איכה ישבה העיר רבתי עם

Tonight begins the Jewish fast of Tisha B’Av on which we mourn the many calamities that have befallen the Jewish people:

-The destruction of the Temple of Solomon by the Babylonians in 587 BCE

-The destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE

-The destruction of the Jewish communities of France and the Rhine by the Crusaders in 1096

-The expulsion of Jews from England in 1290

-The expulsion of Jews from France in 1306

-The expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492

-The Shoah attempting extermination of all Jews begun in 1941

All those calamities were initiated by our enemies, but our tradition treats them differently, looking to those enemies as instruments of retribution for our failing to live up to what we claim of ourselves. We commemorate Tisha B’Av with the reading of Eicha, the Book of Lamentations, attributed to the prophet Jeremiah, mourning Zion from his captivity in Babylon. Consider how this book treats the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the people.  It opens:

Alas!
Lonely sits the city
Once great with people!
She that was great among nations
Is become like a widow!

But Jeremiah quickly moves to his explanation for the destruction:

Her enemies are now the masters,
Her foes are at ease,
Because the Lord has afflicted her
For her many transgressions.

And that is the theme of Lamentations. We mourn the humiliation of Jerusalem and our people, but we confess our sins which led to it. In other words, our adversaries are carrying out God's will by humbling us for our pride. Each chapter of Eicha follows this pattern and each concludes with the prayer that God will once again have faith in us and restore us to grace:

Arise, cry out in the night
At the beginning of the watches,
Pour out your heart like water
In the presence of the Lord!
Lift up your hands to Him!

The message is consistent with the prophecies of Jeremiah before the Babylonian captivity. He repeatedly foretold destruction and warned the people of its source in their own failures. You can find these predictions everywhere in the Book of Jeremiah. Consider this:

Thus said the Lord:
Cursed is he who trusts in man,
Who makes mere flesh his strength,
And turns his thoughts from the Lord.
He shall be like a bush in the desert,
Which does not sense the coming of good:
It is set in the scorched places of the wilderness,
In a barren land without inhabitant.
Blessed is he who trusts in the Lord,
Whose trust is the Lord alone.
He shall be like a tree planted by waters,
Sending forth its roots by a stream’
It does not sense the coming of heat,
Its leaves are ever fresh;
It has no care in a year of drought,
It does not cease to yield fruit.

This reading of God - that he punishes us all for rejecting our calling to good - lost favor in my community after World War 2. People were horrified by the suggestion that we had somehow brought the Holocaust on ourselves. What could we possibly have done that was bad enough to warrant the burning of 6 million souls? We chose to attribute this evil to the presence of evil itself in the world, not to God. Frankly, I prefer that view. A God who would destroy children as a performance of punishment does not deserve worship. But with that rejection of Divine retribution seems to have come the arrogance that believes that we know more than we in fact do, a worship of ourselves.

Then, too, there was the birth of the State of Israel. Instead of waiting for a miraculous restoration to Zion, Jewish people began to believe that we could do it ourselves. Instead of focusing on our belief that God wants justice, we came to the faith that our weapons were instruments of God and that whoever stood in the path of our conquests was an enemy. We adopted the idolatrous view that God wanted us to destroy his children! That worship of "mere flesh" - that "trust" in ourselves - is the beginning of the calamity that I commemorate on this Tisha B’Av.

When we confine our brothers to outdoor prisons like Gaza and the towns of the West Bank,

When we tell our neighbors that they are no longer citizens of the land,

When we rip out their vineyards and olive groves in violation of our Torah,

When we bulldoze their homes,

When we shoot their children,

When we bomb them from the air,

When we deny them food and water,

Whe we do these things we are praying for our own destruction.

But it is not only a prayer.

Because when we do these things we have already surrendered our humanity.

We have hurried to repudiate our Judaism.

We have ceased our worship of God and replaced it with a worship of missiles and guns.

We are idolators who no longer know what it is to be a Jew.

This year on Tisha B’Av I mourn the destruction of Judaism itself, not by Romans or Babylonians or some other enemy serving the destructive will of God, but by ourselves and by the State of Israel.

For my friends who fast this year in the other mode, thinking our most important enemies are external, I recommend the prophet Amos:

You who wish for the day of the Lord, why would you want the day of the Lord?
It shall be darkness, not light!
As if a man should run from a lion and be attacked by a bear.
Or if he got indoors, should lean his hand on the wall and be bitten by a snake.
Surely the day of the Lord shall be not light, but darkness, blackest night without a glimmer.
I loathe, I despise your festivals.
I am not appeased by your solemn assemblies.
If you offer Me burnt offerings or meal offerings I will not accept them.
I will pay no heed to your gifts of fatted calves.
Spare me your hymns, don't let me hear your praise songs.
But... Let justice spring up like water and righteousness like an unfailing stream.