TISHA B’AV 2011/5771: THE PAST AND FUTURE OF ISRAEL & THE JEWISH PEOPLE

TISHA B’AV—AND THE FUTURE OF ISRAEL
Baruch Cohen

In loving memory of beloved Malca z’l

 

Tisha B’Av—the ninth day of Av—a day of mourning, a symbol for all the disasters which occurred again and again to the Jewish people. Tisha B’Av, which commemorates the loss of Jewish independence, the first Temple destroyed in 586 BCE by Nebuchadnezzar, is a reminder to us that the historic enemies of Israel have not vanished, that they still exist to this day.

Tisha B’Av recalls the terrible price paid for our existence as Am Israel—But we are here!Am Israel Chai! The Jewish People Lives! Zionism more than any other movement in our modern history has successfully brought us together: secular, orthodox, socialists, right-wingers, ultra-orthodox, “settlers”: we are Am Ehad, one people, who together re-established a great, strong, admired, and independent State! Zion, the land of Israel, and by extension of the Jewish people the world over!

This year Tisha B’Av reminds us that we do not live in an easy time. Ferocious anti-Semitism all over the world, and the delegitimation of the State of Israel by our enemies, must unite us through pride in the accomplishments of our indestructible Rock, the democratic Jewish State that is called Zion!

Tisha B’Av must bring us together under the banner of Zionism, and an inclusive Jewish Peoplehood indissolubly tied to modern Israel!

Long live the Jewish People and the State of Israel!

(Baruch Cohen is Research Chairman at the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research.)

 

WHY I STILL FAST ON TISHA B’AV
Rabbi Micah Peltz
Haaretz, August 8, 2011

 

Last year, in Haaretz, Anshel Pfeffer began an opinion piece about Tisha B’Av with an apocryphal story about Napoleon Bonaparte. The legendary French leader went for a walk one summer night and heard voices lamenting in a strange language. They may have come from a grand synagogue or a miserable hovel.

Upon asking why the men inside were sitting on the floor and mourning, he was told these were Jews grieving for their destroyed temple in Jerusalem. “How long ago did this happen?” asked Bonaparte. “Eighteen-hundred years” was the answer.

“A nation that can mourn for so long the loss of its land and temple,” the emperor is supposed to have said prophetically, “will return one day to their land and see it rebuilt.”

This is a moving story about the power of Tisha B’Av to evoke a historical memory for the Jewish people. Pfeffer acknowledges this, and then goes on to argue that the Ninth of Av has “lost any relevance beyond the historical.”

Pfeffer’s argument has been heard before. Many have wondered, after the founding of Israel, if there really is a need for a day of fasting and mourning the destruction of the temples in Jerusalem and the exile of the Jewish people. This claim was strengthened after the Six Day War, when Israel captured the Jordanian-held Jerusalem and the Temple Mount itself.

It’s a good argument, and even has support in our tradition. The prophet Zechariah says that, when the Jewish people return to Israel, the four fast days of mourning will become days of a rejoicing. So why still fast?

Despite this arguably logical line of reasoning, the observance of Tisha B’Av connects the Jewish people to its history, to Israel, and to fellow Jews in a powerful way. As study after study shows the fraying of these relationships, marking Tisha B’Av can reinforce these ties.

Though the Mishna states that five tragedies occurred on Tisha B’Av, the list has grown. In addition to the sin of the spies, the destruction of the temples, the putting down of Bar Kochba’s revolt, and the plowing under of the Temple Mount by the Romans, lists of the calamities that have befallen our people on Tisha B’Av now include the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, the outbreak of World War I in 1914, and the mass liquidation of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942.

Tisha B’Av is a day, like many practices in Judaism, which has taken on additional meaning as the centuries have unfolded to this day. The Masorti movement in Israel has declared Tisha B’Av this year as a day of solidarity with the “tent protest” movement. It is imploring people to remember the lesson of sinat hinam, of senseless hatred, that led to the destruction of the second Temple.

Tisha B’Av provides a framework to address issues that are availing society today.

Tisha B’Av serves not only as a reminder of the tragedies that have befallen us, but also how we made it through as a people. The notion of peoplehood is waning today. Our personalized culturecelebrates the individual over the community, while Judaism teaches the opposite.

This is why the mourning period is canceled out for holidays, we can only pray a full service with a minyan, and most of our prayers are written in the plural. Judaism, which has always been counter-cultural, is even more so today. While on Yom Kippur we fast and atone for ourselves as individuals, on Tisha B’Av we do these things for the community.

Our diversity of opinions in Jewish life does not preclude our unity as a people. We have rarely had strength in numbers, but we have always had strength in purpose. At times it feels like we are losing that today. Tisha B’Av reminds us of the terrible consequences of not working together for the good of all of our people—lesson both Jews in Israel and abroad could stand to remember.

As we learn in Ta’anit, the section of the Talmud about fasting, “All who mourn for Jerusalem will see her in her joy.…” Napoleon was right—we have returned to our land and seen it rebuilt. But that does not mean that Tisha B’Av has lost its meaning. On the contrary, its lessons deeply resonate in the face of the challenges that confront us today in both Israel and the greater Jewish world.

 

1942: TISHA B’AV IN THE WARSAW GHETTO
Larry Domnitch
Arutz Sheva, August 8, 2011

 

Before the Germans captured the city of Warsaw during the 1939 Blitzkrieg, there were 360,000 Jews in the Polish capital. The Jews were forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, which was established on November 15, 1940.

Disease and starvation claimed many of the ghetto’s inhabitants but the population was maintained by the continual influx of Jewish refugees. Warsaw’s Jewish population soon reached 460,000. The Jews of the Ghetto initially did not realize that they were being forced into what was a holding pen for the slaughterhouse—Treblinka, the death camp that would destroy eight hundred thousand people, the vast majority of whom were Jews, within the span of a few months.

On July 22, the eve of Tisha B’Av 1942, the death sentence for Warsaw’s Jews was issued. In the early morning hours the Judenrat was convened and the authorities for ‘Resettlement Affairs’ ordered the “resettlement in the east of all Jews residing in Warsaw regardless of age and sex.” The order called for six thousand Jews per day to be rounded up and deported.

A week before the announcement of the deportations, rumors had already spread in the ghetto. The Jews were gripped with terror. Head of the Judenrat, Adam Czerniakow asked the Nazi officials for an explanation, but received nothing but denials. On the 22nd of July, at 7:30 in the morning, Czerniakow, along with the members of the Judenrat, were told that the deportations were to begin the next day—Tisha B’Av—and the expulsions would include children.

He immediately understood the gravity of such an order and that his previous cooperation with the Germans was a grievous error. This was an order he refused to sign. The night following the first deportation, he took his own life, leaving the following note, “I am powerless my heart trembles in sorrow and compassion. I can no longer bear all this.”

The diary A Cup of Tears, by Abraham Lewin, offers the following description of the events that occurred on that day, “Disaster after disaster, misfortune after misfortune. The small ghetto has been turned out on to the streets.… Rain has been falling all day. Weeping. The Jews are weeping. They are hoping for a miracle. The expulsion is continuing. Buildings are blockaded.”

Chaim Kaplan, in his diary on the Warsaw Ghetto, foresaw the doom that awaited the Jews of Warsaw with the issuance of the decree. He had surmised that the deportations can only be a death sentence and those who deny it, “grasp at straws.” In a July 26 entry, Kaplan wrote, “We, the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto are now experiencing the reality. Our good fortune is that our days are numbered—that we shall not have to live long under conditions as these.”

The decree ordered all Jews to be deported except those who worked in German industries or the Judenrat. Over the next nine days 66,701 Jews were deported to Treblinka.

At Treblinka, a sign displayed at the entrance intended to maintain calm stated, “Do not worry about your future.… All of you are headed for the east, to work; while you work, your wives shall take care of your houses. But first you must bathe and your clothes must be cleaned of lice.”

Only moments later, after merciless beatings by SS and Ukrainian guards, the victims were herded into the crematoria.

On July 29, the next round of Warsaw’s deportations began. The SS, along with Latvian and Lithuanian troops, closed off individual blocks and forced people from their homes. Many were shot on the spot; others were savagely beaten. When the crowd’s numbers reached a few thousand, they were herded off to the “Umschlagplatz”—a deportation railway yard, to be transported.

Every morning and evening, the roundups took place. Over the month of August, 142,525 were deported, with 135,120 Jews being sent to Treblinka. By mid August, it was widely understood that “resettlement” was a myth. Enough evidence had already reached the ghetto by witnesses to Nazi atrocities. By October 3, 310,000 Jews were deported, including most members of the Judenrat.

Many were deported on September 21—Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

Hillel Seidman in his diary of the Warsaw Ghetto, wrote in an entry he entitled The Night of Tears, “As Night falls I finally reach home, my brain bursting with terrifying images. Crossing our courtyard I notice our small shtiebl. About twenty men sit on upturned benches—it’s Tisha B’Av tonight! Two flickering candles dimly light up the bent heads, with their eyes staring into the far distance, as that heartrending tune wells up: Eichah.…”

“The tune that was perhaps first composed at the exile from Jerusalem and has since absorbed the tears of generations. We Jews of Warsaw, sons of those exiles, sit on the ground to mourn our own personal churban, the destruction of a major kehillah—the largest and most vigorous in Europe—which resulted from that earlier churban. We weep at our fate, a nation without a land, within the grasp of our fiercest enemy and condemned to death. We grieve both for the loss of the Beis Hamikdash and the extinction of our lives.”

On Tisha B’Av 1942, the well-organized Nazi killing machine whose horror knew no bounds was set into high gear in the city of Warsaw. Other ghettos would face the same fate.

A chronicler of the Warsaw ghetto, Emanuel Ringelbaum, called the eve of that Tisha B’Av in 1942 “The blackest day in Jewish history in modern times.”

 

A WORLD WITHOUT ISRAEL?
Stewart Weiss
Jerusalem Post, August 7, 2011

 

Each year in recent times, as the ninth of Av approaches, we ask the question: How can we sit and mourn for Jerusalem, when the city has been so magnificently rebuilt? Why do we “afflict” ourselves for 25 hours when we have returned to the Jewish state in amazing numbers, and built a wonderful country from the ground up, with a superb army, world-class universities and a brilliant economy? Has Tisha B’av become passé? These thoughts were reinforced last week when my wife and I took a Segway tour on the newly-refurbished Armon HaNatziv promenade. Led by our expert guide Chaim, we beheld a magnificent view of Jerusalem rebuilt, with its many sparkling new neighborhoods against the ancient villages and walls of the Old City. From that elevated view, one can truly appreciate how unique our Jewish capital is, and how it so brilliantly melds the past and the future.

Yet despite all this, I will still recite lamentations on Tisha B’av; I will still add the somber Nachem plea for consolation to my prayers. Not only in remembrance for the spiritually-elevated world, centered around the Temple, which vanished when Jerusalem was destroyed (twice); but also for the shuddering thought of a third destruction, God forbid. For only when we force ourselves to consider what the effect would be of another Holocaust—this time on Israeli soil—can we begin to relate to the destruction that was visited here.

And so, with apologies to the History Channel’s “Life After People” series, I ask you to gather up your courage and consider A World Without Israel.

This scenario—may it never come to pass—occurs sometime in the future.

The combined forces of Syria, Hezbo- Lebanon, a radicalized Egypt and an only semi-reluctant Jordan—spurred on by the Palestinian masses, now fully under the sway of Hamas—have flooded Israel with millions of combatants.

After bombarding the Jewish state with tens of thousands of missiles, causing hundreds of thousands of Jews to flee (no easy task after a shell-shocked Ben- Gurion airport is closed), Arab mobs have crossed our borders, overwhelming the courageous but hopelessly outnumbered soldiers of the IDF. The smell of victory finally in their noses, the Arabs reject all international calls for a cease-fire and unleash a brutal assault on the civilian population. The government considers using nuclear weapons, but the enemy is already within the gates, and the Opposition effectively blocks the proposal.

Independent Israel, as we knew it, has ceased to exist.

Three months after Israel: The last pockets of Jewish resistance have been brutally suppressed. Thousands of Jewish fighters, summarily executed for carrying arms, are slaughtered in the public squares. MKs—present and former, including Arab MK’s—having been charged as war criminals and accomplices to genocide, are also killed.

(Pointedly, the first to be shot are members of the Israeli Left, who zealously defended the Palestinian cause .) The haredi population is not spared; they, too, are slaughtered, despite their protests of being apolitical. Only a handful of Neturei Karta are left unharmed—a reward for their strident anti-Zionism through the years.

Six months after Israel: Hundreds of thousands of Israelis, seeking asylum, find they have no place to run. The Arab League has ordained an oil embargo against any country opening its borders to survivors. The EU has declared a moratorium on all immigration, wishing to “carefully study the situation before inflaming any further passions.…”

One year after Israel: Judaism is no longer acknowledged as an official religion in the new Palestine. Jewish practice among the skeleton Jewish population is permitted only in private, and even then is subject to constant harassment. The last remaining synagogues—branded as “centers of terrorism and racism”—are consecrated as mosques.… The most dramatic moment comes when the Western Wall is dismantled, stone by stone, as the foundation is laid for the Grand Al-Buraq Mosque.

Western criticism is muted.

10 years after Israel: Diaspora Jewry, devastated by the loss of Israel, is in a state of rapid decline. In-fighting within the shrinking communities pits those whose love for Israel still lingers against those who blame Israel’s founders for having established the state in the first place and bringing such destruction upon the Jews.…

50 years after Israel: As world economies experience a deep decline, democracies declare a state of emergency. Jews are scape-goated and subjected to increased discrimination. Pogroms break out in several countries as Jews are accused of parasitism and disloyalty.… Jews are moved into closed-off sections of major cities, and their contact with the indigenous population is limited. The lack of Jewish influence and the absence of a homeland leave Jews exposed to every form of abuse.…

In the Middle East, internecine fighting between Arab nations over the past three decades has left the region in shambles. Palestine, with no natural resources and no wealthy donors, has become bankrupt and largely desolate. The once-flourishing agriculture is but a memory, as fertile fields revert to wilderness.

In secluded places across the world, small groups of Jews gather to discuss the idea of returning to Zion and reestablishing a land of their own, a place where they may again walk proudly with their God. They decide to meet in a special assembly, which they will call “the Herzl Congress.”

Can it happen? I think not and I pray not. But I certainly will not take this great country, or Jerusalem of Gold, for granted.