When the earth’s rotation obscures the sun on Monday Jews begin observing the Fast of Tisha B’av, the fast of the ninth of Av. Tisha b’av is one of four fasts on which historically Jews recalled climactic events in the destruction of the first and second temples. Except among the meticulously observant, the other three fasts are unknown. Only Tisha b’Av , the anniversary of the actual destructions, has survived. In the United States, probably because it falls in the summer, even Tisha B’av is widely ignored even by religiously affiliated Jews. But it is a powerful and important holiday. A wise and discerning psychiatrist taught me years ago that if a person cannot experience grief then his or her joy will be diminished as well. And if Jews suppress the memory of our great losses then our joy on the festivals will be lessened, if we bother to mark them at all. Let me tell you about the calamity that the destruction of our temples represents.
For the Jews, as for all the peoples of the Levant, the sacrifice of grain, wine and animals was the principal link to the gods, in our case to the One who had accompanied us through Abraham’s wandering, through slavery in Egypt, through the conquest of the land God promised, and through the reigns of David and his descendants, the time of our greatest glory. While Moses and the other prophets taught and many Jews understood that if we did not observe God’s commandments God would not protect and defend us, no one called for an end to sacrifices. As long as those sacrifices continued to be properly performed God would ultimately save us.
Indeed, in those days, sacrifice and not prayer or mystical exercises, was how Jews experienced God’s presence. Like so much else, that is reflected in the Hebrew language. The Hebrew word we translate as “sacrifice” is l’hakriv. Its root is kuf resh vet, and its root meaning is to approach or draw near. The sacrifices, though performed by priests, brought God near to all the people.
Significantly for this occasion, sacrifices were performed in the place God chose, not incidentally, the place where Abraham bound Isaac, and in the structure God had commanded us to build, the Temple in Jerusalem.
The two temples, one built in Solomon’s reign, and the other begun shortly after the exiles returned from Babylonia, and gloriously enhanced by Herod’s turn of the first millennium reconstruction, were magnificent. In second temple times, when there was a Diaspora, Jews everywhere contributed a fixed amount to maintain the temple. Rich Jews gave great sums to enhance its glory. And many Jews journeyed long distances to come to Jersualem on one or more of the pilgrimage festivals, Sukkot, Pesach, and Shavuot. In the temple the pilgrims purchased and gave the priests a bird or animal to sacrifice for them. Not only Jews but non-Jews knew about the glorious temple built on the high hill in Jerusalem. It was one of the architectural wonders of the Roman World. It was no accident that Jesus came to the Temple to preach the imminence of God’s Kingdom: for Jews the Temple was the center of the Jewish world. It is both difficult for us to appreciate and impossible for us to exaggerate the excitement Some Jews felt when they witnessed the sacrifices. In those moments, no doubt some felt that God was drawing nearer.
Jews felt that the Temple, being God’s House was indestructible. But the prophets warned that it was not. No doubt the Jewish people preserve the gorgeous and ennobling words of Jeremiah and Isaiah partly because they correctly prophesied that the First Temple would be destroyed amidst unspeakable carnage and that the people would be exiled. But no one could imagine the horror and the despair of the survivors when the Holy City that surrounded the Temple was laid waste and God’s House utterly destroyed. That awe filled grief has been captured by one of the most magnificent elegies in all of literature, and for a Jew, the greatest of them all, Eychah, the Book of Lamentations. Listen to poet’s rendering of the voice of the Holy City that sat silent:
“See, O Lord, and consider; for I am become vile. Is it nothing to you, all you that pass by? Behold and see if there be any sorrow like my sorrow, which is done to me, wherewith the Lord has afflicted me in the day of His fierce anger. From above He has sent fire into my bones and it prevails against them. He has spread a net for my feet, He has turned me back, He has made me desolate and faint all the day. The yoke of my transgressions is bound by His hand; they are wreathed and come upon my neck; he has made my strength to fail, the Lord has delivered me into their hands, from whom I am not able to rise up.”
From that first destruction at the hands of the Babylonians, almost miraculously, the Jews did rise up. But from then onward and until the coming of the Messiah, as the Prophet Zechariah tells us, we Jews have and will observe the Fast of the Ninth of Av, the date when the First Temple fell.
The Romans knew this history. Their ruthless, cruel oppression, the robbery, confiscations, and executions they visited upon the people drove the Jews mad. They turned upon each other and upon the Romans. To the end many believed that they could successfully resist the might of the Roman Army because God would never allow His temple to be destroyed. So fierce was their belief that some of the Roman soldiers shared it. But both were wrong. Perhaps by design, on the ninth of Av the Romans entered the Temple’s inner sanctuary, the Holy of Holies, committed an obscenity, and torched it. The unspeakable suffering of Jerusalem’s inhabitants had been for naught.
Would the Jewish people survive this desperate calamity, a calamity that seemed to prove that God had deserted us forever? Your presence here on a Shabbat morning provides the answer. The question is how did we do it? The detailed answer is lost in the mists of time, but we can infer some of its outlines from the Talmuds and Midrashim, the writings that preserve the ideas, perhaps even the actual words, of the first rabbis. The temple priests perforce no longer had any function. But the rabbis, some of them lineal descendants of the Pharisees, adapted some aspects of the temple ritual and replanted it in our homes and communal buildings, synagogues, as it were, and elevated fixed prayers and study to the places previously occupied by sacrifice. The economic and social underpinnings of the surviving Jewish communities are harder to tease out. But the great creative energy of our people enabled us to live on in Diaspora. Indeed the very fact of dispersion ironically helped to preserve us, for when a community was decimated, its survivors could flee to another; and the anti-Jewish killing hordes, living before globalization, and unable reach more than a fraction of us, quickly turned to other pleasures.
Thus the grief of Tisha B’av, was transferred from one temple to another, from life to poetry and then to ritual, and now to reflection as well. We should relive our grief come Monday night, and hear the cry of despair in the words and the keening wail of the Eychah trope. That grief is an antidote to arrogance and a reminder that for us and all people exultation and placidity often, perhaps always, are followed by loss and destruction. But our sadness may be leavened by the hope-filled and implicit lesson of our coming together that our forebears worked a great metamorphosis. Because of it, our religion, our memories, our people survived. Truth to tell, we live in a time not unlike the period after the destruction of the Second Temple. For the third temple, the imagined world later generations created has itself crumbled, smashed by the twin forces of holocaust and a whole new way of understanding our world and testing for truth. We call that new way science, reason, empiricism. And it is our task, yours and mine, lay people, clergy, and scholars to bring about the metamorphosis that we Jews must undergo if we are to go on remembering. May our observance of the coming Fast help us to remember and to build.