Tishah B'Av: An Earthquake in the Soul of the People

The ultimate purpose of sacrifices in Temple times is reflected in the root of the Hebrew word for sacrifice, korban, which means, "to bring close." The role of the priests in the Temple was to facilitate the process of bringing the people close to God through the rituals of sacrifices and offerings. The great trauma of the destruction of the Temple was due in part to the sudden and profound sense of loss and desperation that the people must have felt at having their mechanism for drawing close to God suddenly torn away and destroyed.

The ninth day of Av has become a holy vessel strong enough to contain the sorrows of many of the tragedies that have befallen the people throughout our history. Just as the time frames placed on mourning practices such as shiva and sh’loshim help us to mourn and move on, this annual container [of Tisha B’ Av] invites us to remember and grow from these historical tragedies without becoming stuck in ongoing grief or mourning. A vessel for grief becomes a vessel for healing and for transformation.”

Tisha B’Av is the moment of turning, the moment when we turn away from denial and begin to face exile and alienation as they manifest themselves in our own lives—in our alienation and estrangement from God, in our alienation from ourselves and from others. Teshuvah—turning, repentance—is the essential gesture of the High Holiday season. It is the gesture by which we seek to heal this alienation and to find at-one-ment: to connect with God, to reconcile with others, and to anchor ourselves in the ground of our actual circumstances, so that it is this reality that shapes our actions and not just the habitual, unconscious momentum of our lives.

Mourning the death of a loved one can feel like an earthquake in the soul. It takes time for healing and settling to take place. The destruction of the Temple was an earthquake in the soul of the Jewish people. Delving into the ways in which the rabbis made meaning following this tragedy is uplifting, even as we mourn. Tisha B’Av offers healing and demonstrates the resiliency and creativity of the soul of the Jewish people.

Man suffers, but he must not lower himself to such self-concern that he begs God to cure his ills. Instead, he must realize that God suffers along with him; the Shekhinah takes upon Herself the pain of suffering man. But in that case, we must extend full sympathy for the Shekhinah in its suffering. This is far more than a "technique," a kind of spiritual trickery. What it implies is that man must move off the dead center of self-interest and be concerned with others—beginning with the Other—and only then will he experience psychic and spiritual succor.

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion (Ps 137:1).

We, the children of Israel, are indeed destined and prepared at any moment and any time to restore the configuration of the Shekhinah, by means of all the minutiae of our service [of God], both before the time of the Temple and after its destruction. The prayers on our lips take the place of the sacrifices, and our table stands in place of the altar. So states the holy Zohar: It is the purpose of a human being's table to purify them from all iniquities. But the study of Torah is a substitute for everything... Through the intermediacy of Torah study and prayer, and even of eating food and drinking water in faith, one is able to unify the limbs of the Shekhinah that were shattered [in exile]...

This, then, is the meaning of By the rivers of Babylon: after we were exiled from our father's table, our holy Temple, there we sat down, i.e., even there God has granted us laws and statutes by means of which we are able to realign the limbs of the Shekhinah, as mentioned. Nothing in the world is diminished from our service of God, and wherever Israel is exiled, the Shekhinah is exiled with them, so that we can restore the shekinah's configuration and repair its structure...

From the foregoing we understand that even now, when the Temple is not in existence, if only we fulfill the dictum In all your ways acknowledge God (Prov 3:6) and do no deeds whatsoever other than those that entail some service to the Creator [we can attain spiritual eminenence]. This applies to all times and occasions, no matter how unalike they are, fore there are times to laugh and times to weep. Both [seasons] pertain to the study of Torah and the service of God. All these seasons and occurrences are nothing in themselves, for their vitality is derived from them by means of the quality of our deeds. One must serve God at every opportunity in accordance with its own value. This will perfect the soul and restore it to its full plenitude even at a time to weep.

Implicit in [Hasidic imagery] is the notion that God has need for human help in the ongoing redemption of the universe, which is also the redemption and fulfillment of the divine self.

The sacrifice of omnipotence in such a concept, long troubling to kabbalah's Jewish critics, should pose little difficulty to moderns who, especially in the face of the Holocaust, see little evidence of omnipotence as a divine attribute. On the contrary, a sense of human partnership with God in the redemption that both require should be an exciting model for contemporary theology. In this partnership, as we would read it today, humans are needed to take a fully active role, for only they can act on the material plane. God is the source of inspiration and the ever-renewing center of strength for this ongoing struggle. In fact, the separation between that which is human action and that which is the handiwork of God through human agency seems to be an artificial one. Even though only humanity is active in uplifting the sparks, we are not alone in our labors.

If things are good, I know they come from You.

If bad, from You;

But if from You, why, then, it is good!

We live in a broken world… Exile—another name for brokenness—is not just the current condition of the Jewish people; according to the Kabbalah, it is the fundamental condition of the universe and of God. Before the beginning, before there was a heaven and an earth, God’s light poured forth, intended for divine vessels. But the vessels were not strong enough to hold the light and, in a primordial catastrophe known as “the shattering of the vessels” (shevirat ha-kelim), the divine light—God’s very being—was scattered like so many sparks. Today, we live surrounded by these sparks and by the shards of the vessels that were meant to hold them.

There is a Jewish tradition from Hasidism, that teaches us the virtue, even the necessity of “being broken” (tsubrokhenkayt). As a Hasidic saying paradoxically declares: There is nothing more whole than a broken heart. Ayn davar yoter shalem me lev shavur. Here we find the same Hebrew word for “whole”—shalem—that lies at the root of Jerusalem.

So what is the wholeness that we seek when we sing “Next year in Jerusalem”? Is it a return from exile or the embrace of a broken heart? Is exile a punishment that distances us from God or an opportunity to get closer to God? Is it more Jewish to be broken than whole? Or is the point of Judaism the attempt to find wholeness in brokenness?

Life bets that we won’t be willing to endure the suffering it requires. Life bets that we will try to shut out the suffering, and so shut out life in the bargain. Tisha B’Av sidles up to us, whispering conspiratorially with a racing form over its mouth. Tisha B’Av has a hot tip for us: Take the suffering. Take the loss. Turn toward it. Embrace it. Let the walls come down...

Our suffering, the unresolved element of our lives, is also from God. It is the instrument by which we are carried back to God, not something to be defended against, but rather to be embraced. And this embrace begins here on Tisha B’Av, seven weeks before Rosh Hashanah, so that by the Ten Days of Teshuvah, we are ready for transformation. We can enter the present moment of our lives and consciously alter that moment. We can end our exile.