Journeys Taken Willingly and Somewhat Less So
In our sedra, we describe the meanderings of the Israelites over the course of forty years. At various times in their journey, they experienced sin, grumbling, relief and belief. So, too, are the emotional journeys we encounter in our Jewish calendar year. One such journey is a personal one that we take from Rosh Hashanah to Hoshana Rabba–a 21-day period of personal responsibility. Another is the more collective journey we take in the summer, in the 21-day period beginning with the 17th of Tammuz and ending the 9th of Av. Both journeys are intense, consisting of prayer, penitential poems and fasting. But I feel that the journey taken in the summer is the harder one for most of us. It is harder because many of the customs–no music, no haircuts, no dancing, no weddings, no meat, no swimming (with many of these only for the ten days of Av)– border on the masochistic, in the dog days of summer. Harder too, because the premises behind this period are more difficult to accept.
Three of those premises make it challenging for me to journey through the difficult soul work of those three summer weeks. One is the premise that we must atone for the past sins of ancestors, or relive the sadness of their sin. Another is that the calamities of conquest and the destruction of our Temples were brought on by our own deeds. A final premise is an even more difficult one: that in this day and age, we still must mourn for the destruction of Zion.
On the 17th of Tammuz, after 40 days, Moses came down with the tablets, saw the Israelites worshiping the golden calf, and smashed the tablets. The smashing of our holy places began with our own actions of smashing faith and building idols. On some level, on this date, God is disposed to estrangement from His people. It’s a day that reminds us of the egel (golden calf). It is also a day that reminds us of when Judean kings put up idols in the Temple. On the ninth of Av, the spies came back and gave a negative report that had the Israelites in demoralized tears. “You are crying over nothing,” says God in the Midrash. “I will give you something to cry about.” From that day on, there were innumerable catastrophes on the day of Tisha B’Av–the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, the Edict of Expulsion of the Jews from York, England in 1290, and the destruction of the First and Second Temples. It’s a day of bad karma, and all due to sins of idolatry and the sins of needless hatred.
It may be that these things weakened our people, but I have no doubt that the destruction was due more to the conquering lust of Babylonia and Rome. I do not believe that God sent the Babylonians and Romans to us as giant and powerful disciplinarians for our sinfulness. I don’t think God is that much in control of ruthless evil. Nor do I believe that He sends destructive forces because He is mad at us. I think those ideas are immature. The workings of geopolitics are not solely a result of the God-Israel relationship. I also think those ideas are pernicious. God doesn’t act furiously against his people by using other people as hammers. God, says the Midrash, clasps his trembling hands when his people suffer, and He is with us and mourns our fate. God is not in full control of every thread of human history. Stuff happens–to us and to everyone else. Fate and misfortune befall us. And we, with God’s help, need to pick up the pieces.
Finally I don’t accept the fact that we are still in intense mourning for Jerusalem and for the Temple. Most of us would prefer not to return to a sacrificial cult. Many of us think that our prayers are out of sync with reality. Jerusalem doesn’t lie in ruins. Jackals don’t howl in the barrenness of the Temple’s destruction. The State of Israel is magnificent. Israel’s army and military might are the strongest in the region. As a Diaspora community, we are, by and large, successful and secure. Rabbis of our stream have said that the 17th of Tammuz may perhaps be less of a fast day because of all the vast improvements in the Jewish condition and the Jewish state. When I was in Jerusalem, I succeeded in my fast until 3pm. Then I drank some water. My head was pounding and it was 100F. But just as importantly, I was in the rebuilt Jerusalem. Something felt wrong with the idea of mourning her destruction.
Still, peace remains elusive. Neighborly relations with flanking countries are still a chimera. World bodies still condemn the Jewish State and blame her actions, with a deep double standard. The media is far from being understanding of the motives of Israel’s actions. And we are not close to being a united people. The issues of conversion in Israel, of who is a Jew and who is a rabbi, still divide us. Mutual understanding and recognition of orthodox and liberal Jews, of men and of women, are non-existent. We remain, in many ways, as dysfunctional as we were before the destruction of the Second Temple.
And so, like the Israelites in the final portion of the Book of Numbers, I still journey, albeit with grumbling. I do so because I still need to get from point “a” to point “b” in my yearly journey. I do it because we need to turn our thinking to the collective Jewish people, in addition to ourselves as individuals. I do it because although God doesn’t control everything, He, too, must have been demoralized by the happenings at the hands of the Babylonians and the Romans and He, too, needs some comforting. I do it because I trust in the whole gestalt of the journey in time, not just sections of it. May all of us consider going from station to station, loyally if not always eagerly. Only then can we reach the entrance of holy ground.