Meditation on the Three Weeks
We need to respond to today's messianic fervor before it is too late
Shavuah tov!
This past week I've been thinking a lot about the Three Weeks between the Hebrew months of the 17th of Tammuz and the 9th of Av, a period known as ‘Bein HaMetzarim’ or ‘Between the Narrow Straits.’ According to the stories we’ve repeated annually over the two and a half millennia since the destruction of our First Temple, during these three weeks we are called to remember that our actions can lead to our fall from grace, that our very sovereignty as a people depends on our decisions in the present.
What I’ve been particularly wrestling with this year has to do with the way some of the more messianic, ‘Judean’ Jews have been retelling the story of our loss of sovereignty. Specifically, my concern is with their glorification of the rebels which externalizes the responsibility for the destruction. This directly contradicts the internalization of the responsibility we’ve traditionally maintained. The story we’ve told ourselves for millennia has been that the Romans and the Babylonians only succeeded in defeating us because of our own internal division, our violent breach of the Covenant.
A People which takes responsibility for its own destiny learns from its past; a People who blames others for its tragedies gets stuck in a cycle of tragedy and violence.
While this story is, of course, not exactly historically accurate, it was instrumental in building the ethos that has maintained Am Israel over millennia of exile. Instrumental in enabling us to return to our Land. A People which takes responsibility for its own destiny learns from its past; a People who blames others for its tragedies gets stuck in a cycle of tragedy and violence.
The prophets preached this narrative; Jermiah’s Scroll of Lamentations, which our tradition instructs us to read every 9th of Av, emphasizes our responsibility for our own failings starkly and graphically. The contrast of Lamentations to the anti-Colonialist literature of the present is astounding.
In Lamentations we learn it was Israel’s own haughtiness and arrogance that led to our defeat and exile. Compare that to the Palestinian anti-Colonialist narrative of exile (the Nakba) which tells of Israel as a colonialist effort and rejects any of the history of Jewish presence in the land, or Jewish attempts to live in peace with Arab neighbors, or of the Arab conquest of the West Bank and Gaza and rejection of Palestinian statehood in those lands. The narrative of Lamentations is empowering, the narrative of the Nakba, objectifying.
In contrast to destruction of the first Temple as told by Lamentations, the road to our second exile began with the feeling of righteousness which led to an invitation to the Romans from the Hasmoneans to help quiet internal dissent. Our intercene battles only got worse: in response to the repeated rebellions against Roman control of the Land, the Romans attacked Jerusalem.
The nobles of Jerusalem sought to negotiate, but the Zealots and Sicarii (called by the Rabbis in later generations the Biryonim or Brutes) believed God was on their side, so they burned the stores of food and oil in Jerusalem to force the Judeans to fight. We know how that ended. More died by starvation than by the sword.
The worst was yet to come; over the next century, Judeans lived and prayed across the Land of Israel. Despite not having a Temple, this was a time of peace and calm, of relative Judean autonomy from Rome as was the practice of the time. A rising religious fervor of the early 130s CE sparked a rebellion led by Bar Kohba, which was followed by a massive campaign by the Romans that killed or exiled most Jews from the Land.
The immediate reaction to this Roman genocide of the Judeans was led by Rabbi Judah the Nassi, best known for compiling the Mishna. A wealthy man known simply as Rabbi, Judah HaNassi witnessed how the students of Rabbi Akiva were inspired into rebellion due to Akiva's own messianic visions. In response to that rebellion, in an act of responsibility taking for the destruction, he worked to develop a new document of faith - the Mishna - expunged of messianism.
Those Rabbis who grew the Rabbinic movement based on Rabbi’s legacy intuitively understood the importance of empowerment in light of tragedy. During the second exile, the Rabbis who built the post-Second Temple religion we know as Judaism expanded the importance of taking personal responsibility into the realm of interpersonal interactions.
According to the rabbis, the Temple was destroyed because of our baseless hatred for one another. To illustrate this, the Rabbis crafted narrative after narrative to explain the moral failings that led to our exile in personal terms: the story of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza, the cycle of violence caused by our overreaction to perceived insults, the rejection of sacrifices due to the over-zealous religiosity of the priests. For hundreds of generations we have reminded ourselves that the personal is political, that living in the Land is a privilege and not a right, a privilege that may be revoked based on how we behave.
My fear is that we have forgotten those lessons. Instead, following the perceived miracle of the 1967 war, we are hearing a long-lost tune today by a messianist generation which has been told that the whole Land of Israel is their right, that God is on their side. We are seeing this in the stories they tell, the songs they sing, the way they blame the ‘hellenized’ portions of secular Israel for their own failings.
My fear is that we are hearing that same tune sung today by a messianist generation which has been told that the whole Land of Israel is their right, that God is on their side.
That this messianism has already raised its head less than a century since we’ve earned a return to our Land deeply troubles me, and I hope it will trouble you to action.
I believe the only way for us to avert a third destruction is to address this messianism through unyielding religious discourse. The secular language Israeli political movements have traditionally used will not quench the deep, spiritual desire these messianic ‘hilltop youth’ have become drunk upon. We need a deep religious response that celebrates the compromise of everyday life, the miracle of mundanity. We need religious leaders to lead this charge and to create platforms to amplify their voices.
When the spiritual leaders of our People instituted the fast after the destruction of the first Temple nearly 2,600 years ago, we understood that it was an instrumental fast. That fasting was a tool to remind us of our responsibility for our exile. Even as the Second Temple was rebuilt we maintained this tradition, to remember we could always lose our sovereignty and hope to avoid that fate. Now that we live in the Land of Israel, we are once again at risk of forgetting the lesson that we have learned over thousands of years of fasting and repentance.
We are once again at a moment in which the instrument of memory is being redefined for the goals of the zealots. We need a new generation of spiritual leaders who will act resolutely to remind the youth that our privilege to live as an embodied people is one that can be revoked at any moment. I hope you will join me in remembering these hard lessons learned during this period of memorial, and support those spiritual voices that call on us to be our best selves through the bearing of personal and national responsibility.