A big topic of conversation in the Jewish community these days is the idea that the State of Israel faces an "existential threat." Various politicians and commentators have stated that an Iranian nuclear bomb, an international agreement to prevent such a bomb, the growth of the Arab Palestinian population, the occupation of the West Bank, President Obama, Prime Minister Netanyahu, and the movement for boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel all pose an "existential threat" to the Jewish State. 

Of course, the "existential threat" contemplated by pundits and pols concerns the belief that Israel's literal existence is in the balance. They fear that a bomb, an agreement to stop a bomb, a demographic challenge, a military occupation, an evil politician, or an international campaign will bring about the death and destruction of Israel. So, of course, the intensity of fear and anger in the conversation is rising fast. How can you have a calm discussion when the premise of the conversation is that somebody is trying to kill you?

In recent days, I have read essays charging that Prime Minister Netanyahu is calling on American Jews to become traitors against the United States. I have read essays charging that American Jews who support President Obama are traitors to the Jewish people. I am appalled by the rhetoric on both sides. It is irrational, overblown, and dangerous. The temperature of this debate has reached the boiling point and it is getting worse. When we start talking about our very existence being threatened, there is no telling how far the internecine anger and hatred can go if we let it.

The ancient rabbis, too, considered the possibility that the Jewish people faced a threat that would destroy them and drive the remnant of their survivors from their land. In fact, that is exactly what happened. The rabbis lived in a time when the armies of Rome conquered Jerusalem, burned down the Temple, and exiled the Jewish people from the city that was the center of their spiritual existence. 

Now that is a real "existential threat."

Today is Tisha B'Av, the fast day that marks the destruction of the First and Second Temples in ancient Jerusalem. On this day, we lament the ancient horrors that befell the Jewish people. We read in the book of Lamentations how, during the Babylonian conquest of Israel in the 6th century b.c.e., "babes and sucklings languished in the squares of the city… as their lives ran out In their mothers’ bosoms" (Lamentations 2:11-12). We can also read the Jewish historian, Josephus, who described how, during the Roman conquest of Jerusalem six hundred years later, the soldiers killed "weak and unarmed" civilians. Josephus says, "They were butchered where they were caught. The heap of corpses mounted higher and higher about the altar; a stream of blood flowed down the Temple's steps, and the bodies of those slain at the top slipped to the bottom" (Josephus, The Jewish War).

Yet, unlike today's commentators, the ancient rabbis did not locate the threat to their existence in the intentions and actions of their enemies. They saw it within themselves. They saw the cause of their suffering, not in their foreign adversaries, but in the way they treated each other.

In the Talmud, the rabbis ask, "Why was the First Temple destroyed?" And they answer, "Because of three things which prevailed there: idolatry, immorality and bloodshed." They ask, "Why was the Second Temple destroyed, seeing that in its time the Jewish people were studying Torah, performing mitzvot, and giving charity?" And they answer, "Because of free-flowing hatred [of one Jew against another]. This teaches that free-flowing hatred is of the same gravity as the sins of idolatry, immorality and bloodshed combined" (Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 9b). 

I do not wish to claim that the State of Israel today would be fine and dandy if the Jewish people would just start loving each other. (I wish it were so). Israel has real external enemies who do wish the very worst kind of harm. However, I do wish to state that while we yell at each other about our existence – while we allow the rhetoric of our debate to become more and more toxic – we are doing our enemies' dirty work for them. Our free-flowing hatred may be as potent a threat to our people as any external enemy.

In a few week's time, the United States Congress will vote on the President's proposed multinational agreement intended to slow or stop Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons. I don't know whether that is a good thing or not. I am not an expert on arms control. I do expect, though, that until that vote is taken, the Jewish community will suffer more pangs of accusations and anger – one Jew against another – that will damage our community and the very idea of k'lal Yisrael, the unity of the Jewish people. 

For all I know, things will get even worse for us after the vote. In anger, the "losers" may accuse the "winners" of being dupes who have planted the seeds of Israel's destruction. The "winners" may crow triumph and call the "losers" fools for not seeing their folly. This is, after all, the current style of American politics. We have become used to the idea that winning is the only thing that matters and no amount of vitriol spent against our enemies is too much. We may not need the Iranians, Hezbollah or Hamas to destroy us. If we follow the path of "free-flowing hatred," we may just do the job ourselves.

My plea on this darkest day of the Jewish year is simple. Listen to our tradition. Understand what the rabbis meant when they said that the uncurbed enmity of one Jew against another is as bad as idolatry, immorality and bloodshed combined. The rabbis believed that our self-directed anger and hatred would ultimately lead us to worship our own opinions, to rape the foundations of civility, and to kill the love that unites us as a people. I fear that they might have been right. 

Prove me wrong.


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Not Turning Away from Grief
Tisha B'Av Comes Just in Time

The last several weeks have been horrifying, upsetting, angering, heartbreaking and mind numbing. The news from Israel and Gaza has put me and many members of my community on an emotional roller coaster as we try, simultaneously, to take in the many sickening images and stories, grieve the destruction and loss of life on both sides, while also standing up for Israel as she defends herself. It has been emotionally exhausting.

I won't rehearse here all the charges and counter-charges about rockets, human shields, tunnels, arial assaults near schools and hospitals, and the deaths of so many children. Chances are, you've already made up your mind about all of that. I will say, though, that I am hard-pressed to imagine how else Israel could respond to the rain of rockets falling on its cities. I don't know how any country could respond successfully to an enemy that intentionally endangers civilians so that it can use their deaths as a propaganda and recruitment tool. What on earth would you do?

And just as the conflict in Israel and Gaza appears to be winding down, we today have Tisha B'Av, the most mournful day of the Jewish year. Tisha B'Av commemorates the cosmic devastation experienced by the Jewish people in ancient times when the First Temple was destroyed in 586 BCE and when the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 CE. To Jews, the day marks a rupture in the bonds that connect heaven to earth. It is our "Black Fast." You would think the coincidence of such a dark day at a time like this would feel like a further burden. In fact, it comes as a relief.

Last night we marked Tisha B'Av at the congregation I serve with a service that included the chanting and reading of the book of Lamentations. This 2,600 year-old book of poetry speaks of the anguish of war, death, inhumanity, grief and despair. As I listened to the words, I thought about the suffering of the people of Gaza.

The discussion that followed was amazing. People let loose the pain of the past few weeks, but also the horror of the Holocaust, the carnage happening right now in Iraq and Syria, the poverty that still ravages parts of our own country. We remembered that Tisha B'Av this year falls one day before the 69th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and the horror that it inflicted. We gave voice to the sense that there is something deeply and heartbreakingly wrong with this poor world. 

We talked about how difficult it is to know where we should put the blame. On God? On "Evil"? On the human race? On the failure within each of our own individual hearts to live up to our highest aspirations? Ultimately, there can be no answers.

No answers – but there is still hope. Our group could not end the evening until we also talked about the belief that each of us has the ability to make the world better. We remembered the teaching that the destruction of the Second Temple came about because of "baseless hatred" among Jews and we pledged to each do our part to replace resentment, anger and disdain with compassion, love and acceptance. Every little bit helps.

Tisha B'Av, for me, comes this year at just the right moment. It comes at a time when I have to cry out in sorrow. It comes during a period in which I have been sick with grief and only partially recognized it. Tisha B'Av this year opens my heart to wailing for a world that is not what it should be, but a world that can yet be redeemed.


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Catastrophe
Not Turning Away from Grief

I had a friend in college named Ray. He was a good guy. He had a lot of the qualities I thought I lacked when I was in college. Ray was good looking, athletic and charismatic. He was a running back on the school's football team. He loved to hang around with attractive women, and they seemed to love hanging around him, too. 

Ray also was smart and had a good heart. He and I were allies in student government. We worked together on a campaign to get our school to divest from companies that did business in South Africa. It was a strategy to put pressure on a racist, apartheid government that kept black-skinned and mixed-raced Africans in second-class status and made their lives miserable.

I was very proud of the work that I did with Ray and many others in college. We were a small part of the anti-apartheid movement, but we made a difference. I was proud also of my friendship with Ray, a guy who was very different from me, and also very much the same.

Why am I remembering Raynard T. Davis, Oberlin College class of 1985, today? Because he was murdered in April of 1999 in his hometown of Washington, D.C. He was then, like me at the time, 32 years old. He was stabbed in his apartment by some men who had come to talk to him about the car he was trying to sell. 

Ray was one of hundreds of black men murdered in Washington during the period from 1998 to 2008. During that decade, the murder rate for black people in our nation's capital was more than 50 per 100,000 residents, ten times the rate for white residents. In the years since, the murder rate for black men in Washington has improved greatly, as it has for people of all races and genders. Yet — there is no nice way to put this — it is still dangerous to be a young black man in America. 

Of course, I also am thinking about Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old who was fatally shot 17 months ago by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, less than a two-and-a-half hour drive from my home. As you know, Zimmerman was acquitted two days ago on all charges. 

There is a great deal of difference between Martin and my friend, Ray. Trayvon Martin was in high school. Ray Davis was a promising graduate student at Howard University. Trayvon was killed by a neighborhood watch coordinator who may have believed that he was trying to protect his community. Ray was killed by a couple of guys who wanted to get the small clutch of bills in his wallet. Lots of differences, but also very much the same. 

There is a catastrophe in our country built on lingering racism, a growing appetite for guns and violence, and the way that the lives of young black men are devalued. I don't really know what happened on the night of February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida (and neither do you). However, I don't need to tell you how differently the verdict would have been if a young black man claimed to have acted in self-defense when he killed a neighborhood watch volunteer.  Do I?

Today, I am also thinking about Tisha B'Av, the holy day that begins tonight at sunset. This is a day for mourning the catastrophe of our broken world. On Tisha B'Av, we weep for the shattering of the link between heaven and earth and how our world is so painfully far from what we would wish for ourselves and for our children. Today, as I remember my friend, and as I think about recent events, I feel heartsick.

There is a tradition of concluding the meal on the afternoon before Tisha B'Av with a hard-boiled egg dipped in ashes. The ashes recall the mourning of our ancestors as they watched the holy city of Jerusalem and its Temple burn. The egg itself, though, is a symbol of two things. Because eggs become harder when cooked, they remind us that our sorrows should toughen us to face the challenges of tomorrow. The egg's shape reminds us that life turns in many cycles — hope may yet be born from sorrow. 

I have eaten my egg dipped in ashes. I am ready for the fast to begin. I also am ready to hope that the cycles of hatred, violence and cold-heartedness may be overcome. I am stiffening my resolve today to do my part to make a difference.


Other Posts on This Topic:
Not Turning Away from Grief
Matot-Mas'ei: Chasing After Emptiness

On an unusually rainy day in South Florida, a small group of volunteers met at a church today to prepare a meal for sixty men, women and children in need of a hot meal. The volunteers included some of the members of the congregation I serve, as it does on every second Sunday of the month. We call it "Souper Sunday," and it is always a fun and a fulfilling time. This week, it seemed particularly appropriate.

This past Shabbat, we read the third and final "Haftarah of Affliction," the readings that prepare us for Tisha B'Av, which begins Monday night. The passage from Isaiah tells us that we should not offer empty and insincere worship to God, but rather, "Learn to do good. Devote yourselves to justice; aid the wronged" (Isaiah 1:17). I like to think that the spaghetti and meatballs, the chicken and tuna salad sandwiches, and the garlic bread we made today were more than a filling meal for the hungry; they also were a way of responding to God's call for justice.

Tisha B'Av was instituted in ancient times to mark the anniversary of the destruction of the First and Second Temples. But the day means a great deal more than that. The fast is not just to bemoan a tragedy that happened to our people long ago. It also is a day to grieve for a world that is heart-breakingly far from the world of our highest hopes. 

This is the second of the three weeks leading up to Tisha B'Av, the most sorrowful day of the Jewish year. The three weeks are called the t'lat d'furanuta, "the three weeks of affliction." On each Shabbat during these weeks, we read a haftarah in which the prophets rebuke Israel for failing to keep faith with God, but promising redemption for Israel if it returns to God.

In the opening of this week's haftarah, God ask a rhetorical question. "What wrong did your ancestors find in Me that they distanced themselves from Me, went after empty things, and thus became empty themselves?" (Jeremiah 2:5). The image is clear. When we run away from things of real value in life and chase after illusions, we become delusional. Empty pursuits yield empty lives.

That is a rebuke that should make each of us more than a bit uncomfortable. Who will deny that his or her life has more than its share of empty pursuits? I think about the energy I put into learning about the latest electronic gadgets and the time I spend following the ups and downs of sports teams. Is Jeremiah speaking to me? Is he reminding me that my time is better spent with family, community and making a difference in people's lives? Is he saying that I am digging a hole of emptiness in my life? What is he telling you?

We know it's true. We see it in others and, when we are being honest, we see it in ourselves. When people spend their time preoccupied with triviality, vanity and self-indulgence, they become trivial, vain, and…well…unhappy. When we look at our own lives, we realize that our greatest joy comes from moments focused on the things that are meaningful — building relationships, working for the good of others, sharing what we have, loving and being loved. 

You can toss the rest.  Happiness is filling up our otherwise empty hours with things that matter.

Jeremiah tells us this is what it truly means to be close to God. It's not about mouthing prayers or fulfilling empty rituals. God is what we experience when we connect with others — when we make our lives matter by doing things that matter. Then, instead of distancing ourselves from God, we draw close.

And Jeremiah reminds us that the rewards are very great. In the conclusion of this week's haftarah (according to Sephardic practice), we read, "If you return, O Israel…and swear by the living God in truth, justice and righteousness, then nations will find blessing in you…" (Jeremiah 4:1-2). When we attach ourselves to God by acting truthfully, justly and righteously, we not only secure our own happiness, we bring blessing to others.

So try it. The next time you find yourself filling up your time with things that don't really matter, make a different choice. Turn off the screen, put down the video game, stop the preening and posing. Instead, make the choice to do something — something that matters and brings blessing to the world.


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Bamidbar: From the Wilderness Comes a Gift
Hope after Despair

In the afternoon, it gets even stranger. This is the only afternoon of the year that one is supposed to wear tefillin for the afternoon service. If that doesn't wreak havoc on your spiritual equilibrium, the haftarah reading for Tisha B'Av afternoon will.

We have just spent the last twenty-or-so hours in the land of spiritual grief, reading the book of Lamentations both last night and this morning. Lamentations is the book that, at its cheeriest, asks God how much longer we must suffer. Perhaps we also have read kinnot, poems for mourning the destruction of the Temple. Then, on Tisha B'Av afternoon, the sound of the words changes completely. The haftarah is Isaiah 55:6 - 56:8, one of the most beautiful passages in all the prophetic writings. Isaiah inspires us with visions of a time of utter redemption:

The foreigners who attach themselves to Adonai to serve God and to love the name of Adonai to be God's servants—those who keep Shabbat from profanation and hold fast to My covenant—I will bring them to My holy mountain and I will rejoice in them in My house of prayer. Their burnt offerings and sacrifices shall be accepted upon My altar, for My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations. (Isaiah 56:6-8)

It is one of the most hopeful and optimistic passages in the entire Hebrew Bible. It announces a time to come when all of humanity will be united in God. There will be no more distinctions between Jew and gentile. All will be one. 

Why on earth do we read this at the end of Tisha B'Av, a day that peers into the abyss of human cruelty and despair? It is because it is only after we have taken that journey into the abyss that we can finally, truly, see the light of hope.

Hope is not just wishing for the best. Hope is what we experience after we have known despair and, yet, choose to see that it need not always be that way. You can only know hope after you have seen just how bad things can be. It is only after that experience that you can turn your life around and know that real joy is not just "having a good time." It is the feeling that your life has been reclaimed and restored by something beyond yourself. 

That is where we want to get to before the strange journey of Tisha B'Av has been completed. We want to know that our highest hopes can be fulfilled, not despite life's torments, but because we have transcended that pain and risen higher because of it.


Other Posts on This Topic:
Not Turning Away from Grief
Tough Times
Devarim: How?

My second experience today with grief was at the service this evening for Tisha B'Av, which began tonight at sunset, the darkest day of the Jewish year. We read the book of Lamentations and studied a text from the Babylonian Talmud that meditated upon the suffering the world endures because of baseless hatred. We grieved the brokenness of the world as if we were sitting shivah. There was no celebration of life and no rejoicing in an expected redemption to come. No jokes.

I think I understand the approach that the minister was taking in leading the funeral. I think I understand how it is comforting to help people put their grief aside and remember that the only reason why losing someone is so painful is because of love. By celebrating the life of a loved one, we remember why the loss hurts and we remember that death does not end the joy we feel in recalling the person's life and gifts. It is an approach that I understand, but it is one also that I reject.

Tisha B'Av is not a funeral, but the way we mark this darkest day says something about the Jewish attitude toward grief. As the rabbis teach, "At a time of joy be joyous. At a time of mourning, mourn" (Genesis Rabbah 27:7). Judaism does not try to allay grief with talk of celebration and God's glorious heaven. Grief is real and it hurts. Explaining it does not make it hurt any less and it does not, in the end, help people to "get over it." Jewish tradition says that we need to look squarely into the abyss of grief and acknowledge its reality. We do not turn away from our pain.

Today is Tisha B'Av. It is a day for confronting our grief for the broken state of the world. This world is in such pain that it must require at least one day of putting aside the happy talk of love, joy and redemption. This world deserves at least one day for us to cry, fast, mourn and deeply feel our sorrow, without sentimental palliatives, without the cover-up of false joy, and without jokes.

If we spend one day of the year really feeling just how bad the world can get, and just how awful human beings can treat each other, maybe we will spend the other 364 days working harder to fix it. Maybe we will spend more of our lives working to create true joy, instead of pretending that we are laughing while our hearts are crying.


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Tough Times

In Syria, government-backed troops are sending rocket fire into Aleppo, the country's second largest city, and the death toll keeps rising. The coming of the London Summer Olympics reminds us that we are now approaching the fortieth anniversary of the massacre in which eleven Israeli athletes and coaches were murdered by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Munich games.

During times like these, we cannot help remember just how out of whack this poor world is and just how much we are surrounded by madness, violence, suffering and grief. We wonder how to reconcile this world with faith in a loving, all-powerful God.

There are no clear, definitive answers to the questions of suffering and evil. The world is as it is. We do know, though, that we have some ability to change it. Not all the blame can be placed on God. It is up to us to act to confront evil, to create peace, to cure illness, and to ameliorate suffering. 

Sometimes we feel unequal to the task. Sometimes, we are in despair. The world's problems are vast and our power can feel puny. That feeling can cause us even more suffering.

This Shabbat will be Shabbat Chazon, the "Sabbath of Vision" that precedes Tisha B'Av. This coming Saturday night, we will listen to the words of the Book of Lamentations that bewails the destruction of Jerusalem. Throughout the book, we hear the cry of despair that still echoes in the world.

My eyes are spent with tears,
My heart is in tumult,
My being melts away
Over the ruin of my poor people,
As babes and sucklings languish
In the squares of the city.
They keep asking their mothers,
“Where is bread and wine?”
As they languish like battle-wounded
In the squares of the town,
As their life runs out
In their mothers’ bosoms.
What can I take as witness or liken
To you, O Fair Jerusalem?
What can I match with you to console you,
O Fair Maiden Zion?
For your ruin is vast as the sea:
Who can heal you? (Lamentations 2:11-13)

We, too, wonder: Who can heal our broken world? Who will put an end to the hatred and evil that makes people kill the innocent? Who will stand against the mad rage that poisons our society? Who will stop the wars that still kill children in the arms of their mothers?

The answer, of course, is that we human beings must be the ones to do it—but we don't have to do it alone. The famous second-to-last verse of the book of Lamentations tells us, "Turn us, Adonai, to You and we shall be returned. Renew us as at the beginning" (Lamentations 5:21). When we turn away from evil and allow God to rule over our lives, we restore the world to its original state of balance and peace. 

God does not wave a magic wand that makes the misery we inflict upon each other disappear. Rather, our faith is in a God whom we experience in our own determination to end misery ourselves. God shows us the way. God turns us back to the right direction, but it is up to us take the steps toward our own renewal. 

We know what we need to do; God has taught us. We need to be the ones who replace hatred with understanding, who vanquish terrorism with justice, who take guns out of the hands of madmen, and who dismantle despotism and install freedom. There is something deeply wrong with the world we live in—its ruin is as vast as the sea—but we have the power to do something about it. We begin by heeding and obeying the voice that tells us: "Turn!"


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