Category Archives: Tisha B’Av

Flesh of Our Flesh?

Learn to do good, seek justice; relieve the oppressed. Uphold the orphan’s rights; take up the widow’s cause. (Isaiah 1:17)

This classic verse comes from the Haftarah portion for this Shabbat. It is the final so-called “Haftarah of affliction” coming annually on the Shabbat before the festival of Tisha B’Av. Beginning next week our prophetic portions will offer messages of consolation, reminding us that the path of return to righteousness is always open to us. Indeed, it is this very message that will guide us into the High Holiday season itself – the season of our return.

As I read this passage this year, I was mindful of a very similar passage that will appear in the Haftarah of Yom Kippur, also from the book of Isaiah:

No, this is the fast that I desire: to unlock fetters of wickedness and untie the cords of lawlessness; to let the oppressed go free and break off every yoke. It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home; to clothe when you see the naked, and never forget your own flesh (Isaiah 58:6-7).

In a way, these two similar Isaiah passages seem to represent spiritual bookends to the High Holiday season. These characteristically prophetic calls to justice and repentance guide us through our High Holiday journey, reminding us not only of our seemingly chronic hypocrisy but also of the eternally simple route to return: “learn to do good, free the oppressed, feed the hungry…”

As many of you know, our recently organized Fast for Gaza has cited Isaiah 58 as a kind of spiritual prooftext to our initiative. As it turns out, ever since we’ve launched this project I’ve been in a kind of dialogue with more than one correspondent over this particular verse. Several people have already written to me that we’ve misinterpreted Isaiah. It appears that for some, calling a Jewish fast in support of Gazan Palestinians rather than Jewish Israelis represents a betrayal of this prophetic imperative (not to mention the Jewish people.) As one writer put it, “never forget your own flesh” means “charity begins at home.”

This criticism motivated me to do a bit of digging into the source material. As it turns out the Hebrew word for “your flesh” – b’sarcha – can indeed refer to blood relations or kin. But interestingly, according to the Brown, Driver, Briggs Biblical Dictionary (p. 142), this term can also mean “all living beings” (occurring in this usage at least 13 times throughout the Bible.)

So, in fact, there is good, solid linguistic evidence to reject this narrow, tribal reading of Isaiah. Now I’m certainly willing to admit that this passage might have referred only to fellow Israelites when it was originally written. But today we live in a fundamentally different time than the ancient Israelites. In our globalized, post-modern world, the Jewish community has become inter-dependent with others in profound and unprecedented ways. Whether we are prepared to admit it or not, our Jewish security, our Jewish destiny is now irrevocably bound up with the destiny of all peoples and nations of the world.

I am well aware that this viewpoint represents a distinctly 21st century Torah. I also have no illusions that it will be a simple matter for the Jewish community to heed this call. Having only recently emerged from the ghetto, still living with a collective memory of anti-Semitism, still reeling from the trauma of the Holocaust, it will necessitate a radical shift in consciousness to understanding our place in the world in such a way.

It will not be easy, but I believe it will be essential. It can no longer be us against them. At the end of the day, we are all one flesh.

Your Safety is Continually in My Thoughts…

Comfort in the Wake of Trauma

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This evening begins Shabbat Nachamu (“The Shabbat of Consolation”), the Sabbath immediately following the festival of Tisha B’Av. Last week we highlighted our collective experience of pain and loss; beginning this week we begin the road to recovery through the consoling themes of the Haftarah portions chanted during the next several Shabbat services. These reminders will lead us into the High Holidays themselves – the quintessential Jewish expression of healing and hope.

In the wake of Tisha B’Av, Shabbat Nachamu comes to remind us that healing from trauma is not only possible, but inevitable – as long as we become active participants in the healing process. In a sense, it is not enough to affirm healing in our lives and our world: we need to admit that healing from pain and loss involves very real work. Yes, it is painful work, but it if we devote ourselves to it with a faith and commitment, it is truly sacred work.

This Shabbat Nachamu, I’m suggesting we learn about and support the sacred work of healing that is currently being done around the world by organizations that aid those who are traumatized in the wake of violence and war. Though there are many important national and international centers doing this work, I’d like to spotlight the Center for Mind-Body Medicine’s Global Trauma Relief Mission. The CMBM Global Trauma Relief Mission has remarkable global reach, treating victims of psychotrauma in such diverse locales as Kosovo, Israel, Gaza, Macedonia, Bosnia, in post – 9/11 New York and the post- Hurricane Katrina Gulf Coast region.

This Shabbat Nachamu and beyond, may we do all we can to bring healing and hope to a too-often traumatized world…

Soul Accounting on Tisha B’Av

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One of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned about the holiday of Tisha B’Av came in Jerusalem during the summer of 1988. At a vigil sponsored by Shalom Achshav, one speaker (I wish I can remember who) compared Tisha B’Av to the Jewish High Holidays. During the latter, Jewish tradition requires Jews to do a Cheshbon Nefesh Prati (“personal moral accounting”); on Tisha B’Av, however, the Jewish people are commanded to undergo a Cheshbon Nefesh Leumi (“national/collective moral accounting”).

I’ve been thinking about that simple insight a great deal this year. Too often, I think, Tisha B’Av feels like a masochistic exercise in collective self pity – a numbing recitation of a long litany of woe that has befallen the Jewish people over the centuries. To a certain a extent this is certainly justified: more than any other holiday, Tisha B’Av puts the spiritual themes of grief and mourning firmly at the center. But I do believe we do the holiday – and ourselves – a great disservice if we only treat it exclusively as an expression of our communal Jewish pain and angst.

In the midst of the often overwhelming grief of this holiday, it is too easy to forget that Tisha B’Av also asks us to examine the collective responsibility we bear for the misfortunes that befall us. After all, the Rabbis hastened to remind us that the Jewish exile was mipnei chata’einu (“due to our sins”) and the destruction of the Second Temple was a result of the Jewish People’s sinat chinam (“baseless hatred”). In other words, the central question on Tisha B’Av is not “why do these horrible things always happen to us?” but rather, “how have we contributed to our misfortunes?”

Too many of us seem to feel that since we Jews have experienced more than our share of collective tragedy, that we are somehow given a free walk on this question. That to even suggest such a thing is tantamount to blaming the victim. Others choose to turn away from this question because of its troubling theological implications, rejecting outright the notion of a God who would punish in such a fashion.

Still, I believe that we ignore this question at our peril. At the end of the day, Tisha B’Av asks us to reject the notion that the Jewish People are only a victimized people; the passive recipients of injustices meted out against us from time immemorial. If anything, Tisha B’Av reminds us that we bear a collective moral responsibility – that what we do matters in the world, and that our actions have had very real consequences for us as a people. And so on Tisha B’Av we are asked to make a communal moral inventory so that we might better understand the part we play – wittingly or not – in our own history.

In this regard, there is no getting around the fact that there are important political implications to this holiday. Indeed, the questions we might ask about our collective responsibility are more than merely academic. Tisha B’Av demands this collective accounting: how have we contributed to the ongoing crises in our own country and around the world? How have we – as Jews, as Americans, as world citizens – sown the seeds of our own tragedy?

If we are truly able to find honest answers to questions such as these, I can’t help but believe that our collective mourning will eventually give way to a more hopeful future for us all.