For the past few years, many in Israel, including some religious Jews, have expressed a certain discomfort with the mourning customs surrounding Tisha B’Av. Is it really appropriate to mourn the loss of Jewish sovereignty nearly 2,000 years ago in the midst of a reborn Jewish nation?
Do we not express a certain lack of appreciation if we mourn as if we were still in exile? With the Ingathering of the Exiles in full swing, Jerusalem rebuilt and teeming with Jewish life, a renaissance in Jewish education happening all around us… should we continue to mourn a loss that is gradually being healed?
But perhaps these are the wrong questions.
The way we choose to commemorate communal sorrows is indicative of the peculiar way that we experience communal memory. We intentionally relive. We fast as if we could still alter the outcome. We refuse to come to terms.
This is as it should be. The fact that we continue to mourn indicates that there is something here that we instinctively know we should not “get over”. We do not mourn merely because Jerusalem fell. Cities can be rebuilt. We mourn because something within us failed before the walls ever did.
Tisha B’Av is not primarily about remembering what others did to us. It is about remembering what we did to ourselves. Enemies change from age to age; the underlying dangers do not.
A national flashback
Any survivor will tell you that the anniversary of a traumatic event is the time when one is most likely to relive it. The same is true of communal memory. Tisha B’Av is an intentionally triggering “national flashback”.
When we trigger a national flashback, we keep ever before our eyes the crucial question: would we, today, with all of our history to remind us, make the same mistakes we originally made?
The answer can be found in today’s headlines.
Are We Listening?
Have we learned to disagree without denying one another’s legitimacy? Can we still distinguish passionate conviction from contempt? When did political opponents become enemies rather than fellow citizens?
Increasingly, disparate segments of Israeli society no longer feel responsible for one another’s burdens. Groups that once saw themselves as partners in a common national enterprise now often speak as though the concerns of others are someone else’s problem.
Too often, our leaders speak to their own constituencies rather than to the nation as a whole. The ability to lead an entire people has become less important than the ability to mobilize one’s own tribe.
Public confidence in many of our institutions has steadily eroded. Whether in politics, the courts, the media, or even religious leadership, suspicion increasingly replaces trust. A society cannot achieve unity if every institution is seen as serving only one camp.
One of the great tests of any nation is whether its citizens believe that they share both the blessings and the burdens of national life. When large parts of society begin to feel that sacrifice is unequally distributed, resentment becomes almost inevitable. Tisha B’Av reminds us how quickly such resentment can harden into internal strife.
Reasons for hope
We have repeatedly learned that, in moments of crisis, we are capable of remarkable unity and self-sacrifice. The understanding that “Kol Yisrael arevim ze l’ze”, that we are all responsible for one another, is deeply embedded in our national psyche.
For the past 2,000 years, we were not in a position to repeat the mistakes of the past. Now we are.
The greater challenge is whether we can preserve that sense of shared destiny once the immediate danger has passed. Tisha B’Av asks precisely that question. Can we remain one people when no external enemy forces us to be?
Far from being made obsolete by the rebirth of the Jewish state, Tisha B’Av is more relevant now than at any time in the past. For the past 2,000 years, we were not in a position to repeat the mistakes of the past. Now we are. Our national rebirth brings us face to face with many of the same tests that we so dismally failed before. A look at the headlines should make it clear that it’s far too early to declare victory.
There’s nothing like a “national flashback” to make us acutely aware of what awaits us if we fail again.
Memory as Responsibility
Memory, even when painful, is the key to learning from our mistakes. The flashbacks suffered by trauma survivors are more than an endless reliving of the past; they are the mind’s attempt to change the ending. Likewise, our days of mourning allow us, as a people, to remember the past viscerally enough to learn from it, and to choose a different ending.
On Tisha B’Av we acknowledge that wrong decisions have consequences, that what is lost can never be regained. It is a day of honoring lost potential, so that we will finally learn that what is most precious is also the most fragile. We mourn not only what was destroyed, but what facilitated that destruction.
The purpose of Tisha B’Av is not to keep us living in the past. It is to keep the past from becoming our future.
