A Note on the Jewish Calendar: We have just entered the Jewish month of Av, a month in which, the rabbis taught, we decrease our joy. Tisha B’Av, the 9th of Av, falls this year on Wednesday night, and we fast until Thursday night.
This Shabbat we read the Torah portion of Devarim, which opens the book of Deuteronomy, alongside the haftarah (the weekly reading from the Prophets) from Isaiah, which begins with a vision of destruction. The vision is called Chazon, and it gives this Shabbat its name. These readings always fall on the Shabbat before Tisha B’Av.
Tisha B’Av is the day on which we mourn the destruction of the two Temples and other catastrophes that have befallen the Jewish people. Traditionally, Jews observe it by fasting and setting aside pleasurable activities, and by gathering in synagogue to read Eikha (Lamentations) and dirges.
It has been a really hard year since last Tisha B’Av, with even more brokenness for us to mourn. The essay below tries to draw some important lessons for this moment, and I’ll add to them a prayer: The rabbis taught that whoever mourns for Jerusalem will merit to see its joy. May we all merit to see more and more redemption.
Shabbat Shalom,
Mijal
The Chutzpah of Blaming Ourselves
Our Mandate for Tisha B’Av, Parashat Devarim and a story about Lindsey Graham
A few weeks ago, on a flight to Israel, I was texting with a friend about the election results in New York and the wave of DSA victories. I sent her message after message bemoaning how our well-resourced Jewish community couldn’t get its act together to take on an organization with just a hundred thousand members nationally.
But in the middle of my lament, I stopped myself. I asked her: “How much do you think I’m doing what the rabbis did, imagining the Jews could have had agency to stop the Roman Empire?”
Is it even rational to think we have that kind of power?
This question goes to the core of the most important Jewish methodology in the face of disaster, and arguably the reason we have survived so much.
Senator Lindsey Graham, a great friend of Israel, died this past weekend. In the Atlantic, Richard Fontaine recalled asking him when he had gathered the boldness to assert himself in foreign policy.
Graham answered that when he first arrived in Washington as a representative, he went looking for the “they.” The people who run things. The people who know how it all really works. The people in charge.
He couldn’t find them. He went to the Senate, then to the White House, then into closed-door briefings with top officials. Still no “they.”
What he finally realized, he said, is that there is no they. There is only we.
Graham stumbled into that realization at the beginning of his political career. The Jewish people made it a methodology. And this week’s parasha is where it begins.
Devarim opens the last book of the Torah, and it is unlike the four books that precede it. It is a collection of speeches by Moses before his death, retelling to the Israelites much of their own past.
Moses speaks in this book not as a historian but as a pedagogue. A historian’s obligation is to what happened. A teacher’s obligation is to his students.
Read the opening chapters of Devarim with that in mind, and you see the craft. Moses compresses forty years into a handful of episodes. And when he retells stories – such as the catastrophe of the spies, which condemned an entire generation to die in the wilderness – notice the grammar he chooses: You refused to go up. You rebelled against the word of God. You wept in your tents.
Here’s what makes this astonishing: most of the people listening weren’t there – or even alive when it happened. But Moses is installing a lens. Before the Jewish people cross into a land full of enemies and empires, their teacher wants one interpretive habit burned into them: when you tell the story of your own catastrophes, look first for your own hand in them.
This Shabbat is named for its haftarah, the opening vision of Isaiah, which begins with the word Chazon. What Isaiah sees is devastating: a nation laden with iniquity, its hands full of blood.
Pay attention to what the rabbis did when they fixed this reading in our calendar. They had an entire prophetic literature to choose from. They could have assigned a text about the cruelty of Babylon or the treachery of Edom, and sent us into the fast rehearsing what our enemies did to us. Instead, they assigned Isaiah’s indictment of us.
The choice is the message. Before we sit on the floor and lament what was done to the Jewish people, the liturgy makes us spend a Shabbat hearing what the Jewish people did.
Every single year, the approach to our greatest catastrophe begins with our own hands.
The rabbis made this the paradigm. Faced with the destruction of two Temples, they explained each one through Jewish responsibility.
I once heard a scholar laugh and say the only party responsible for the destruction of Jerusalem was Rome. What chutzpah, he scoffed, that Jews blamed themselves when the greatest empire of the ancient world wanted it to burn.
But I think the Rabbis were into something – they are Moses’ heirs.
The rabbis lived under Rome. They buried its victims. But when they sat down to explain the destruction and exile, they wrote: mipnei chatoteinu, because of our sins. They told the story of Kamsa and Bar Kamsa, a petty humiliation at a banquet. They named sinat chinam, baseless hatred between Jews, as the force that brought down the Second Temple.
Agency, it turns out, is a strange kind of resource. Wherever you place it, that is where the power in your story lives. Place it with Rome, and you have written yourself a tragedy in which you are the scenery. Place it within the covenant, and you have written yourself an audaciously hopeful claim: our choices moved history once, and they can move it again.
None of this acquits Rome, then or now. The rabbis saw it as an evil empire seeped in guilt. But they declined to make it the protagonist.
The historian Paul Johnson, a Christian who wrote a sweeping history of the Jews with open admiration, described his project as writing world history “from the viewpoint of a learned and intelligent victim.”
He meant it as a compliment, but I still want to argue with Johnson. Victim is an outsider’s category. It describes accurately enough what was done to us. But it misses entirely how we have written about ourselves. Open our own texts on our worst catastrophes, and you will find grief everywhere – but victimhood almost nowhere.
Back to that WhatsApp message somewhere over the Atlantic.
My friend didn’t hesitate. To be honest, she wrote, I was just sort of thinking that’s what you were doing.
She knew what I was doing before I did.
The Jews of this generation who respond to hostile coalitions and rising hatred by asking what we must build and what we must repair among ourselves are practicing the oldest discipline we have.
Here is what I want to ask each of us this Shabbat Chazon, before the week of Tisha B'Av begins. Let's do what Moses trained us to do. When we take stock of this hard year for our people, and there is so much to take stock of, let each of us start with the question that has no they in it: what is mine to repair, and what is mine to build?
There is no they for a people whose chief preoccupation is hope for the future, even in catastrophe. There is only we – we who inherited a tradition that insists we act, at all times, always.
May we mourn this Tisha B’Av as our people always have: with our own hands in the story, and our own hands ready to build.
Shabbat Shalom,
Mijal
I have so many issues with Tisha B'Av, not the least is blaming ourselves. I am all for introspection, figuring out how things were messed up, what we could have done better, and of course being weary of sinat chinam just in general is a good idea. But ultimately the evils that befell the Jewish people are not because we sinned, but because we were sinned against. I look at Tisha B'Av as code for maybe trying to see what may be coming down the road, preparing for it, protecting ourselves, and figuring out a way to fight back. Si vis pacem para bellum.
שבת שלום