For America’s Reckoning, The Wisdom Of Tisha B’Av And Jewish Mourning

Tisha b’Av mourners at the Western Wall. Creative Commons photo.

(OPINION) What’s it like to experience a cultural, historic day of mourning during a pandemic and quarantine, twinned with protests against systemic racism and an armed federal crackdown?

Ideally, this question would be unthinkable. This year, it arises — and the answer points to wisdom that can guide us all through these dark days.

On Wednesday night and Thursday, for Jewish Americans, the troubles of this time will overlap with Tisha b’Av: the date of the destruction of Judaism’s First Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE by ancient Babylon, and on the same day, the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE by the Roman Empire. The occasion is one of fasting, softly singing dirges and contemplating these historic traumas.

At the common table of America’s diverse cultures, Tisha b’Av contributes a cardinal tool for our time: a vocabulary for acknowledging and talking candidly about problems. 

As America struggles with how to have a reckoning, this candor is just what the doctor ordered.

We as a country have made our problems immensely graver by so often evading acknowledgment, and thus failing to adequately deal with them. Amid a pandemic, many disdain public health requirements like masks and physical distancing, saying mask-wearing is weak and the science and risks are overblown.

Many also say that there’s no issue with how police officers view and treat Black Americans. They portray today’s protesters as malefactors to be locked out of sight and out of mind, as federal armed forces in fatigues roam domestic American streets over objections by mayors and governors alike.

Acknowledging what’s happening can seem easy on the surface. Yet our inclinations against doing so can be ironclad. 

President Trump sets this tone at the top. But Trump didn’t come out of nowhere. His stunts, deflection, bias and belligerence in answering the pandemic and racial injustice are the same techniques he’s long chosen in the world of business: reneging on paying workers, multiple bankruptcies, the scam of Trump University, the empty showmanship of The Apprentice.

And that approach, in turn, comes out of America’s longtime dark underside in which spin overtakes reality, instant gratification overtakes substance and unchecked self-interest overtakes fair play — from P.T. Barnum to Mad Men advertising tactics to Big Tobacco. 

The fact that Trump could win and can run the presidency this way sounds a clarion call for American re-examination and change.

Tisha b’Av suggests a way to answer this call. 

The losses of the Temples were such catastrophic crises for the Jewish people that denial and avoidance were not only unwise, but impossible. The rabbis of the era responded by saying, in effect: “We must be able to talk about this crisis. And not only this crisis — let us make this crisis the foundation, the shared point of reference, for a whole new vocabulary for how to talk about problems. If we can do that, then out of this darkness, we will have drawn some light.”

Their insight and courage have been interwoven into Jewish living ever since. When someone is mourning a death in the family, for example, the traditional phrase of condolences harkens back to Tisha b’Av: “May the Omnipresent One comfort you among the other mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.”

Within that phrase is a powerful message: the classical rabbis faced the loss of Jerusalem and talked about it candidly, so you should feel now that you can face the loss you’re experiencing and talk about it candidly — and the community will support you as you do.

This same frank acknowledgment of life’s difficulties marks experiences of joy in Jewish tradition. It is the reason for the moment under the chuppah, the wedding canopy, when one of the new spouses, traditionally the groom, stomps on a glass, to remember the destruction of Jerusalem. The couple ritually recognizes that life is never without problems — even in our bedrock relationships — but what we can do is deal with the problems we face in honesty, partnership and love.

It is this kind of spirit and mindset that we need for confronting 2020 together in America. We need to acknowledge and talk candidly about the problems we’re facing, to take action to solve them and to keep taking that action till the job is done — heeding public health, in our policies and individual lives alike; reforming the police, to expunge cognitive bias and racism, and to cease disproportionate force.

The Shabbat after Tisha b’Av is called the Shabbat of Comfort. Prophecies of hope from Isaiah are chanted. Among them are the verses Dr. King used as the climax of his litany of phrases beginning, “I have a dream” — the dream that “every valley shall be exalted… and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.” 

The ultimate light that Tisha b’Av shines shows us that it is precisely through this hard candor today that we can build that better reality for tomorrow.

Noah Lawrence writes on legal and religious ethics, has served at the UN tribunal system in The Hague and the US Senate and is the rabbinic intern at Congregation Kol Ami of Westchester, NY. The opinions herein are his own. Follow him on Twitter @noahlawr.