Episode No. 149: The True Nature of Tishah B'Av

In this special summer episode, the contemporary issue being explored is the one day in every Jewish year that way too many of us choose to ignore (assuming that we even know it exists): the grueling nearly 35-hour fast smack in the middle of summer known as Tishah B'Av, which this year begins on Monday at sundown. Those of us who are aware of it want nothing to do with it because it is the ultimate downer day on the Jewish calendar. A downer it surely is, but that's not what Tishah B'Av is really about. Tishah B'Av is truly a day of uplift. Take 15 minutes and listen to why I say that.

Transcript

Shammai’s August 9th Podcast: The True Nature of Tishah B’Av

It’s Friday, October 9, the 5th day of Av, 5784, and welcome to another special summer edition of Keep the Faith, the podcast that appears weekly from September through June and occasionally in July and August, in which contemporary issues are explored through the prism of Jewish law and tradition. This week, though, the “contemporary issue” is a totally Jewish one—and a very important one, at that.

Summer began 51 days ago and has just 44 more days to go.

This is the season we looked forward to going back to the end of last summer on September 23rd.

Many of us probably put a great deal of thought each year into how we want to spend our summers, but there’s one crucial element that most of us who are Jewish never include in making those plans. Either it’s because we don’t want to think about it or it never even enters our minds because we don’t remember that it exists:

I’m referring to Tishah B’Av, the gruesome, nearly 25-hour fast that begins this year at sundown on Monday and ends around 45 minutes after sundown on Tuesday.

I do get it. Tishah B’Av, after all, is the darkest day of every Jewish year and has been almost from the beginning of our history. It comes at the end of the period known collectively as the Three Weeks, 21 days of mourning rituals that we’re supposed to observe smack in the middle of summer—and who wants to be reminded of that, much less take part in it?

So the topic for this special summer edition is Tishah B’Av, the day we choose to ignore and why we shouldn’t ignore it.

What is it that makes us Jews? It’s not our religion, at least not anymore. Muslims have dietary laws, too. Both Muslims and Christians observe a Sabbath day. Both pray to the same God as we do. Both consider our sacred texts sacred for them, as well.

And the truth is, you don’t have to be “religious” to be Jewish, and l put “religious” in quotes, because Judaism is not a religion, after all. There are secular Jews, humanist Jews, atheist Jews, agnostic Jews, and cultural Jews.

Is it our culture that makes us Jews? What culture? In a very real sense, ours is the most multicultural culture of all. We may be Asian in origin—which we are, by the way—but today, we’re a people spread out across the four corners of the globe. There are African Jews, European Jews, South American Jews, North American Jews, and Oceanic Jews, meaning the Jews of Australia, and we’ve assimilated many of the cultural motifs of the countries we’ve called home. There are no permanent residents in Antarctica, of course, Jewish or otherwise, but there is a Torah scroll that permanently resides on that continent. It was brought there, I believe, in 2010.

It’s not enough, for example, for someone to say he or she loves Jewish music. Which Jewish music? The one that sounds like a Spanish love song or an Arabic folk tune? The one that sounds like a Russian saber dance or a Greek ballad? Or the one heavily influenced by American rock?

What makes us Jews is memory. Nearly everything we do is related to memory.

Memory is why we observe Shabbat each week—or we should observe Shabbat. It’s meant to remind the world that God is the Creator of all there is and to remind us that God freed us from the bondage of Egypt.

Memory is why we wear prayer shawls with macramé-like fringes and why we strap on black boxes called tefillin onto our hands and heads. They’re to remind us that after God freed us from the bondage of Egypt, God brought us to a mountain in the middle of a desert and tasked us with the responsibility of guiding the world into creating a more just, equitable, moral, and ethical world—a task that includes a great many responsibilities very few of which can be called “religious.”

Memory is what we’re all about. We’re the people of memory.

And yet, when the sun goes down this coming Monday evening and a new Jewish day begins, many (if not most) of us won’t even know that it is Tishah B’Av.

The Ninth of Av is no ordinary day of the year. It’s a very special day on the Jewish calendar, and not in a good way. Pick a day, any day, and you’re likely to find some event somewhere in history that had some effect on who and what we are. There’s no other day on the Jewish calendar that’s so packed with defining events as Tishah B’Av.

There’s no other day that’s so infused with memory—bad memory at that.

The history of Tishah B’Av begins with an event recorded in the Torah portion we read in synagogues on June 23rd this year, the portion we call Sh’lach L’cha, Send for Yourself. It took place approximately 3,500 years ago, in the second year following the Exodus, when the Israelites were encamped on Canaan’s border. They had just heard the report of 10 of the 12 scouts they had insisted Moses send to roam through Canaan. That report convinced them that God had lied to them; that God had brought them out of Egypt in order to have them die at the hands of merciless giants those 10 scouts said inhabited Canaan. And so, the Torah tells us, “The people cried that night.”

That led to the first tragedy of Tishah B’Av because that was the day the Torah says God decreed that the generation of the Exodus would spend 40 years in the wilderness until they all died; only their children would live to inherit the Land of Promise.

The Torah doesn’t tell us what night that was, but by following the chronology laid out in the Torah, the date is virtually obvious. Here’s a brief rundown:

According to the Torah, 13 months after the Exodus, on the 20th day of that month, which we know as Iyar, the Israelites left Mount Sinai. Around the beginning of the next month, which we call Sivan today, they encamped at a place called Kadesh Barnea, which is located about 31 miles south of Beersheba.

The scouts were sent on their mission on the 29th of Sivan; that mission lasted for 40 days. That puts the date of their return to the Israelite camp as the 8th day of Av. It was late in the day by the time they gave their report to the people, who then returned to their tents, where they spent that night, the 9th day of Av, wailing away and bemoaning their fate.

With the gift of hindsight, our Sages of Blessed Memory concluded that in addition to sentencing that generation to roam through the wilderness for another 39 years, God must have also decreed: “Because you, Israel, cried for no reason on this day, I, God, will see to it that you have reason to cry on this day forever after.”

We could easily dismiss this as just another fanciful talmudic-era fairy tale, but for this: Time and again, we’ve been given reasons to cry on that same day. The facts prove this inescapably.

The First Temple reportedly was set on fire on Tishah B’Av in the year 586 B.C.E., either by the Babylonians or their Edomite allies.

According to a host of religious and historical sources, Roman forces set fire to the Second Temple on Tishah B’Av in the year 70 C.E.

On Tishah B’Av in the year 135 C.E., the final Judean revolt against Rome reportedly came to a crushing end with the fall of Betar, the last Judean stronghold. The revolt’s leader, Simon Bar Coziba, known popularly as Bar Kochbah, lay dead, and a series of executions began that wiped out nearly an entire generation of religious leaders and scholars, including the famed and beloved Rabbi Akivah.

On July 18, 1290, King Edward I signed his infamous Edict of Expulsion, forcing the Jews out of Merry Old England. The Jews were not allowed back into England for another 365 years until Oliver Cromwell gave tacit approval for them to do so in the mid-17th Century. He gave tacit approval. He was blocked from formally revoking Edward’s Edict of Expulsion and, it technically remains a part of British law.

Another expulsion occurred on Aug. 2, 1492, when what was likely the greatest diaspora community the world had ever known until then came to an end with the forced departure from Spain of the last of its Jews. Aug. 2, 1492, was Tishah B’Av. Curiously, Christopher Columbus was supposed to set sail that day, but for some reason—wink wink—he chose to wait until the next day.

Aug. 1, 1914, was also Tishah B’Av—and its impact on Jewish history was the most devastatingly profound. On that day, Germany declared war on Russia, and World War I began in earnest. It set into motion events that led to the creation of the Soviet Union, which waged a 75-year campaign to destroy everything Jewish within its borders. The war ended in the creation of a peace so debilitating to Germany that its people became easy prey to the nationalistic and racist rantings of an itinerant house painter named Adolf Hitler. The way that war ended also allowed Britain and France to play their duplicitous games in the Middle East, sowing the seeds for more than a century’s worth of bloody conflict between Arabs and Jews—a conflict that is being fought in real time even as I record this.

This is just a taste of the horrors of Tishah B’Av, the day we so casually toss aside.

Now, some people say. “We don’t need Tishah B’Av anymore; it’s not relevant anymore; it belongs to the past.” Chanukah belongs to the past, but we celebrate it. Purim belongs to the past, but we celebrate it. Pesach, Passover, belongs to the distant past, but we celebrate it.

Why do we ignore Tishah B’Av?

Again, there are some who say, “Chanukah, Purim, Pesach—these are fun days, but Tishah B’Av is the ultimate downer. Here we are in the dog days of summer when everyone wants to go to the beach to cool off and have fun. Why ruin it by remembering so many tragedies?”

My response to that is that Tishah B’Av is not now and never has been about tragedy. Tishah B’Av is about triumph.

No generation of Jews should know this better than this generation. We’re here today, 79 years after the destruction of European Jewry, revived and alive.

Seventy-nine years after we should have been dead and buried, we’re living in an age that has been the most scholarly productive in Jewish history.

Seventy-nine years after Six Million Jews died because no state would have them, the reborn Jewish state stands ready to rescue entire communities of endangered Jews, such as those from Ethiopia, Syria, Yemen, and the former Soviet Union.

Seventy-nine years after the doors of the world shut in our Jewish faces, there are few doors left that we cannot open. Mexico just elected its first Jewish president. An observant Jew, the late Sen. Joseph Lieberman, actually won the popular vote for vice president in the year 2000. Presidents of the U.S., starting with Bill Clinton and including Donald Trump and Joe Biden, have Jewish children or grandchildren. Vice President Kamala Harris’ husband Doug Emhoff, this country’s so-called Second Gentleman, is Jewish, and her stepchildren are all Jewish. And if “Mamala Kamala” is elected president on November 5th, Emhoff moves up to become this country’s First Gentleman.

Of course, Tishah B’Av reminds us that we‘ve experienced more tragedies as a people than any other in history. Just last October 7th, we experienced the greatest tragedy since the Shoah, the Holocaust, followed by the war against Hamas, now in its 308th day, the renewed aerial attacks by Hizbullah coming from Lebanon and Syria, and now even from Iran. These alone should make Tishah B’Av a day to be observed because, in truth, it’s the only day on the calendar when we’re supposed to immerse ourselves fully in grief over the tragedies of the past; it’s the substitute for having to mourn every day of every year for the tragedy that befell us on that particular day.

The point, however, is not that tragedies keep happening to us but that we’re still here to be reminded of them. We’re still here. Even with enemies of Israel attacking from virtually all sides of its borders today, Israel is still here and is as strong as ever, and may it stay that way, albeit with a different set of national leaders.

No other day on the Jewish calendar better exemplifies the link between God and the People Israel. No other day better proves that God’s promise to us, God’s covenant with us, is indeed everlasting and irreversible.

That’s the real memory of Tishah B’Av.

And the greatest tragedy of Tishah B’Av is that we refuse to remember this day.

Please, don’t forget this day, not this year—especially given what is happening today in the Middle East and in the explosion of anti-Semitism around the world—and don’t forget Tishah B’Av in any year. Don’t toss into the dustbin of disuse this most potent vehicle for reaffirming that our tragedies, as dreadful as so many of them were, nevertheless were of the moment, but we the Jewish people are forever.

This is Rabbi Shammai Engelmayer. I do hope you come back for my next podcast, assuming another one drops again this month, and certainly weekly beginning next month, and I’d like to hear what you have to say about this or my other podcasts. Go to www.shammai.org—w-w-w-dot-s-h-a-m-m-a-i-dot-o-r-g—and email me, please.

If you don’t get the Jewish Standard but want to read my columns, go to the columns page of my website. The latest column focuses on the sin that our Sages say brought about the destruction of the Second Temple—a sin that threatens to bring down our representative democracy here in the United States, the sin of baseless hatred, sinat chinam.

Especially with COVID-19 cases on the rise again throughout the U.S., keep taking every precaution, no matter who tells you otherwise. Also, get fully vaccinated if you haven’t done so yet, including the latest booster shots.

Shabbat Shalom and have a great weekend.

Stay healthy. Stay safe. And may we all have easy fasts beginning this coming Monday evening.

Ahm Yisrael Chai!