The day that Jerusalem became a pariah

Once a princess among nations, Jerusalem “hayta lamas” has become a vassal, a tributary, enslaved to her conquerors. (Lamentations 1:1). She who formerly enjoyed dignity and privilege, has become debased.

The hissing sound of “mas” – a captive people – mentioned in the first line of the megillah, is echoed in the similar sounding (but linguistically unrelated) term used in the megillah’s last line where the speaker challenges God: “Ki im ma’os ma’astanu” (5:22). “Have You truly rejected us?”.

Here the hissing of ma’as includes overtones of disgust, hatred, and contemptibility. The sentence can be read as an angry accusation “Have You truly rejected us?”, or as a resigned statement “For You have truly rejected us.”

Eichah brims with all the emotions that the psychologist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross associates with death and beravement: grief, anger, denial, depression, bargaining, and acceptance.

The Ninth of Av is the nadir of the Jewish year. The Three Weeks are a catch-all period for centuries of Jewish historical trauma. During the nine days we strip away much that is pleasurable in life. People stop eating meat, listening to music and attending parties, even from wearing freshly laundered clothes.

For the first few hours of the fast at least we are encouraged to sit miserably on the ground, and refrain from greeting one another. This goes further than the usual mourning rites, these are ways of enacting social estrangement and isolation.

In Eichah, Jerusalem is also described as a niddah, a menstruant, (1:8,17) who in biblical times would have maintained physical distance from her family. Jerusalem elicits disgust such that normal people cannot tolerate proximity to her. But worse than that, her enemies enjoy her suffering and jeer at her, revelling in her downfall (2:16). This is about abjection.

A rabbinic term which evolved from the same root as niddah is “niddui”, someone who is excommunicated or banned from society, a pariah. The rabbis had the power to shun or ban people for certain ritual and anti-social crimes. Niddui could be imposed for a week (and extended if appropriate.)

The subject of the ban was required to dress and behave like a mourner. Where mourners are offered comfort, the niddui’s exclusion was amplified, with others forbidden to eat with or come within a certain distance of them. A one-day version of niddui (nezifah) also existed, as did a more severe form of indefinite duration (cherem), famously applied to the philosopher Baruch Spinoza.

Conceptually, exclusion reaches its most potent form in the biblical punishment of karet, often translated as “excision”. The notion is as vague and terrifying as it sounds. Karet is an existential execution. The sages variously understand it to mean dying young, dying without children, or being excluded from whatever good the afterlife has to offer.

Karet, in the Torah, is the punishment for violating Shabbat, forbidden sexual acts (including sex with a menstruant), and various other ritual sins. What it amounts to is eternal and total exclusion.

Humans are not designed to survive outside of society. The experience of being excluded brings about clinically measurable, life-shortening physical responses. The social pain of ostracism or pariahdom is corrosive.

At both the individual and state level: it results in the rejected party devoting more resources to defence. They invest what little energy they have in rumination, self-defence, self-recrimination, and fantasising about revenge.

In this beleaguered state, a person’s cognitive capacity is affected. They have less ability to empathise (with other wounded parties or their antagonist) and less capacity for building and rebuilding relationships. Ironically the very efforts that could ameliorate their suffering are beyond their means. The last line of Eichah is bleak: “You have/have You? truly rejected us!”.

But we never end a religious recitation of the megillah there. Instead, we repeat the penultimate line “Hashiveinu Adonai Elecha ve nashuva” “Take us back, O Lord, to Yourself, and let us come back. Renew our days as of old!” (5:21). This is a call for reconciliation, a rehabilitation from pariahdom.

But how to make the shift from exclusion to reintegration? The answer is there in the Jewish calendar. Just days after the absolute nadir of the Ninth Av, comes the Fifthteenth of Av, almost its inverse.

The rabbis of the Mishnah recall that on this day the young women of Jerusalem would go out dancing wearing beautiful clothes, and the young men would seek out brides. The weddings which resulted would be harbingers of the rebuilding of the Temple (Mishnah Ta’anit 4:8).

Pariahdom can end when small gestures are extended and accepted by both parties.
 

Zahavit Shalev was previously a rabbi at New North London Synagogue and is now interim rabbi at Westminster Synagogue

Image: Prayers of lament: mourning the destruction of the two Temples on the fast of Tishah b’Av at the Western Wall in Jerusalem