Why Will You Cry?

by: rejewvenator

Wed Aug 06, 2008 at 20:43:24 PM EDT

The Rambam writes in the Mishneh Torah (Laws of Fasting 5:3) that five events happened on the ninth day of Av: the sin of the Spies (about which we read in this week's parsha), the destruction of the First Temple and the Second Temple, the capture of Betar and the killing of the proto-messianic Bar Kochba and all his people, and finally, the plowing of the Temple Mount by Turnus Rufus. In short, for the Rambam, Tisha B'Av is the betrayal of hope. It is the time when the three promises that God makes the Jewish people are all reversed: that He will give them the land of their forefathers, that He will dwell among them, and that He will bring a messiah to redeem them.

And do I lack for messiahs? Theodore Hertzl redeemed my nation. David Ben-Gurion and his fellows redeemed my land. My exiles have been ingathered, and almost nowhere in the world is a Jew unable to return to the land of his forefathers. Once, our enemies chased us relentlessly, murdered us systematically, and drove us to depths of depravity. Today, we wield the mightiest weapons, and our enemies cower in the shadow, feral and dispossessed. The Tisha B'Av of Maimonides is not my Tisha B'Av.

Every year, there's only one line in all the liturgy of Tisha B'Av that moves me to tears. "The hands of compassionate women boiled their own children, they were their food in the destruction of my people" says Lamentations (4:10), recalling the destruction of the First Temple, and all I can think is that today, it is not we who await God's redemption. It is God who awaits our redemption, God who waits for us to explain to ourselves, and to Him, how we can live with such a God, and what the rules of our relationship with Him might be.

For we Jews engaged in social justice there is a paradox that we cannot relieve. We believe that each person is a reflection of God, and that the infinite value of the individual is rooted in this divinity. But reality confronts us with the opposite proposition. Through most of history, life was brutish, cruel, and brief. In many places it so remains. And if God is the Unmoved Mover, the Eternal and Changeless One, then is it not because of Man that life, for many, has become longer, more peaceful and secure, more just, and more kind? What to make then of this God who bids us mourn the devastation that He wreaked upon us?

The Satmar Rebbe, R. Yoel Teitelbaum gave a reason when he was asked this question about the Holocaust - which for many of us is the prism through which we can see Tisha B'Av most clearly. He said that it was the sin of Zionism, in its rebellion against the Nations, its attempt to hasten the Redemption, its scaling of the walls that the Nations erected around Israel, that led to the death of six million in the Holocaust.

Many of us are disgusted by this idea. Many of us shy away from explaining the Holocaust. I recently read the Shoah Scroll, a Conservative Movement attempt to create an Eicha-like text for Yom HaShoah. In Rabbi Reuven Hammer's introduction he writes "The voices of six million cry out before God for justice. We have no answer but the sound of silence. And yet we must never say that the Shoah represented the will of God, that the Shoah was God's punishment, or that it was justified because it was followed so soon by the creation of the State of Israel... there are some answers that must be rejected completely for the honor of our people and for the honor of God." Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits, among the luminaries of the Orthodox world in the 20th century, declared that one could not follow the traditional Jewish approach of relating to tragedy as a Divine punishment when considering the Holocaust. The Holocaust is a "divine mystery," terrifying and impenetrable.

But it can no longer be. In avoiding finding meaning in the Holocaust we empty our God of meaning as well. The silence is unbearable. Like the mourner at the graveside, our first cry must be "Yitgadal V'Yitkadash Sh'mey Rabah" - May the great Name be elevated and sanctified! It is not enough to say that the response to the Holocaust is a call to action, to our conscience, to social justice and the affirmation of value of human life. No matter how much we busy ourselves with the important and endless work of improving the world around us, the shadow of a question hangs over all we do. Why?

Jeremiah told us why. It was our sins. Not your sin, or my sin, or my grandfather's sin, or your great-aunt's sin. Our sins. Our failure as a people, as a nation, as a faith, and as a culture. Our failure to create just societies, to shine a light of truth upon the world, to imbue our homes with holiness, to toil in the vineyard of Torah and to teach that the world does have purpose, and that human life does have value. That's always the reason why in the Jewish tradition. To give this answer while Holocaust survivors yet live may be premature, but we must begin to think on it, and to start formulating answers that can point us towards the next steps in our national destiny.

We respond to Holocaust by saying "Never Again". The Zionist project saw Israel as a land of refuge, but to what end? Its goal was for the Jewish people to be non-distinct, simply another nation seeking a private destiny. We are not that nation. We are particular. We may struggle with the concept of being chosen, but we cannot but see that to tell the story of the history of the world, we must tell the story of the Jews. So we must understand why.

I always cry over that image in Lamentations of a mother cooking and eating her child. The image is awful in its own right, but the Holocaust has brought us many wrenching images and heart-rending stories, often from the mouths of those who lived them. I think the reason it moves me so much is because it is fundamentally dissonant. A mother would sacrifice her own life to extend the life of her child. Failing that, a mother might kill herself and her child in the face of horrific alternatives. But what mother would sacrifice her child, much less consume her child, to extend her own life?

The woman of Lamentations suffers from madness and grief, but also from guilt. She blames herself and her sins for the evil befalling her and her people. She wishes to spare her child a cruel fate. But she cannot, she will not release herself from living through every moment of the agony. Instead, she feeds on it.

We are still that woman. We are still mad from the Holocaust. We can find no meaning in it, we are estranged from God, from ourselves, and from our destiny because of it. We drink in all of its memories, we recite very name, stare at every photo, and listen to every story, but we never master it. We cannot bring ourselves to name its causes, to assign responsibility for it, or to reframe our relationship to God around it. And until we don't change that, the creeping numbness that inflicts us every Tisha B'Av will grow, the distance between our values, our work, our God, and ourselves will lengthen, and we will become a faceless, speechless people with no lesson for the world but silence. We'll know then why to cry on Tisha B'Av, but by then it will be too late.