1.
We are a nation that remembers. What would we be without memory? How can a group of people remember their common past when they are scattered around the world without a country and political framework? The Jews of the world today, even if they are not observant and do not study Torah, can connect to their people and culture through their mother community, the State of Israel. But what did Jews do throughout the generations without a Jewish state? How did they maintain their identity and avoid being swallowed up by the peoples they lived amongst and being swept away by the tides of time?
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For the Roman Empire, the destruction of Judea, the Galilee, and Jerusalem, and burning down the Jewish Temple were just part of a chain of events that characterized Roman rule in the first century. For us though, their meaning took on another dimension. Our capital, our Temple, and the Land of Israel were the cornerstone of our existence, and this became all the more true as the years passed and we were scattered to the four corners of the earth. The great effort we made to remember the disaster that befell us and led to us becoming a dead-alive people wandering through the nations, was what connected us to our past and reminded us where we came from. This was what kept alive the hope that one day we would return home and restore our past glory.
2.
Without the religious envelope, we would not have succeeded in preserving our national core. Tisha B'Av, the fast day of the ninth of the Hebrew month of Av, which marks the destruction of the First and Second Temple, was always more than just a day of national mourning, but also a day of religious mourning on which Jews fast, recite lamentations, say special prayers, go barefoot, and couples sleep apart. When we celebrate weddings the groom smashes a glass under the wedding canopy to state that our joy is not complete as long as our city has yet to be rebuilt. When we welcomed the sabbath in our various places of exile we would read in many accents from the Hebrew poem Lecha Dodi, "Sanctuary of the King, royal city. Arise, go out from amidst the turmoil. In the vale of tears, too long you have dwelt, He will show you the compassion, He has felt."
Video: Reading of the Book of Lamentations at the Western Wall / Yoni Rikner
Not only the city of the Temple is mentioned, but also the royal city; the religious vision together with the national-political vision. Our existence is not complete without sovereign life as a free people in our land. The words of Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz, the author of Lecha Dodi, who came to Israel and settled in Safed in the 16th century, contain a desperate cry to leave the Diaspora before it is too late. He uses the story of Sodom and of Lot to describe our situation in exile. Moments before the destruction of Sodom, Lot pleads with his family to flee the coming catastrophe: "Up, get out of this place, for the Lord is about to destroy the city" (Genesis 19:14). Flee the exile because a great catastrophe is coming. The response to Lot's warning was ridicule: "But he seemed to his sons-in-law as one who jests."
Rabbi Yehuda Halevi in his book "The Kuzari" (12th Century) commented bitterly about the fact that the Jewish people remained in exile, saying that the prayers that Jews recite about returning to the Land of Israel sound like "the talk of a parrot and the chirping of the starling." He labeled this phenomenon the source of our people's "disgrace."
3.
This week we marked the anniversary of the death of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, who warned in the 1930s of the need to save The Jewish people from the "all-consuming lava." He repeatedly warned our people against the coming catastrophe, saying that the Jews should finish off their exile before the exile finishes them off. Jabotinsky saw Zionism not just as a national and spiritual movement, but also as a means of saving the masses. He is just one of not many figures in our people's history to warn against remaining in exile. In the first half of the 17th century, Rabbi Chaim ben Attar called on the Jews to leave exile and settle in the Land of Israel. When he saw that his call fell on deaf ears, he lamented:
"For this, all the masters of the land, the leaders of Israel will have to be held accountable; and from them, God will demand the insult of the wretched house.".
Nevertheless, even though we did not heed the calls to return to the Land of Israel, we continued to mark Tisha B'Av. This shows the foresight of our sages in the early generations after the destruction. As long as the Jews lament, and go barefoot in mourning for our city, and read by candlelight from the Book of Lamentations there is hope for the generations to come. Because it is in remembrance that we will find redemption and at the end of a long and bloody historical process there will be individuals and then groups who will rise and act: They will return to Zion to raise it from its ashes.
4.
Our sages also taught us another important thing: We are responsible for our deeds, we are responsible for the destruction of the nation and the homeland, and therefore it is our responsibility to rectify the situation. On every Jewish holiday, we say "Because of our sins we were exiled from our land." Not just religious sins between man and God, but also sins, between man and his fellow man, and between man and his people. The Jerusalem Talmud presents a concept that appears in the Babylonian Talmud: "We found that the house (temple) was not destroyed in the first one, except because they practiced idolatry and revealed adultery and shed blood; but in the second [house] we know those who were attentive to the Torah and careful in the mitzvot and tithes... (so why was the house destroyed?) but because they loved the money and they would hate each other, hatred for nothing..."
What is baseless hatred? Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin, the head of the Volozhin Yeshiva in the 19th century, wrote in his introduction to the Book of Genesis, "They were righteous and devoted to the Torah, but they were not straight in their ways. Therefore, because of baseless hatred in their hearts, they suspected anyone who did not behave as they did of being a Zadokite and an Epicurus. And through division, they led to bloodshed, and to all the evils in the world, until the Temple was destroyed." In other words, they hated each other only for their opinions, and not because one group negated the existence of the other group; even small differences in the way each group saw the goals of the people and the way the state should be managed, led to great hatred. Things became so bad that even when the Roman divisions arrived, the various Jewish factions in Jerusalem continued fighting each other. The Jewish historian Josephus Flavius wrote of the situation in Jerusalem on the eve of the destruction: "They started by pelting each other with stones in the streets and in front of the Temple and by hurling spears at long range. When either side retired, the victors used their swords. The slaughter on both sides was frightful and the wounded could not be counted."
5.
Our sages made it clear that it was internal divisions and fraternal hatred that led to the destruction, not the Romans. The Talmud relates that when the conqueror entered the Temple, a divine voice emerged and said to him: "Your haughtiness is unwarranted, as you killed a nation that was already dead, you burned a Sanctuary that was already burned, and you ground flour that was already ground."
We are talking about our sages who did not leave a single page of Talmud that did not contain a dispute, and before the Talmud, in our great codex of laws, the Mishna, which the work's editor Rabbi Judah the Prince left full of dissenting opinions even though these opinions never became Halacha. This is because these conceptual, political, religious, and legal disputes are the secret of our existence and our ancient ethos, but they are certainly not a reason for the split between us and the irresponsible statements made by those who would renounce our mutual responsibility.
For almost 2000 years we mourned our national destruction, but in these years of mourning, we learned an important lesson: We are one people. We will emerge from the present crisis together and in the building of Zion, we shall take comfort.
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