A bleak day in these bleak times, Tishah B’Av takes us to the heart of disaster and grief. Yet, at the same time, it guides us to deepen our compassion, sharpen our commitment to justice and strengthen our resilience. Over the desolate landscape of destruction and grief it sheds a patchy light of defiant hope.
“I am shattered by the brokenness of my people,” testifies Jeremiah (8:21). Who, two-and a-half millennia later, cannot empathise with these words of the grief-stricken, yet fearless prophet through whose eyes we see the terrors which destroyed Jerusalem?
One has only to visit the Nova exhibition and witness the searing testament of murder and rape on October 7, 2023 to know that our world has not become less cruel, that trauma is not a thing of the past, and that we remain deeply vulnerable. We see the suffering across the Middle East, in Israel, Gaza, and further afield in Ukraine, Somalia and elsewhere.
Half my heart rebels against Tishah b’Av this year. Who needs further reminders of catastrophe and yet more mourning in these anguished times of resurgent antisemitism and war? But then I remember the saying of the Rebbe of Slonim: “A broken heart must always belong to the world of building, not to the world of destruction.”
So, with the other half of my heart, I accept this difficult day, with its painful journey from horror and grief towards hope and renewal.
Jeremiah does not avert his gaze when the tragedy he has long prophesied comes to pass: “My eyes are spent with tears. Small children faint in the streets of the city. They say to their mothers: “Where’s corn and wine?”, then collapse and die in their mother’s laps (Lamentations 2:2-3).These are the streets of sixth-century BCE Jerusalem; but also of the Warsaw Ghetto, Lodz, and so many places where our people have been starved and murdered.
They are also the streets we see on our screens today from conflicts and disasters around the world, with their aftermath of hunger and death. His heart torn by such suffering, Jeremiah refuses to let us to look the other way. Jewish or not Jewish, whatever their faith or nationality, hungry children cry out to us for mercy.
If they are too near death to speak, their silence is even more articulate than their words. How can we not be moved to compassion for the suffering of our people, for all innocent suffering? Midrash Lamentations Rabba portrays even God as weeping with sorrow.
The brutality of the destruction of Jerusalem is shocking. There was probably nothing a small state like Judea could have done to prevent invasion by the superpower Babylon in 586 BCE, or any way, centuries later, that the fragile Jewish Commonwealth could have withstood the Roman legions in 70 CE.
Jeremiah minces no words about the barbarity of Nebuchadnezzar and his minions, just as the Talmud testifies to the cruelties of Rome, and as the word today should have no illusions about Hamas, Hezbollah and the regimes that support them.
But the enemies without are not where Jeremiah, or Isaiah before him, focus their main attention. Their deepest concerned is the wrongs within their own society. “Once justice resided here [in Jerusalem],” proclaims Isaiah words we read on the Shabbat preceding Tishah b’Av, “Now, murderers” (Isaiah 1:21).
Jeremiah inveighs against his people for putting their trust in the wrong things: “Don’t rely on falsehoods, saying, ‘God’s temple, God’s temple, God’s temple’” (7:4). God cares about righteousness, a fair and faithful society, not stones. Even after Jerusalem has fallen, Jeremiah doesn’t relent: “Jerusalem has sinned,” he laments; that’s why this tragedy has happened (Lamentations 1:8).
It’s foolish to imagine that military power doesn’t matter. But the prophets of Israel understood, or hoped, that the true strength of any state lies in justice and its treatment of the weak and the stranger.
This warning was not lost, millennia later, on Thomas Jefferson, as he, a slave owner, drafted the American Constitution: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.” It shouldn’t be lost either on those of today’s leaders who set justice and mercy aside.
Yet, in spite of everything, Jeremiah does not abandon hope. He never despairs of the future. He tempers castigation with consolation: “God’s lovingkindness is not over; God’s mercies are not ended” (Lamentations 3:22). The deep wells of faith and trust are not exhausted; we have not been abandoned: “God’s faithfulness is great” (3:23).
That is why we refuse to end Lamentations with its final verse: “[God] You despise us; you’re utterly furious with us.” Even in the bleakest times, we have held to our faith with a defiant resilience tested throughout the numerous challenges of Jewish history. Instead, we repeat the penultimate line, “Bring us back to You, God, and we will return; renew our days as of old.” We move to a place of hope.
As midday passes, the mood of Tishah b’Av lifts. “Mir zaynen do – we are still here!” We will learn from our bitter history. We will rebuild our land, and our world. We will practise compassion and uphold justice. We will repair our relationship with God. This is the day when the Messiah is born; the day when we renew our commitment to compassion, justice and the work of redemption.
Jonathan Wittenberg is Senior Rabbi of Masorti Judaism
To get more from judaism, click here to sign up for our free daily newsletter.