I have an admission to make. Tisha B’Av does not come naturally to me. I have to work hard to feel the sorrow our tradition seems so invested in making me feel. I start learning musar (ethics) at the beginning of the three-week period leading up to the day itself. I try to take the restrictions of the days of Av that lead to Tisha B’Av very seriously. I do my best to reflect on the ways I have fallen short, particularly in the sin which our sages tell us led to the destruction of the second temple, sinat chinam, baseless hatred.
This year, the heartbreak has required no spiritual homework, no cultivating emotions that simply do not come on their own for me. With no prompting from the Shulchan Aruch (a central text of halacha), I have done just as the Prophet Jeremiah demands in the book of Lamentations, traditionally read on Tisha B’Av: “Rise, cry in the night, when the watches begin, pour your heart out, like water, before God. Lift up your hands to Him for the souls of your infants, faint from starvation at the head of every street.” (Lamentations 2:19)
The meaning of Tisha B’Av has seemed so obvious to me in the past. What could be simpler than a day to reflect on the damage done to a society that undermines its own ethical underpinnings? One of the earliest stories in the Torah describes the absolute destruction of Sodom, which the Talmud tells us was a society that hoarded its abundant blessings and horrifically oppressed the poor and the stranger. To me, Tisha B’av has fundamentally been a day to look at our present and historical society’s damage and find morals and meaning in their breach.
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How then are we to look at Tisha B’Av today? A report this week from the courageous Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem quotes a Gazan woman, a mother of five children, as saying, “My youngest, Az a-Din, cried a lot and kept saying ‘I’m hungry.’ It broke my heart to hear it, and I cried over his situation — but that was the situation for everyone. I explained to him that everyone was hungry and there was nothing I could do.” Whether you agree with the conclusions of the report or not, this woman’s experience of watching her children starve is unbearable.
A lifetime of Jewish observance has prepared me with the tools for spiritual resilience and meaning-making when it is our community who suffers. I know just what to say at a vigil, I have the words of the psalms on my lips, ready to commemorate our losses. What I need are the tools for when the people I love are the ones inflicting suffering. My tax dollars finance the weapons used to impose this starvation, while the U.S. government provides political cover. Virtually every Jewish institution I have been affiliated with or given tzedakah to has at best gently critiqued this policy or at worst denied that its perpetrators bear any meaningful moral responsibility for their actions. The desire to close my ears and eyes and to create as much emotional distance as possible is almost overwhelming. All I want is to rationalize away what is being done. In my heart of hearts, I want to find some way to blame someone else, someone whose Shabbat tables I have not eaten at, someone whose Torah I do not love, someone whose soul is not bound up with mine forever.
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Crushingly, the message of Tisha B’Av does not change just because it is harder to hear — even when it is incredibly painful to do so, we must take responsibility for our actions. The 11th Tikkun in the Tikkunei haZohar tells us that prayer should not work, that in our exile, “all the gates are closed, and the Shekhinah is outside Her chamber, and the Blessed Holy One is outside His chamber. And the angels appointed over prayer are outside their chambers…And there is no place for prayers to enter.”
How can we possibly heal the exilic suffering of the world when things feel so broken? The Tikkunei haZohar goes on to parallel Moses’ personal salvation from the Nile as a baby with the Jewish people’s collective salvation, telling us that it was Moses’ tears that opened up Pharaoh’s daughter’s heart and led to his (and our people’s) salvation. To truly see a crying child, when you are complicit in causing that suffering, is an act of real bravery. For Pharaoh’s daughter, it meant rejecting the choices of her father and her community, and opening herself up to real risk. Even more so, it meant rejecting a narrative that justified throwing so many Jewish children in a river to drown, a narrative that told her there was some argument out there that meant it was justified to kill a child. Her compassion for that child opened the door to an end to the killing, and the first flowering of redemption, or as the Tikkunim put it, “When Israel begins repentance in crying, then immediately they will be gathered from exile.”
How can I look my own daughter in the eye while giving her breakfast on Tisha B’Av while I am complicit in starving Az a-Din? We must be brave enough to begin repentance with crying and continue with action. It is incumbent on each and every one of us to do everything in our power to save whoever we can, and to put an end to the continued suffering of millions of people. Nothing short of an immediate end to the war and a flood of aid can be accepted.
Rabbi Jonah Winer (he/him) is T’ruah’s director of learning. He was born and raised in Toronto and, after earning a BA in Religious Studies at McGill University, was ordained by Yeshivat Chovevei Torah in New York. While there, he worked as a Rabbinic Intern at NYU’s Bronfman Center and the Kehillah of Riverdale. After ordination, he spent three years working at Hillels, most recently as Senior Jewish Educator and Orthodox Rabbi at Brown RISD Hillel.