A Hard Tisha B’Av

by Rabbi Dr. Ismar Schorsch, Chancellor Emeritus, Jewish Theological Seminary,

7/6/2025.

Despite the comforting fact that fasting gets easier with age, this year's Tisha be-Av was the hardest of my life.  From beginning to end, I found the gap between words and deeds insurmountable.  The day commemorates graphically what others did to us, including on October seventh, with almost no attention to what we have done and are doing to others.  I am starkly reminded of the elegy we recite on Shabbat morning in the synagogue before returning the Torah scroll to its scacred ark in which we lament the countless victims of the early crusades.  Regardless of our pain we are not entirely oblivious to the righteous Gentiles among us, witness the unexpected words of our memorial: "May our God remember them (the innocent victims) for good along with the other righteous of the world."

Clearly the existence of an awesome Jewish state has surely enhanced our contemporary ability to wreak revenge on our enemies, but not at the expense of the moral constraints demanded of us by Judaism.  The fundamental mission of the Prophets in the polities of the First and Second Temples was certainly to denounce the frequent immoral excesses of the monarchies (royalty and laiety) of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms of Israel and Judah.  The fury of the Prophet Amos set the tone: "I loathe, I spurn your festivals, I am not appeased by your solemn assemblies.  If you offer Me burnt offerings - or your meal offerings - I will not accept them; I will pay no heed to your gifts of fatlings" (5:21-22).  Ritual and piety are no substitute for social justice, as I remind myself each morning as I don my Tefillin with a marriage proposal to God: "I will espouse You forever: I will espouse You with righteousness and justice, and with goodness and mercy " (Hosea, 2:21-22). 

The universal import of these words makes of our treatment of others the very fabric of Judaism.

Noticeably, Judaism has only two 24-hour fasts, radically different from one another.  Yom Kippur in the fall offers atonement to individuals brave enough to confront their shortcomings; Tisha be-Av in the summer addresses the fate of Jews as a national community.  They are meant to be equal, comprising the totality of Judaism as it emerged from Abraham and Moses.  It is that equality that perpetuated the deep attachment to the land of Israel during its long exile.  Our immediate challenge as Jews is to retain that balance, to make sure that Judaism qua religion is not submerged and shredded by the power of the Jewish state.  The unremitting violence against helpless Palestinians in Gaza and their wholly innocent coreligionists on the West Bank will saddle Jews with a repulsive religion riddled with hypocrisy and contradictions.  The messianism driving the current government of Israel is sadly out of kilter with traditional Judaism -- and an utter moral abomination.

To what extent are we responsible for the destruction of the Temples that we mourn on Tisha be-Av?  The question is not only that of fallen Jews or Zionists.  Long ago the Rabbis dared to attribute the burning of the First Temple in 586 BCE by the Babylonians to the pervasive practice of idolatry by contemporaneous Jews throughout the first commonwealth and the burning of the Second Temple in 70 CE by the Romans to the irreconcilable divisions among the Jews in the vanguard of the rebellion.  A poetic Rabbinic narrative concretized the global explanation of 586.  As flames consumed the precincts of the First Temple, young priests in training ascended to its roof.  In unison they admitted that “because we have failed to be faithful stewards of Your sanctuary we are returning its keys to You.”  And as they tossed them toward heaven a hand appeared to take them in, whereupon the priests in training jumped off the roof into the raging flames of the Temple (Bav. Taanit 29a).

In that self-critical spirit, I wish to reflect on the origins of the messianic fervor that erupted into two futile, catastrophic rebellions against a Roman empire at the peak of its power.  In brief, the remarkable Maccabean victory over an ever-weakening Seleucid  regime, temporarily in 164 BCE  and finally in 140 BCE, imbued the Hasmonean dynasty that emerged with a distorted sense of its invulnerability.  A victory can sometimes be as portentous as a defeat.

A euphoric assembly of Jews in 140 BCE rewarded Simon, its courageous and astute leader and sole surviving son of Mattathius 's five sons, with a triple crown that included control of the polity, the army and the high priesthood of the Temple.  The last quickly cost him the support of religious conservatives because it violated the genealogical rules of the Temple.  Under Simon's successors, John Hyrcanus and Alexander Jannaeus, the Hasmonean state became little more than a Hellenistic kingdom, determined to expand its borders, diminish its non-Jewish population through conversion or expulsion, and commemorate military victories with religious festivals.  Internally, religious disputes proliferated, becoming a permanent fixture of the realm.  As the Romans penetrated into the Middle East they shoved aside the sorry remnants of the Hasmonean dynasty, ruled for some 30 years indirectly through Herod, their adroit vassal, himself a product of the forced conversion of his father, and then eventually directly through the administration of procurators.  But many Jews deeply resented the loss of sovereignty and the decades following  the death of Herod simmered with insurrection.  In short, the embers of nationalism, fed by the heavy hand of incompetent procurators, never subsided.

The vector of my argument should be clear.  The reckless uprising against Rome was inspired by memory of the unlikely overthrow of the Seleucid monarchy.  As God's intervention had once scrambled the odds in Israel's favor, the even greater odds of defeating Rome would be rectified by yet another act of divine love.  No temple was ever destroyed, it was widely believed, as long as the deity to whom it was dedicated resided therein.  Forgotten were the searing words of the Prophet Ezekiel depicting in graphic terms the slow departure of God's presence from the First Temple rendering the sanctuary indefensible (chapter 10).  The rebellion may have been launched by the priests, but by the time it had been reduced to the desperate defense of a besieged Jerusalem the rebellion was firmly in the ruthless hands of the Zealots.  Death was meted out to anyone daring to leave.  And what prompted the dangerous flight from Jerusalem by Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai was probably an act of utter madness akin to the Zealots’ burning of the granaries to display their absolute conviction that God would come to their rescue.  Faith not food would deliver the Romans into their hands!  But the desolation of the Temple by Titus and the massacre at Masada did not quell the messianism still abroad in the land.  In 132 CE it erupted again in a rebellion of even greater scope and devastation under the united leadership of Bar Kokhba and Rabbi Akiva.  Both leaders and vast numbers of their blind legions went to their death in the carnage that followed. 

It was only the irreparable consequences of these national calamities that finally persuaded the rising Rabbinic leadership of the third century CE to temper the potent messianic illusions that were the legacy of the Maccabean victory.  According to the Talmud, those embarking to leave the land were required to take multiple oaths of passivity: not to retake the land, not to take up arms against their neighbors and not to tinker with the calendar to find out when the Messiah might come (BT Ketuvot 111a).  As in so much of Judaism, moderation was henceforth irrevocably preferred to extremism.