CBI Blogs

This week, the Jewish community commemorated Tisha B’Av, or, the 9th day of Av (one of the Hebrew months). Traditionally, this day is remembered as the anniversary of the destruction of the great Temple in Jerusalem, both in 586 B.C.E. and 70 C.E. In addition, it’s often considered the same day for several other terrible events in Jewish history.

For many, this is a day of mourning and loss, of remembering the multitude of tragedies that have befallen our people. It’s a day of fasting, a day of studying the Book of Lamentations, a day of acknowledging the pain our people have felt for centuries, the oppression that has weighed us down for generations.

As a progressive, Reform Jew, I can and do recognize the strife we’ve endured from too many incidents. However, I struggle with mourning the loss of the Temple, a place that represented ritual that I have no desire to return to, now or ever again. I believe this passage, written by Uri Sternfeld shares the sentiment I and many other progressive Jews feel about Tisha B’Av. While some of Sternfeld's language is seemingly harsh and quite strong, the overall feeling he captures in this piece drives right to the heart of the matter. Originally written in Hebrew, the translation isn't seamless, so please keep that in mind. Thank you to Sarah Avner for bringing it to my attention. I hope this passage gives you new insight and perspective for Tisha B'Av. 

The Temple is not a sword because of "baseless hatred", it's fake news from people who never bothered to open a history book. The Temple was a sword because the zealots took over Jerusalem forcefully and smashed all of Judea into an unlikely war against the world's most powerful empire out of a Christian hope that God would help them (spoiler: it's not). Even if there wasn't the same "free hatred" (a meaningless expression), even if all the Jews were united resolutely against the Roman legions, they still wouldn't have any chance of victory, under any circumstances. After the inevitable defeat, woe to the victors, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple, as they did to countless rebel cities and rebel nations that rose up against the brutal conqueror and lost. The difference is that in our case we couldn't accept that something bad happened to us because of religious fanaticism and a failed political bet, and we had to invent some "free hatred" (I wonder what will win this year's 'X is the real free hatred' award of the current politician) as a mystical factor without which everything would have worked out somehow. This inability to take responsibility for actions and their consequences is childish and embarrassing.

And regardless of this lie, Tisha B'Av is not a day but for me. It is ridiculous to compare between Tisha B'Av to Holocaust Day or Memorial Day. We all know relatives of people who were murdered in the Holocaust or people killed in war, and they live among us now, real people, that we care about. On the other hand, I don't know people whose relatives were killed in the Great Uprising, and I am sorry for their suffering and death as much as I am sorry for the victims of the Inquisition or the Jews who were massacred in Jerusalem during the Crusades, or all the billions of people who died during history.

For the destruction of the Temple, on the other hand, I'm not sorry at all.

If it weren't for the destruction and exile of Judaism, it would have been something completely different. History is not a collection of isolated events (as you might have mistakenly thought from the history curriculum in the schools) that skips from the destruction of the Temple to the expulsion of Spain and come on to the Holocaust, but a complicated embroidery of complex causes and results and processes that unfold thousands of years ago and drain into the present, which is also just another link in a chain. Judaism of today is very different from Judaism of the late Iron Age. That Judaism, of the righteous, was a religion based on a corrupt priesthood and blood on altars. It was a religion of verbal interpretation of the Bible (on all its entanglement) that took place in the period before writing the Gammara and the Talmud, the two prepared texts of Judaism. The entire Rabbinate institution was created solely in the wake of the destruction of the Temple. Can anyone imagine Judaism today without Rabbis? Exile softened Judaism, turned it into a religion of the people instead of sacrifice and spirituality instead of stones. The Temple, like the button in the story "Button Soup", is just a nucleus of memory in the center of Judaism, that continued to develop without it for another two thousand years. The two temples together existed only a third of all the history of Judaism. Wanting to return to the Temple is pathetic like an adult man wanting to return to live in his childhood room with his parents. We have grown up since then.

Or at least that's how it seemed. Because adults in their bodies, crazy in their eyes and have access to weapons, money and politicians, talk seriously about building a third temple. New zealots take over Jerusalem and want to bring down Israel all to the abyss out of Christian hope that God will help them (spoiler: it's not). What bothers me especially about the state and artificial mourning of Tisha B'Av (beyond the routine religious coercion) is that they are trying to awaken in the secular public some legitimacy for another temple. This is the normalization of the temple. As if there are only two types of Jews, the ones who really want to build the Temple, and the more moderate ones, who only blame it like a dream that will never come true. No and no. There are third-class Jews, and there are many of us, and for us the Temple is a piece of history and not and that's where it should stay, like Titus Gate in Rome, which was built two thousand years ago to celebrate the Roman victory over the rebellion in Judea.

I wish the third temple will never be built. Amen.