Can You Win the Blame Game?

The Violation of Jerusalem by Prof. Rabbi Rachel Adelman, thetorah.comAs is common in the shame-blame language of rape culture, one might ask: “What was she wearing?” or “Was she drinking?” It is precisely on this distinction, between having sinned and being shamed, that Bat Tzion interrupts the narrator and cries out to YHWH: “Look, O YHWH, upon my misery, for the enemy is triumphant!”

How many of you go to that place, when something bad happens, the first thing you want to know is whose fault is it? I'd rather it be MY fault than no one's fault. Because why? It gives us some semblance of control. If you enjoy blaming, this is where you should stick your fingers in your ear and do the "nanana" thing, cos I'm getting ready to ruin it. Here's what we know from the research. Blame is simply the discharging of discomfort and pain. It has an inverse relationship with accountability. Accountability, by definition, is a vulnerable process. It means me calling you and saying, "My feelings were really hurt about this." And talking, not blaming. Blaming is simply a way that we discharge anger. People who blame a lot seldom have the tenacity and grit to actually hold people accountable, because we spend all of our energy raging for 15 seconds and figuring out whose fault something is. Blaming's very corrosive in relationships. It's one of the reasons we miss our opportunities for empathy. Because when something happens and we're hearing a story, we're not really listening. We're in the place where I was - making the connections as quickly as we can about whose fault something was.

Rabbi Alan Lew, ‘This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation’Why was the Temple destroyed? the rabbis of the Talmud asked. Because of sinat chinam—gratuitous hatred; because the Jewish people had fallen into factional bickering; because they had broken up into warring cults and were busily engaged in fratricidal religious disputes, each one claiming to be the true Israel and denying the legitimacy of all the others. Isaiah Gafni is an Israeli professor of ancient history.

On holidays celebrating ancient historical events, he is frequently asked to appear on Israeli radio and TV to participate in panels with other learned commentators. On Tisha B’Av, there is invariably a commentator from the Israeli left who explains that the Temple was destroyed and Israel was conquered by the Romans because of the intolerance of the religious right of that day. Then a right-wing commentator explains that both the Temple and Israel itself fell to the Romans because of the failure of the Jewish people to unite against the enemy militarily. Then it invariably falls upon Gafni to explain that there was one reason for the fall of the Temple and one reason alone: Rome was absolutely invincible, and its huge armies were marching through the world mowing down everyone in their path, and nothing could have stopped them from taking Jerusalem, no matter how tolerant the religious right nor how unified the armies of Israel might have been.

So what were the rabbis of the Talmud talking about when they said that the Temple was destroyed by gratuitous hatred? What was Moses talking about? Why did they blame the people for what had happened, when the objective evidence of history clearly seems to exonerate them?

The answer is that neither the rabbis nor Moses cared a fig about history. They weren’t historians; they were spiritual leaders, and spiritually, the only question worth asking about any conflict, any recurring catastrophe, is this: What is my responsibility for it? How am I complicit in it? How can I prevent it from happening again?

When things go bad, there is an enormous temptation to blame it on externals, on the evil of others, or on an unlucky turn of events. Spiritually, however, we are called to resist this temptation, no matter how strong it may be and no matter how strongly rooted in fact or reason or history it may seem. Spiritually we are called to responsibility, to ask, What am I doing to make this recur again and again? Even if it is a conflict that was clearly thrust upon me from the outside, how am I plugging in to it, what is there in me that needs to be engaged in this conflict? Why can’t I just let it slough off me like water off a duck’s back, as I am able to do with so many other things?

Our power in this world is considerable, but also very circumscribed. It is only here and now, in this moment, in this place—in the present—that we can act. We cannot act in the past, we cannot act in the future, and most certainly we cannot act through someone else’s experience. So from a spiritual point of view, we need to ask, What can I do here and now, in the present-tense reality of my own experience?

Prof. Rachel AdelmanTisha Be’Av commemorates the greatest tragedies that befell the Jewish people—the destruction of the First and Second Temples, repeated exiles and expulsions. To these I would add the most recent events of October 7th. In one day, more than 1,200 men, women, and children (most of whom were civilians) were killed by Hamas terrorists, over 250 were captured and held for ransom in Gaza, often in appalling conditions.

Many women were subject to sexual abuse, gang rape, and mutilation before being slaughtered. It is their cry, the “scream before the silence” (to borrow Sheryl Sandberg’s title for her recent documentary) that commands me to listen. So too Bat Tzion cries out in Lamentations. Simply by hearing, bearing witness, we may participate in the process of healing, and thereby offer some comfort to her, who poignantly had none to comfort her. I take seriously the questions in Lamentations:

“How can I bear witness for you? What can I liken to you?…How can I comfort you?….Who can heal you?” (2:13)

These are not rhetorical questions, but genuine interrogatives about how we approach trauma in the biblical text, as in life. In the words of Theodor Adorno: “The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition for all truth.”