Tisha B'Av, Exile, & The Laws of Physics

Astrophysicists understand principles of physics to become “laws” when they can be reliably applied not only on earth but also universally throughout… well, the universe. For instance, the Second Law of Thermodynamics presumes that objects everywhere have an inclination towards entropy and chaos. And a gravitational principle like centrifugal force, which pulls objects away from their center, is considered reliably true.

I wonder about the universality of these principles in relationships and the human soul. Is “entropy and chaos” our destination? Is there a centrifugal force that pushes us apart? Do our lives automatically incline towards distance and exile?

Stay with me, because Tisha B’Av, the most solemn fast day in the Jewish calendar, is upon us. The 9th day of the month of Av has been a magnet for disaster in Jewish history, encapsulated as the date of destruction of both the First and Second Temples of Jerusalem and the subsequent Jewish exiles from the Land of Israel.

The Sages of Jewish tradition confronted the destruction of the Temple (the Beit HaMikdash) and their exile with radical theology. They spiritualized the message of destruction. And this is a point that I think we lose sight of: what Tisha B’Av really tells us about G-d and human beings.

To understand this, we have to understand what the Beit HaMikdash meant. According to Solomon’s dedication prayer for the Temple (in I Kings 8), worship there had several goals: Someone who was wronged could go to plea for divine justice. Israel sought divine assistance there versus her adversaries. Prayers were offered for relief in times of natural disaster or epidemic. Individuals sought forgiveness for their sins. And it was a place for non-Israelites as well: Solomon asserted that God’s House would be a place for anyone who grasped God’s wonders and wanted to share in celebration of them.

There were other innovations. It was not just a place for reconciliation with God; it was also about reconciling with people. There was a “chamber of secrets”—like something out of Harry Potter—where people would give Tzedakah in secret and others would take in secret, to minimize their loss of dignity (M. Shekalim 6:6). There was also a space in the Temple where a person would return lost objects—not just objects lost in the Temple precincts, but things that belonged to others and had been discovered during the year and throughout the countryside; the Temple was a national lost-and-found (Bava Metzia 28a).

In short, “Anyone who never saw the Beit HaMikdash in its constructed state has never seen a magnificent building” (Sukkah, 51a). And I can’t help but think that by “magnificent” they don’t just mean bean beautiful architecture, but ethical beauty.

The Beit HaMikdash was a place for divine-human intimacy. But that could only be achieved in a place of human-human intimacy, a place where people treated one another with the value, respect, and honor deserving of the Image of God.

In 70 BCE, the Romans destroyed the Temple, burned Jerusalem, and exiled the Jews. The Talmud strove to understand how God could let this happen. And it came to a radical conclusion:

Why was the First Temple destroyed? Because of three things: idol worship, sexual immorality, and bloodshed.

However, the Second Temple—a time when people were engaged in Torah study, Mitzvot, and acts of kindness—why was it destroyed? Because of senseless hatred (sinnat hinam).

This teaches us that senseless hatred is worse than idol worship, sexual immorality, and bloodshed. (Yoma 9b)

The Talmud, in Gittin 55b-57a, describes various vignettes and a chain of events that led to the destruction of Jerusalem. The most famous of these scenes is the “Story of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza,” where a private dispute turns into the public humiliation of a certain man named Bar Kamtza. His humiliation takes place in front of the ambivalent Rabbis, the leaders of the community, who couldn’t care less about his suffering. It culminates with the understanding that “God destroyed God’s house.”

What is the point of all this? And what is so radical about it?  The Talmud is saying that people in those final days of the Beit HaMikdash were already estranged from one another. They couldn’t talk to one another, they publicly embarrassed one another, and ultimately they failed to see the divine in one another. Once a society reaches this low state, where someone would be publicly humiliated and no one would speak in his defense, then the community is already in exile—and its foundations are rotten. 

The Beit HaMikdash is meant to be the antithesis of Exile. So if the people are already exiled from one another, then the Temple is purposeless and empty. Thus God flicks it away; its reason for being had ceased to exist. The Temple wasn’t destroyed as a punishment per se, as if to say, “Because you sinned, I exiled you.” To the contrary, its message is: I, God, was already in exile from you. So I tossed the Temple away like a used candy wrapper.

The question at the heart of Tisha B’Av is: Are we destined to pull away from one another? Is Exile—the place where each of us is ultimately, fundamentally Alone—the natural movement of our lives? 

There is a centrifugal force that moves people apart from one another; it is exacerbated by selfishness, greed, and a failure to find empathy for people whom we know are hurting. More than that: the Talmud condemns as accomplices the bystanders in the Bar Kamtza story, the ones who didn’t humiliate Bar Kamtza but who didn’t do anything to support him. Bystanders to evil are contributors to its effects. If you do nothing in the face of lies and hurt, then you are part of the forces that are pushing exile deeper.

The only way to counteract exile is to apply a countervailing force. (This was the theological premise of early Zionism: don’t passively wait for exile to end, but get to work ending it.) Where there are lies, speak truth. Where a person hurts, provide comfort. Where this is injustice, stand up. And where there is hate, apply love. 

Rav Kook called this countervailing force ahavat hinam, “senseless” or default love, the only possible response to sinat hinam, senseless hate. (Orot HaKodesh, Vol. III, p.324).

The Second Law of Thermodynamics presumes that objects have an inclination towards distance and disorder. But Stephen Hawking, musing on the nature of black holes, notes that this law is not universal: 

The second law of thermodynamics has a rather different status than that of other laws of science, such as Newton’s law of gravity, for example, because it does not hold always, just in the vast majority of cases. (A Brief History of Time, p.130)

In other words, exile isn’t inevitable. And Tisha B’Av is not a black hole of bleakness. It just reminds us that passivity and inertia will pull us further apart from one another, and from our source, unless we act—and act soon.

Gleanings in the Fields of Israel

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the corners of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. – Leviticus 19:9

 We came to the land to build and to be built [livnot u’l’hibanot] – Early Zionist Song & Slogan

The Torah created a remarkable framework for caring for the most desperate and hurting people in the ancient world.  At a time when wealth was your land, animals, and crops, the Torah stipulated that a certain part of your fields didn’t in fact belong to you at all, but belonged to people who were poor, needy, and homeless. These are called:

Pe’ah – the edge of the field;

Leket – the gleanings that were dropped by those harvesting the field the first time around, or were neglected to be harvested;

Shichecha – parts of the field that had inadvertently been forgotten to be harvested.

Each of these belonged to poor people, who had the right to come and take what belonged to them. The most well-known illustration of this from the Tanach is found in the second chapter of the Book of Ruth, as Ruth herself gathered grain for herself and her widowed mother-in-law Naomi.  This is what social justice meant in the days of the Bible. As later generations of Jews (and Christians) became urban and less agriculturally-based, they took these ideals and transformed them to systems based on money (i.e., the laws of Tzedakah). But it all starts with food.

Leket (“gleanings”) is alive and well today. I spent the morning with other volunteers in fields operated by Leket Israel, harvesting daloriyot (butternut squash).  Leket Israel relies on a handful of employees and hundreds of volunteers to glean vegetables in their fields and then distribute it to hundreds of organizations around the country that get food to people in need. 

Standing in the hot Middle Eastern summer sun this morning, I was thinking of Ruth the Moabite and I was singing.  I was reminded that harvesting these squash was a deeply spiritual exercise, one that the early pioneers of this land understood well when they harvested their fields and sang “Livnot u’L’hibanot: We’ll build and simultaneously build authentic selves, new identities.”

One stereotype of meditation is that it entails sitting crosslegged in silence. But many meditative practices involve mindful movement. For instance: dance, exercise, flyfishing, hiking – any of these can become focused spiritual disciplines (but they aren’t automatically so. They have to be performed mindfully.) As I look to the ground to identify a ripe squash, break it from its stem, put it in my basket, and walk on to the next one, I begin to develop a rhythm.  Identify, break off, basket, walk on.  Again. Again. The repetition lifts me. The sun is hot; the field goes on forever. And my basket gets more and more full, until it has to get emptied. This continues for two hours, with water breaks.  I get very into it, losing myself to the rhythms of the gleaning.

The two hours fly by quickly. I look to the bin that I’ve filled with squash and the volunteer coordinator (she was a Temple Executive Director in Arizona where she went by the slave name “Nancy”, before she made Aliyah, came to Leket, and became “Nechama”) looks at my accomplishments.  “You’ve gleaned 400 kilos of squash,” she tells me, “Enough to feed 100 people.”

But the fields are so big, and she explains that most summers she has hundreds of volunteers gleaning it all.  The war this summer has scared many of them away; this morning there are just a few of us.  She says that much of this field will never get gleaned this summer, and the vegetables will probably rot on the vines.  There’s just too many vegetables and not enough hands to harvest them. We’ll do the best we can – but hungry people will be another set of victims of the war.

Disability

The angel wrenched Jacob’s hip at its socket… The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping on his hip… Jacob arrived  שָׁלֵם [whole] at the city of Shechem (Genesis 32:26, 32; 33:18).

All of us are damaged in some way; it’s a fundamental part of being human. Also human is the way in which we confront our brokenness; the gracefulness with which accept our imperfections.

My personal disability is rather awkward because it plays itself out so publicly in my life – in the classroom, in meetings (in Buber’s sense of the word), in our sanctuary, and even across a hospital bed. I started losing my hearing a few years ago, at exactly the same age when my father began to lose his. It began to impact my effectiveness in my work. I would get frustrated, angry at myself. I even had a moment of “bottoming out”, to use the language of addiction and recovery, when I sat in the front row for a lecture of which I heard practically nothing. It rocked me deeply.

For a short while I felt sorry for myself. Then I started visiting audiologists and figuring out how I was going to move forward with my problem. Hearing aids have made a difference, although to my chagrin and frustration they have remained “aids” and have never given me 100% of the hearing I’ve desired. This was particularly frustrating, because of all our cherished senses, hearing is especially precious to me. You who know me know that for me listening to music is one of life’s deepest pleasures. The diminishment of that pleasure is a serious heartbreak. 

All of us have fears that awaken us in the middle of the night, when the day’s distractions have dissolved away. Lately mine is the prospect of what my hearing loss will be like when I’m 50, or 60, or beyond. Will I move from “hearing-impaired” to full-fledged deafness? Will I be able to function at my job? Those are real fears I carry in my soul, to some degree of anguish.

But these days those fears don’t slow me down. Quite to the contrary. I’ve become more and more comfortable with saying to students in my classroom, “This is what I’m working to overcome. This is my disability. What’s yours?”

In fact, I find an enormous amount of strength coming forth from our tradition. Personal prayer has become far more intense since I’ve come to grips with my disability. The morning prayers, for instance, contain a remarkable passage that reflects on the body’s delicateness: “You have made the human body filled with tiny holes and orifices… If one of them were opened when it should be closed, or closed when it should be opened, we wouldn’t be able to stand before You for even a moment.” When I reflect that my hearing loss stems from the ossification of the miniscule bones in the inner ear, I share the wonder of the siddur’s poet. It’s a daily miracle how much works so well!

In the Torah, many of our ancestors carried some sort of brokenness. Isaac was blind; so too, perhaps, was Leah. Jacob’s leg was wrenched in his wrestling with the angel; perhaps he limped for the rest of his life. Most famously, Moses stood before G-d at the burning bush and said, in essence, “Why would you choose me to speak before Pharaoh?  After all, my lips…” The Torah is enigmatic about Moses’s shortcoming: Did he stutter?  Did he have a disabled palate? Or was he merely terrified of public speaking? It matters—but not as much as G-d’s response to him, which is, in essence, “I don’t make mistakes. I’ve called you to do a job, to speak truth to the power that is Pharaoh. And if you trust Me, then when the time comes we’ll find the words, together.”

I have no delusions (trust me) of being a Jacob or Moses or Isaac or Leah. But I study their life-stories and try to learn their lessons. Isaac found the words to bless his children. Leah went on to find love and, if you believe the midrash, she also found her sister. Jacob, even with his limp, is still called shalem, “whole” – a poignant reminder that these finite bodies are mere containers for the infinity in our souls. And Moses, G-d’s servant and partner, spoke through damaged lips the words, “Let my people go.” He even found the strength and confidence to lead a people through the wilderness.

I imagine that each of them felt sorry for themselves when they first confronted their disabilities.  Maybe their family and friends supported them in their struggles (maybe they didn’t). But eventually, each of them found a way back to Life; to saying: This is Who I Am. No longer will it hold me back, but I’ll offer myself, anew, in all my brokenness, to do what I was designed to do all along. In faith and tradition and the love of others, I will find my strength.

This is my brokenness. What’s yours?