Tisha B’Av is the great day of Jewish national mourning. Its prayers and restrictions recall destruction, exile, persecution and the loss of the Beit HaMikdash. Yet mourning alone does not exhaust its meaning. The day also asks what must be repaired before what was lost can be restored.
As a non-Jew who has spent much of his adult life studying Jewish history, thought and public life, I would like to suggest that Tisha B’Av may have a particularly urgent role in our generation. In a period that may be approaching redemption, it may be wise to make the day an especially searching examination of sins and failures committed by Jews against fellow Jews-all fellow Jews.
Jewish religious life already contains a powerful annual rhythm of repentance. Yom Kippur naturally directs the individual toward his or her standing before God. Its central questions concern fidelity, obedience, prayer, spiritual negligence and the repair of the relationship between adam laMakom. Interpersonal wrongs are also essential to Yom Kippur, and the day famously does not absolve them without reconciliation. Nevertheless, its atmosphere is fundamentally that of the individual soul standing in judgment before the Creator.
Tisha B’Av offers the possibility of a complementary emphasis.
It is the day on which the Jewish people remembers the collapse of its national and spiritual centre. It therefore lends itself naturally to examining the condition of the people as a people: the bonds between Jews, the quality of Jewish public discourse, the willingness of one sector to bear responsibility for another, and the extent to which ideological conflict has weakened the consciousness of shared destiny.
That task has become increasingly urgent.
The Jewish people today possess sovereignty, military strength, flourishing Torah institutions, a revived language and a national centre in its ancestral land. These achievements have given Jews forms of collective power unavailable to most previous generations. They have also made internal conflict more consequential. Disputes are no longer confined to distant communities with limited influence over one another. They shape the government, army, courts, economy, education system and public culture of the Jewish state.
The disagreements themselves are often serious and unavoidable. Questions of security, religion and state, judicial authority, military service, settlements, economic burden and the character of Israeli society cannot be resolved by appeals to harmony alone. A mature people must be able to debate such matters vigorously.
The spiritual danger begins when Jews cease to see disagreement as a conflict within one people and begin to see fellow Jews as alien camps whose defeat matters more than the health of the whole.
This danger is visible across the spectrum. Religious Jews can speak of secular Jews as though they were merely spiritually empty or nationally unreliable. Secular Jews can speak of religious Jews as though faith itself were a pathology or an expression of backwardness. Haredim, Religious Zionists, traditional Jews and progressive Jews may each be reduced by opponents to a caricature. Israelis can dismiss Diaspora Jews as irrelevant, while Diaspora Jews can judge Israelis without bearing the burdens of Israeli life. Ashkenazi and Sephardi grievances may be instrumentalized long after the circumstances that produced them have changed.
Sinat chinam is intensified by political and media incentives that reward anger, sensationalism and public humiliation. Leaders gain attention by presenting every dispute as a struggle for survival. Entire sectors are described as parasites, traitors, fanatics, cowards or enemies of democracy, Torah or the Jewish future.
A society can survive harsh debate. It cannot indefinitely survive the steady erosion of mutual trust and legitimacy.
This is why Tisha B’Av may require more than general appeals to unity. Calls for unity are often made precisely when no one wishes to reconsider his or her own conduct. They can turn into demands that the other side fall silent, compromise first or accept the speaker’s definition of the common good.
Soul-searching demands something more exacting.
It asks whether I have represented opposing Jews fairly. Whether I have attributed motives to them that I would resent if attributed to me. Whether I have excused cruelty, mockery or dishonesty because it served my political camp. Whether my concern for Jewish unity includes Jews whom I find difficult, misguided or even dangerous. Whether I recognise that the obligations of Klal Yisrael extend beyond those who share my beliefs, lifestyle and voting habits.
The words “all Israel" are easy to pronounce in prayer. Their seriousness is tested by the Jews one is least inclined to include.
This does not mean that every position is equally valid or that every political compromise is wise. Love of fellow Jews cannot require moral indifference. A person may believe that another Jewish movement, party or leader is causing grave harm and therefore be obligated to oppose it.
The question is how that opposition is conducted.
Can Jews fight over the future of the state without denying one another a place in that future? Can they defend Torah without despising Jews who do not observe it? Can they defend secular freedoms without treating religious devotion as irrationality or pathology? Can they reject an argument while retaining concern for the dignity, safety and spiritual welfare of the person making it?
These are not secondary matters of tone. They concern whether Jewish collective life remains covenantal or becomes merely tribal and competitive.
Tisha B’Av is uniquely suited to this reckoning because the Temple was never the possession of one Jewish faction. It represented a centre toward which the whole people was oriented. A society preparing for its restoration must therefore ask whether it is capable of sustaining a sacred centre shared by Jews who remain profoundly different from one another.
The Third Temple, understood literally or spiritually, cannot become the headquarters of the victorious sector of Jewish society. It must belong to all Israel. Any preparation for it that deepens contempt between Jews contradicts the unity the Temple is meant to embody.
The same principle applies to the redemptive significance many attribute to the present age. The return to Zion, the establishment of the state and the gathering of exiles may be seen as stages in a divine process, as extraordinary achievements of human courage, or as both. In every interpretation, the rebirth of Jewish national life places a new responsibility upon Jews.
Inside a scattered and vulnerable nation, internal conflicts were partly contained by the limits of communal power and partly inhibited by external danger. A sovereign people must learn to govern intractable differences through institutions, restraint and a shared commitment to national continuity.
That requires stronger habits of respect, fairness and mutual responsibility than exile required. Jews now possess the power not only to protect one another but also to injure one another through law, institutions, public rhetoric and the distribution of collective burdens. The moral demands of sovereignty therefore extend beyond external defence. They include the creation of a public culture in which disagreement does not dissolve peoplehood and in which solidarity remains strong enough to sustain a people that continues to face serious external threats.
Tisha B’Av could become the principal annual occasion for examining this dimension of Jewish life.
Synagogues, schools, families and communities might devote more attention to failures of speech and solidarity between Jewish groups. Rabbis and public figures might address the wrongs committed by their own camp before cataloguing the wrongs of others. Individuals might identify one Jewish community they habitually misunderstand and make a serious effort to hear how its members understand their own fears and responsibilities.
The goal would not be emotional warmth toward everyone. The goal would be to restore the conviction that every Jew shares a common destiny and that no political victory can justify the degradation of that bond.
A non-Jew should be cautious about instructing Jews in the observance of a sacred Jewish day. Yet a friend may be permitted to express a hope.
My hope is that Tisha B’Av will increasingly become the day on which Jews ask not only why the Temple was destroyed, but whether Jewish society is becoming worthy and capable of receiving it again.
Yom Kippur will continue to summon every Jew to stand before God and examine the state of his or her soul. Tisha B’Av can summon the Jewish people to examine the condition of the bonds joining one Jew to another.
For the Third Temple-whether it descends from Heaven or is rebuilt upon the earth-to stand among us, Am Yisrael must first strengthen the human foundations upon which the nation’s sacred calling rests.
Every Jew must help build within his or her own heart a temple of ahavat chinam: a love that does not depend upon agreement, similarity or political convenience, but upon the recognition that every Jew belongs to the same people, participates in the same covenant and shares responsibility for the same destiny.
Perhaps the rebuilding of the Beit HaMikdash will begin in earnest when enough such temples have been built.
Rafael Castro is an Italian-Colombian independent political analyst based in Berlin. A graduate of Yale and Hebrew University, he can be reached at rafaelcastro78@gmail.com