Reflections on Tisha B'Av, by a wannabe Jew, Part 1

Part 2

I wanted to especially write about this Tisha B'Av (the ninth of the Hebrew month of Av, the date of the destruction of both the First and the Second Temple, and an extraordinary string of other calamities to befall the Jewish people on that same fateful date), but what can a non-Jew write about something so central to being Jewish, especially after the Simchat Torah massacre? I thought that it might be constructive to reflect on a prominent Jew's thoughts on this Tisha B'Av, and eventually settled on Rabbi Benjamin Lau's "The First Tisha B’Av Since October 7," that appeared in SAPIR, Volume Fourteen Summer 2024.

Rabbi Lau sets out to compare the significance of Tisha B'Av over the course of the history of Israel since 1948, with occasional reference to ancient times. I found much in this tract puzzling, sometimes even disturbing, starting with the mismatch between the title of the article and its content. The article says very little about Tisha B'Av and practically nothing about "October 7". I am prepared to concede that perhaps that is just the way that rabbis write.

I found Rabbi Lau's opening line encouraging, since I think it important to ground writing in history. Especially gratifying was that the history in question was that of pre-state Israel, a time and place that interest me greatly. The article opens:

On Tisha B’Av in 1934, the Labor Zionist youth movement named HaNoar HaOved, affiliated with Israel’s Histadrut (Workers’ Union), went on a camping trip, much to the chagrin of Berl Katznelson, one of the Histadrut’s founding leaders.

Rabbi Lau invokes Berl Katznelson to bring his readers to the centrality of memory, and Katznelson's rebuke to draw out the particular importance for Jewishness of commemorating Tisha B'Av. "Katznelson’s declaration reflects, beautifully and forcefully, the role of Tisha B’Av in the history of Zionist consciousness and the intensity of mourning that accompanied Israel throughout the years of exile." I settled down to a good read, anticipating learning new facts, making new connections, refining some ideas, perhaps shedding other, and most importantly, coming to insights I am unlikely to arrive at on my own. But as I got into the details, I found myself increasingly driven towards polemics.

For Rabbi Lau, the key to the changing meaning of Tisha B'Av lies in the contrary outcomes for Zionism of the Six-Day War of June 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of October 1973. Rabbi Lau describes how the liberation of Jerusalem in 1967 precipitated a movement for the "renewal of halakhah (Jewish law) in the State of Israel" and changing the now obsolete Tisha B’Av liturgy that describes Jerusalem as a “mournful, ruined, wretched, and desolate city,” since the city was no longer wretched and desolate, but being rebuilt. It was deemed appropriate to change the prayer from the present tense to the past (“the city that was destroyed”). The redemptive power of a nation liberating their capital after so many millennia in exile is hard to imagine.

Then came the Yom Kippur War, when Israel’s near-defeat had a sobering effect on the messianic fervour. In response, the country split into two distinct directions. One side pulled Israel east, toward traditionalist and religious nationalism. The other pulled Israel west, toward secular liberalism. These opposing winds kept blowing, eventually forming the storm of judicial reform, until October 6, fifty years to the day after the start of the Yom Kippur War, when the split began.

I could have my history wrong, but throughout I was confronted with many assertions that simply did not add up. My first question: surely, this split was already present in the early Zionist movement, albeit in a different form. I had always understood the split of 1967 to be a trans-generational re-emergence of the split between David Ben Gurion's Labour Zionism and Ze'ev Jabotinsky's Revisionist Zionism (this in itself, perhaps, reflecting an even earlier split between political and cultural Zionism).

The fact that Rabbi Lau seems to be suggesting that there is no link between the intra-Zionist rivalries ante-dating the re-establishment of Israel and the split over the character of the state after 1973 strikes me as odd, especially given Rabbi Lau's grounding the opening of his article in 1934, when the Nazis were already well on the march and intra-Zionist rivalry was rising to its most intense. Rabbi Lau gives no hint as to how such a split can suddenly "begin" in 1973. Even if my understanding is incorrect, there is a superficiality to the treatment of these post Yom-Kippur developments that stands out against the more detailed treatment of the post 1967 situation.

The dynamic does not get any clearer by describing the split as: "One side pulled Israel east, toward traditionalist and religious nationalism. The other pulled Israel west, toward secular liberalism," given that it implies an oriental Jewish input to these exclusively Ashkenazy developments. The "western" pull had its origins not in secular liberalism, but in Bolshevism and its forerunners. The "west pull" was secular, but it was socialist long before it became liberal.

"Traditional and religious nationalism" only became infused with "eastern" (Mizrahi and Sephardic) influence after the election of Menachem Begin in 1977, making it misleading to talk about the post-1973 perceived social pressure as "east", triggering, as far as I understand, the series of Labour-socialist developments we now call 'Left-wing' in the Israeli context. Even if the split did occur in 1973, it only got teeth in 1977, a point on the timeline that Rabbi Lau cares not to mention. We do not read of the machinations of the Israeli state, through its Left-wing officials and academics, to create a centre of power able to rival future elected governments that might threaten the character of "their" state. Instead, we read: "These opposing winds kept blowing, eventually forming the storm of judicial reform." And here the imbalance becomes especially stark, laying out what is important to "the eastern spirit" and "the Western intellectuals'" response to, and position on, it:

The eastern and western pulls weren’t merely figurative but literal. Those imbued with the eastern spirit excitedly gravitated toward the Temple Mount, the Cave of the Patriarchs, Joseph’s Tomb — places associated with the roots of the Jewish national story in the Bible, in the east. The Western intellectuals chose to turn a cold and alienated shoulder to exactly these places. To them, these sacred sites were symbols of the Jewish occupation and control of the Palestinian people.

“These places” are the most physical, the most tangible fingerprints of the Jews upon their own land. The "Western intellectuals" were not simply “turning a cold shoulder” to this Jewish presence written in stone, they were repudiating that presence, which would lead, before long, to a repudiation of Zionism, and by 2006, the wholesale rejection by Left-wing Jews of the very idea of Israel. "To them, these sacred sites were symbols of the Jewish occupation and control of the Palestinian people."

Labour-socialist disillusionment with Zionism did not immediately translate into the self-negation of "Jewish occupation", in itself not synonymous with a wish to hand over the country to the recently-manufactured "Palestinians". The assertion that, "to them [the Western intellectuals], these sacred sites were symbols of the Jewish occupation and control of the Palestinian people," strikes me as an oversimplification. It seems more likely that “the Palestinians,” contrived in 1964, became a handy substitute for the old socialists’ (the Labour Zionists’) now-abandoned working class. The Palestinians became the new victims who could do no wrong.

Yet, according to Rabbi Lau, these two "spirits" were not all that divided after all: "But there was something these spirits had in common: an undeniable feeling that the exile had ended. The paradigm had shifted, Rabbi Lau quotes Joseph B. Soloveitchik, from a “Covenant of Fate” to a “Covenant of Destiny.”

The paradigm might have shifted, but phrasing it this way is also misleading. I would make the case that while exile had ended for both tendencies, religious Zionists embraced the end of exile, while the secularists of Labour Zionism refused to accept that ending. They wished to restore it, since they had, as they imagined, already started transcending exile while in exile by increasing assimilation into European Gentile culture, or more accurately, they were disappearing into Gentile culture by erasing their Jewishness, or so they thought. They immersed themselves into socialism with all the more fervour, thereby more certainly to annihilate the Jew within them. Traditionalism, religion and nationalism were backward, embarrassing and stood in the way of, though not yet so explicitly articulated, Israel becoming "a normal country".[1] According to Rabbi Lau:

The Covenant of Fate expressed the existence of the Jewish people as a persecuted minority in the lands of the Diaspora, beholden to the choices and external powers around them. It was a mode of survival built on a common memory of powerlessness.

Even the Jews who remained in the land that had once been in the Land of Israel after the destruction of the Second Temple had become “a persecuted minority in the lands of the Diaspora.” Because Israel did not exist anywhere, all Jews, regardless of where they existed, were in the Diaspora. This point, and the complexity of Diaspora, become very important later.

Unless I badly misunderstand Rabbi Lau, over three thousand years of persecution, pogroms, massacres and genocide can be inoffensively packaged up as: “beholden to the choices and external powers around them.”

Rabbi Lau explains that the Covenant of Destiny, by contrast:

Was configured around the opposite: power and agency, the will to express the Jewish experience through a national mission, unencumbered by external powers, seeking to realise its special role in history as a member in the family of nations, to be an am segula, a term often translated as a “treasured nation,” but more accurately, a “dignified one.”

Is this not exactly what secular Labour Zionists and their descendants recoil from? Jewish specialness, the "national mission" of the State of Israel as the national home of the Jewish people, Judaism – all rejected in favour of disappearing? The less they know about Judaism and the history of the Jews, the easier to erase themselves as Jews, and the easier for Israel to become, in the infamous words and aspirations of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, “a normal country,” thereby achieving what the destruction of the two Temples, and all the other calamities commemorated on Tisha B'Av, could not.

Far from seeking to be "unencumbered by external powers," it is precisely subjugation to the pleasure of such powers — Britain during the Palestine Mandate, the United States post-1973, the Palestinians since the Oslo Accords —that the Israeli Left will go to any lengths to accomplish, as revealed in all its destructiveness, including appeal to external powers to help destroy Israel, over the eleven months between the election of the current Israeli government and "October 6," a stain on the history of Israel that Rabbi Lau describes as, "the anti-coalition protests." It is about am segula, a dignified nation, Rabbi Lau points out. It is hard to see dignity in any of this, yet dignity, conspicuous by its absence, provides the basis for where Rabbi Lau leads his readers to next:

But ever since the arrival of the eastern and western winds, even Tisha B’Av has been marked in terms of the Covenant of Destiny.

"The eastern and western winds" obscures a time bomb at the very heart of Zionism, for the descendants of Labour Zionism are ideological, and will not reconcile themselves to the end of exile. Their project all along has been to make a Diaspora out of Israel, and they will never give that up. The misleading prose continues in what seems like a carefully-crafted sentence: “Fewer tears over the days of destruction and more sweat over building the character of the state.” The implication here is that both winds, so-called east and west, are engaged in building.

But Rabbi Lau is careful to speak of “the character of the state,” rather than “the state”. It has been most notable that the old socialist Labour Zionists did everything to protect and preserve their Western, socialist state from traditional and religious pressures arising from the mass influx of Jewish refugees from Arab and Muslim lands in the 1950s and '60s, as did the descendants of the Labour Zionists since the Yom Kippur War. Far from “sweat over building” the state, those descendants, the Israeli Left, did everything they possibly could to destroy whatever state might arise once they started losing control of its character to the “eastern wind” following Menachem Begin’s election as Prime Minister in 1977.

In an idealist romanticisation of a history fraught after a brief civil war in 1948 and corrosive internecine hatred after 1973, Rabbi Lau sketches a kind of Israeli kumbaya:

For the past several decades in Israel, Tisha B’Av has been a day of reflection on where we are going as a nation, with discussion circles and panels held both in the places of the east (such as the Old City) and the west (such as Rabin Square).

This would be the same Rabin Square where young, woke Israelis physically harass religious Jews and disrupt their prayers, and where the democratic Tel Aviv Municipality sought to ban Jewish public prayer. If they can do it on Temple Mount in the Old City, why not on Rabin Square in Tel Aviv?

Part 2/...

Notes:

1. To use Joseph B. Soloveitchik's terms, Jews acquiring a state marked a corresponding transition for Muslims: from a “Covenant of Destiny” to a “Covenant of Fate”. I have developed this concept here, without using these terms.

Picture credits:

Didier Descouens - Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=132796743

Johann Leusden - "Philologus Hebræo-Mixtus," Utrecht, 1657, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=121108430

SAIMI, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7175981

Jewish Theological Seminary - CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=121082860

Leopold Horovitz - [1], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1783601