Judaism is mainly a religion of rejoicing and, but occasionally there are sad days too. Monday night sees the start of the saddest day of the Jewish calendar, known in Hebrew as Tisha B’Av (the 9th of the Hebrew month of Av).
This is a period of 25 hours of fasting and mourning starting at night. Not easy, especially as many people have to work and it is also often the hottest time of the year.
If possible we sit on low stools until the middle of the day, reading the books of Lamentations, Jeremiah, Job and other sorrowful parts of the Bible.
Why?
Simply because on Tisha B’Av the following calamities took place:
1. In 1312 BCE the 10 spies gave Moses a slanderous report about the Land of Israel to Moses (Numbers 13-15). I preached a sermon on the subject at a synagogue in Jerusalem exactly 10 years ago.
2. In 586 BCE the 1st Temple was destroyed by Babylon, led by Nebuchadnezzar. 100,000 Jews were slaughtered. The Jews were forced into exile.
3. In 70 CE the 2nd Temple was destroyed by the Romans, led by Titus. Two million Jews are reputed to have died and 1 million led into an exile of 2000 years in diaspora.
4. Between 132-135 CE the remnant of the Jews of Israel led a revolt by Bar Kochba, backed by the legendary Rabbi Akiba. They lost, were tortured and slain. This was the end of political Zionism until Theodor Herzl’s 1st Zionist Congress, held in Basel Switzerland in 1897.
5. Emperor Hadrian ploughed up the area where the Temple had been and replaced it with a Temple of Venus (Jeremiah 26:18). The Jewish people were utterly destroyed, physically, mentally and spiritually.
6. In 1290, it was decided to expel the Jews from England – the first country to do so. The English Jews (some of whom dated from Roman times) all left later that year (many were deliberately drowned in The Wash). They were only let back in to this country in 1655-56 by permission of Oliver Cromwell.
England was also the first country to introduce the blood and desecration of the host libels in the previous century, culminating with the 1190 massacre in the city of York, commemorated in the Tisha B’Av liturgy as one of the worst pogroms in Jewish history.
8. In 1492 over 100,000 Jews were expelled from Spain for refusing to convert to Catholicism. Included in the list of forced deportees was the great Bible commentator, Isaac Abarbanel, Chief Minister of Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella. Abarbanel had sorted out the royal finances and they rewarded him by expulsion. Later, the families of these expelled Jews emigrated to Israel, where they founded the mystical community of Sfat in Galilee, one of the four holy cities of Israel. The expulsion from Spain, where Jews had lived for 1500 years, was a trauma that was only to be repeated by the Holocaust of the 20th century.
9. In 1914 World War I broke out, when Germany declared war on Russia. Resentment from the loss of this war set the stage for the Holocaust and World War II, when two-thirds of European Jews were exterminated by the Nazis and their allies.
10. In 1942, the Jews were deported en masse from the Warsaw Ghetto and sent to Treblinka concentration camp where they were exterminated – my own grandmother among them.
So what to make of all these tragedies and why did they happen? Many think that – without letting gentiles off the hook – sinat chinam, or ’causeless hatred’ among Jews themselves cannot be ruled out as a cause of our own misfortunes.
Causeless hatred is reputed to have set the scene for the destruction of the 2nd Temple, for instance. And today many contemporary Jewish thinkers have called for an improvement in relations between observant and non-observant Jews.
This was the view of the former Chief Rabbi of Haifa, Shear Yashuv Cohen, who stated about relations between the observant and not-so observant Jew:
‘If there is genuine love, people can feel it in their hearts. Love draws people near. It is very important that the Jewish person who does not carry out the religious precepts experiences no sense of superiority in you. Preachy people are basically those who feel that they are “the bee’s knees”. But where love is, superiority is not.
‘A non-practising Jew who comes to Shul has to be treated with love and affection. Bear in mind constantly the possibility that this same non-practising Jew is actually on a higher level than you. For all we know, he or she may actually be carrying out the religious precepts, or may have done so in the past, whether wittingly or unwittingly. And the Holy One, Blessed be He, regards this person as on a higher level than the person who appears outwardly to be nearer to Him. We do not know the thoughts of the Holy One, Blessed be He, nor how he assesses a fellow human being.’
Not only a guide for everyone at Tisha B’Av, but a lesson for life as well – love and affection conquer all.
Dr Irene Lancaster is chair of the Broughton Park Dialogue Group in Manchester and an author who has pioneered the teaching of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at a number of universities in the UK.