish history. To the Psalmist, it was praise of the Temple and God’s worship. In Halevi’s poem, he leaps across the centuries to pick up this abiding trust, weaving the Psalms and other Biblical verses into his own with complete spontaneity. As with all true evocations of Jewish history, it is an untranslatable mixture of the familiar and the unattainable (in the following translation, italicized phrases are quotations from the Bible). Here were words and verses that all knew and recited as prayers with complete automatism; yet when Halevi sang, they fell into place as poetry, so that every man, bowed down by sorrow, could be transformed by joy:
“O who will make me wings, that I may
fly afar
And lay my cleft heart among thy cliffs.I would fall, with my face upon thine
earth and be gentle
To thy stones, tender to thy dust.Zion! Perfection of beauty! With love and
grace thou wert bound
Of old; and still the souls of thy com-
panions are bound up with thee.It is they that rejoice at thy well-being,
that are in pain
Over thy desolation, and that weep over
thy ruin—They that, from the pit of the captive,
pant toward thee, worshipping,
Every one from his own place towards thy
gates.”
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As time went on, Tisha B’av became deeper and deeper in feeling, overlaid with generations of tragedy. To the rabbis of the 2nd century, five tragedies of Jewish history had happened on this day. To later generations, had they pursued this thought, many more could have been added. Certainly in modem times, the Kishineff massacre must have happened on Tisha B’av, the birth of Hitler, the Hebron martyrdom of 1929, the finishing of the stockade around Buchenwald.
Kishineff, where fifty Jews were butchered and hundreds of others wounded in April 1903 after a deliberate mass incitation by the ritual murder libel, was, and has remained, an epic word of sorrow in Jewish history. When it happened it sent such horror through the Jewish world that, like its grim prototypes, it released a monumental sadness that found its full form only in poetry. Bialik’s great poem on Kishineff—“In the City of Slaughter”—is another kinah; yet more significantly, it is a turning point in the story, a kinah that is also a protest against all the kinot, and certainly against the passive acceptance of God’s will that shone through all previous lamentations.
Bialik’s poem is written in a plodding, singsong meter, as though from the very beginning there were no hope left for any of us. But the mood changes. Filled with unutterable grief as he details incidents of the massacre, he is suddenly stirred to another kind of anger when the reader is asked to follow the survivors into their synagogues “on their fast day” and listen to their bitter dirge. “The room is filled with such howling and cries as to set your hair on end, and fill you with fear and trembling. . . . But is there a seed of vengeance in their heart? Not a trace. . . . They beat their chests and confess their sins, crying: ‘We have sinned, we have betrayed.’ . . . But their words belie their heart. Can a broken vessel sin? Can a shattered pot transgress? Why do they pray to Me? Tell them to thunder against Me. Let them raise their fists against Me and claim recompense for their shame, the shame of all their generations from time immemorial.”
The poet was protesting against the deepest sense of Jewish history—the conviction that all this suffering was God’s will; yet in the form of his protest he still echoes most of the implicit assumptions of Tisha B’av. He still feels that, in contrast to his miserable contemporaries, “the Jews of old” were moral giants, heroes, if not of mighty deeds at least of spiritual grandeur. Like everyone else, he cannot resist reliving, in the thought of the heroes of his youth, the joy and power of youth itself. Jewish history—at least in the past—is still the crucible of his emotion.
Bialik was only half-hearted in putting forward the answer to the Jewish riddle that so many Zionists have thought sufficient—that if the Jewish people ceased to be “different,” their troubles would end. To European Zionists especially, the idea of Jewish farmers, Jewish road workers, Jewish garbage men in their own country, Palestine, seemed to promise the welcome end of being the “chosen people,” the beginning of an era when the horrors of history could be forgotten. Yet, once arrived in Palestine, it seemed less likely that the Jews would succeed, or would want to succeed, in shaking off the past. It was Jewish manual workers, digging the foundations for a settlement, who unearthed the glorious mosaics of the synagogue at Beth Alpha. And it was in the course of a procession to the Wailing Wall—on Tisha B’av, 1929—that the riots of that year began, culminating in the massacre of the pious old Jews of Hebron.
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When Tisha B’av is celebrated by the observant this year, on August 12, why will they be fasting? Will it be to comply with a rabbinic ordinance—and one not very high up in the scale of really old rabbinic priorities—or because they find it good and proper to turn with ascetic discipline, in this way, to reflections on the sadness of the past and the riddle of the future?
Rationally, it is easy to be superior to these primitive customs. Does one have to go without food for a day and a night in order to indulge in religious speculation? And to center one’s hungry thoughts around the destruction of an almost prehistoric “altar” where animals were brought for slaughter and their blood poured out ceremoniously—really this is too much!
Reform Judaism, in its early phase, was very logical about these things. Since the Jewish people acquired their special character only after the destruction of the Temple, how can one sincerely pray for its restoration? David Einhorn, the scholarly Reform leader who died in New York in 1879, wrote: “Reformed Judaism beholds in the cessation of the sacrificial service, the termination of a special nationality, and the scattering of the Jews among all nations, the fundamental conditions for the fulfilment of their mission among mankind. Only after the destruction of Jerusalem was it possible for Israel to become ‘a kingdom of priests and a holy nation,’ a conception which even in the Talmud is intimated in the saying: ‘On the day of the destruction of the Temple, the Messiah was born.’ ”
Perhaps so. But the coming of a Messiah had no meaning to the Jews unless, while praying for his coming, they wept for a Jerusalem that was set on fire, year after year, before their own eyes. On the day that the Temple was first destroyed, the Jews took unto themselves an enormous longing—not a mission to proselytize mankind, but a hope, symbolized by the word Zion, that its rebuilding was as certain as the ultimate dawn of an era of peace and brotherly love. Their own suffering had shown the ugliness of the world. The return to Zion—not merely the physical return but the dawn of a Messianic age—was a concept so beautiful that the mere thought of it lent dignity and poetry to the grim life around them.
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Are we as sure now as were the early reformers that a preoccupation with the suffering and longing of the past has little significance £or a people as advanced and emancipated as we have become? Is the future so assured, so firmly based on the progress of science and the improvement of man’s character, that we can look forward securely to a world of good intentions and universal happiness?
If we thought so fifty years ago, we are less likely to think so today. Even the most convinced Zionist does not believe that, with Israel restored as a state, it is time to cast off sackcloth forever, to be done with grief. Suffering and evil, and the problems they raise, are as much in our minds now as in the days of the old rabbis. Only if we can turn our backs confidently on the tortures of the concentration camps, on the murder of freedom, and on the ever-present possibility of an apocalyptic holocaust, can we turn our backs on Tisha B’av.
But just as surely we cannot turn our backs either on the Messianic hope, enshrined in the Sabbath of Comfort. To ignore evil is to lose one’s worth as a human being: to lose hope in human destiny is to struggle in a vacuum.
The rabbis were not devoid of insight, then, when they sat in the synagogues exchanging Biblical verses, finding in this exercise not an archaic prophecy of ancient disasters, but a vivid contemporary echo of all their hopes as human beings.
Here, to end appropriately for Tisha B’av, is a snatch of conversation among the rabbis on verse 2 of the first chapter of Lamentations:
She weepeth sore in the night: [literally: “Weeping, she weeps in the night”]: Why is the word repeated? Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai said: “God said to Israel: ‘You have often wept for no cause, but one day you will weep for good cause.’ ” When did Israel weep for no cause? And Moses heard the people weeping, family by family. . . . And all the Congregation lifted up their voice and the people wept (Numbers xi:10, xiv:1). And when did they weep sincerely? Rabbi Aibo said: “Once in Ramah and once in Babylon. In Ramah, as it is written: A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping (Jeremiah xxxi:15), and in Babylon, as it is written: By the waters of Babylon there we sat down, yea we wept when we remembered Zion (Psalms cxxxvii: 1).” Rabbi Aibo added: “God said to Israel: ‘Because of this weeping, I shall end your exile, for is it not written in Isaiah: Refrain thy voice from weeping and thine eyes from tears. . . . For there is hope for thy future, said the Lord.’ ”
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