For decades, I have had mixed feelings about Tisha B'Av. At camp it was a day we marked but not with fasting. At home it was a day ignored. In class it was a day to learn about and parse out what horrific events actually occurred that day and which were "assigned" to it. As a teen in Ramla, Israel it was one of the most moving Jewish experiences of my life.
My mixed feelings swarm around the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E, and the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. While I certainly mourn the deaths of so many and lament the exile and yoke of slavery that fell upon so many others, a large part of me sees the upside. If we had not been exiled to Babylonia, we would not have redacted the Torah or created the synagogue as an alternative to the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem. These two consequences of the Babylonian's destruction of the First Temple and the Exile, set up our ability to survive and even thrive in the wake of the Roman destruction of the Temple centuries later.
The Roman destruction and exile created two realities that sustained us as a people and continue to do so now and into the future. First, the exile brought the fulfillment of the promise to Jacob that his descendants will burst forth over the face of the earth. There is no place on earth that Jewish feet have not trod. The exile, so far and wide, brought into Judaism a rich cultural diversity that could not have been achieved else wise. Yes, exile often brought suffering. But, as I learned from Leonard Fein z"l, the exile brought into Judaism a richness that we would otherwise never have known.
Second, the Roman destruction of the Second Temple brought an end to sacrificial service. As I have often put it: no longer do have to bring our cute, cuddly, lambs to slaughter. Prayer replaced sacrifice just as the synagogue replaced the Temple.
Maimonides expounded on this by pointing out that in essence, Judaism was forced to mature from killing animals to expressing our communal and personal thoughts and prayers directly to God. We did not disappear into the annals of history, as did so many other peoples. We evolved into a new iteration. We were stateless but with a closer connection to God and each other.
In a class through the Shalom Hartman Institute, my teacher, Rabbi Gordon Tucker, showed me a new way of looking at the existence and final destruction of the Temple.
The final construction of the Biblical Tabernacle included many, many curtains which divided it into various areas blocked off from each other and ultimately the outside world. Both Temples in Jerusalem followed a similar construction only substituting unhewn stones for the majority of curtains. But some of the curtains remained, especially between the inner and outer sanctum and between the inner sanctum and the Holy of Holies which represented, as it were, God's home on earth just as it had in the Tabernacle in the desert. Through the use of various texts, Rabbi Tucker shows that, regardless of intent, all these curtains and walls effectively separated the people from God. By destroying the Temple, the Romans allowed for the reestablishment of the people's direct connection with God, just as they had at Sinai. The difference being that unlike at Sinai, the people were no longer afraid of the intimacy of the connection.
Rabbi Tucker showed us how beautifully Leonard Cohen's "Lover, Lover, Lover" expresses this thought, especially in the fourth verse:
"I never never turned aside," he said, "I never walked away.
It was you who built the temple,
it was you who covered up my face."
(Click HERE to hear the whole song.)
As we come out of the Pandemic and begin to return to our synagogues, it is time to ask ourselves if our synagogues have replaced the ancient Temple as the curtain, the barrier, between us and God. If so, how do we remove the barrier and maintain our sense of community and peoplehood.
