A Jewish trauma and a holiday
The story goes that Napoleon Bonaparte traveled through the Jewish section of a city in Russia on Tisha B’Av. He rode by a synagogue, where he heard people wailing and crying. Napoleon turned to the bereft community and asked what tragedy had befallen them. He was told that they were mourning the destruction of their Temple some 1700 years before. When he heard this, Napoleon was astonished. He declared that a people so attached to their history will one day return to their land.
“By common consensus,” writes Rabbi Martin S. Cohen in his recent book The Observant Life, “Tisha B’Av is the saddest day of the Jewish year. Aside from Yom Kippur, the only other full-day fast on the annual calendar is the fast of the Ninth of Av, popularly called by its Hebrew name, Tisha B’Av.” During the week of the 9th of Av, the Sefer Torah is not adorned. This day of mourning, which falls on the 29th of July in our civil calendar this year, reminds us of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. Both Temples were desecrated on the 9th of Av. The Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the fi rst temple 586 years before our time, and the Roman emperor Titus destroyed the second Temple on the same date in the year 70 CE. This day, on which we fast from sundown to sundown, is the conclusion and the sorrowful climax of the three weeks of mourning for Jerusalem that begins on the 17th day of Tammuz.
Night of tears
The Mishnah also tells us of three additional catastrophes that are connected with this date, including the Roman defeat of Betar in the year 133, after which the conquerors razed Jerusalem to the ground (Mishnah Ta’anit 4:6). The fi rst disaster, however, took place when the Israelites were still wandering in the wilderness. Numbers 14 describes how scouts that Moses had sent into the land of Canaan returned with a discouraging report. The people wept all night – the night of the 9th of Av – and declared they would rather return to Egypt than to attempt to conquer and settle in the land of Israel. God decided that the entire generation would wander for 40 years in the wilderness until the last of then had died, and only then would their children enter the Promised Land under the leadership of Joshua.
In his Historia de’ riti hebraici (“The history of the rites, customs, and way of life, of contemporary Jewry throughout the world”) the Venetian Rabbi Leon Modena (1571-1648) describes the customs of his Jewish contemporaries on Tisha B’Av as follows: On the 9th day of the month of Av, which falls in August, they observe an especially solemn fast, because on this day the temple was destroyed twice and stood in fl ames and Jerusalem was conquered. Observance begins on the day before, one hour before sundown or a bit later. They do not eat or drink anything until the evening of the following day when the stars come out. They walk unshod, or at least without leather shoes. They are not allowed to wash themselves. In the evening, they visit the Synagogue, where they sit on the floor and read with great sorrow the lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah. After morning prayers they plead with God. On this day, it is forbidden to study the Torah or other related writings for one’s edification other than the books of Job and Jeremiah and other melancholy material. After the evening meal, they do as described above. The Sabbath that follows this fast is called Nechama, which means “consolation”, for the Haftarah reading from the book of Isaiah, chapter 40, “Comfort, oh comfort my people, says your God” offers them consolation and new hope for the rebuilding of the Temple and the city of Jerusalem. The seven weeks of consolation that follow the day of mourning culminate in the celebration of the New Year – Rosh Hashanah.
Accursed day
We also remember other catastrophes on this day. King Edward I ordered the expulsion of all Jews from England in 1290. It was on Tisha B’Av. Sephardic Jews remember the 9th day of Av as the date in 1492 when they were forced to choose between conversion to Christianity or expulsion from Spain. In Ashkenazi communities, the liturgy includes medieval songs of lamentation that describe hardship and murder during the crusades in cities like Speyer, Worms, and Mainz. Others tell of the suffering of the Jews of Lviv and Cracov during the crusade against the Turks in 1463. In 1670, the last Jews were expelled from Vienna. It was on Tisha b’Av.
The Talmud states: “Whoever eats or drinks on the ninth day of Av makes himself as guilty as one who eats on Yom Kippur.” Even though many of us in our secularized world have dispensed with the old customs, we sense that it is akin to breaking a taboo if we simply go about business as usual on such days of remembrance. The American-Jewish writer Lev Raphael (born 1954) knew very well that it was a provocation to name one of his stories “Dancing on Tisha B’Av.”
70 years ago, in 1942, the mass deportation of Jews of from Warsaw ghetto was announced, and deportations began on Leil Tisha B’Av and continued for 53 days, during which 300,000 Jews were taken to the death camps, most of them to Treblinka. Hillel Seidman wrote in his diary of the Warsaw Ghetto an entry entitled “The Night of Tears”:
We Jews of Warsaw, sons of those exiles, sit on the ground to mourn our own personal churban, the destruction of a major kehillah, the largest and most vigorous in Europe, which resulted from that earlier churban. We weep at our fate, a nation without a land, within the grasp of our fi ercest enemy and condemned to death. We grieve both for the loss of the Beis Hamikdash and the extinction of our lives. True, our lives were full of suffering, yet we always harbored hopes that will now never be realized. Now, however, our enemies scheme to wipe us all off the face of the earth.” (Warsaw Ghetto Diaries)
God’s strong hand
The trauma of this loss still affects us today. Rabbi Martin S. Cohen states: “The essence of the modern State of Israel presents a different challenge to the traditional observance of Tisha B’Av.” The chairman of the editorial board of Conservative Judaism mentions that “some have suggested ending our fast after reciting the Afternoon Service as an acknowledgement of the miracle of the modern State of Israel”. We know, however, how endangered the existence of Israel is. Today, we once again hear open talk of Israel’s destruction. Our nerves are laid bare, and we do not merely pin our hopes on silent diplomacy and the strong hand of God.
Rather, we expect understanding and solidarity from society and from our political leadership. This includes the solidarity of the churches. For centuries, the church propagated a historical- theological theory that justified the discrimination of the Jews based on the destruction of the Temple. Beginning in the 16th century, the Protestant Churches observed the 10th Sunday after Trinity as a day of remembrance for the destruction of Jerusalem. In the 19th century, collections were taken up on this day for missionary work to convert Jews. In Germany after the Shoah, Israel Sunday was declared as a day of critical self-reflection and contemplation of the common roots of Jews and Christians.