Rabban Gamliel, Elazar ben Azariah,
Rabbi Joshua and Rabbi Akiva went to Jerusalem.
They reached the Temple that was in ruins and saw a fox emerging from
the ruins of the Holy of Holies. The
others started to cry but Rabbi Akiva laughed.
They asked, “Why are you laughing Akiva?” He replied, “It was prophesied (Book of
Lamentations) that foxes would haunt the Temple Mount, and it was also
prophesied that the ‘old men and women will yet dwell in the streets of Jerusalem’. Now that the first has happened, we know the
second, the redemption, will happen, too.”
They replied, “Akiva, you have
consoled us, you have consoled us!”
We have an ambivalent approach to
mourning the Temple. In our Siddur, we
changed the language in our Musaf service from ‘we will offer sacrifices at the
Temple’ to ‘We once offered sacrifices…’ but we also kept “May the Temple be
rebuilt soon and in our days.”
We support the State of Israel as a
democracy and the evolution of our faith from priesthood and offerings to
prayer, tzedakah, and community building.
I suggest we’d find it strange to see rebuilding of the Temple and
restoration of its rituals with the inevitable political and religious fallout
from the actual rebuilding.
So why then do we observe this
holiday of Tisha B’av, even granted that other national tragedies occurred on
the same day in history?
Why observe this holiday that in
many communities is even less familiar that Shemini Atzeret or T”u Bi’shevat?
It’s a holiday that according to
writer Simon Yisrael Fuerman (Tablet Magazine) probably was familiar to many
only from a classic Allan Sherman song, “Why did she go and fall in love, I
haven’t seen her since last Tisha B’av.”
One way to see Tisha B’av’s
relevance is as a day long Tachanun – the weekday prayers when we ‘lean in’ on
God for support. We’re soaked in tears,
we’ve had too much, we’re done, we’re cooked and we can’t go on without a
source of strength from outside ourselves.
There are two pieces of the
Tachanun that have always spoken to me and that bear on our experience of Tisha
B’Av – giving us two ways to reflect on this upcoming moment of remembering
sadness, destruction, pain and loss.
The first is “We do not know what
to do…” Va’anachnu lo nedah mah naseh…We
search, often in the dark, for answers, what to do, how to do it, why me? Why us?
Why now? The 9th of Av
is a day of recognizing our humanity, recognizing we don’t have all the
answers, that we’re searching, hoping, praying for inspiration – but often that
light bulb just doesn’t pop up over our heads.
The second is “Remember compassion
in the midst of anger” Bero’gez ra’chem
tizkor…Around us there is so much anger, stress, crankiness, edginess, and
impatience. It feels like the world is
on edge. There are 7 billion, 442
million, 886 (or so) people on earth flying past each other at digital light
speed, car horns blaring, lives exposed on social media more than we’d care to
realize [even for those of us who are not on Facebook]. And so we ask God to remember compassion for
each of us when thing don’t work out the way we hoped, when we’re lonely and
lost and angry with ourselves, angry with God.
We ask God to help us be gentle, not backing down or giving up – but
patience in strength and endurance.
The 9th of Av makes the
evils of the world more real to us because we choose to confront them through
the lens of our lived experience, to shed tears at what we’ve lost while never
forgetting how far we’ve come against all odds.
And if we find ourselves laughing
like Rabbi Akiva, then let’s laugh, release the tension, notice the irony, and
live with things unfinished and in disorder, at least for a day.
