Reflections on Tisha B'Av, by a wannabe Jew, Part 2
Let us not mention the thousands of Palestinian civilians who scrambled to beat, to taunt and to humiliate the captured Jews. Let us say nothing of how they imprisoned us in their homes. Let us only whisper of "the horrific events" of October 7, for we are a people destined to suffer.
Rabbi Benjamin Lau describes how, on Tisha B'Av 2023, "during the height of the anti-coalition protests," he sat on one such discussion panel held in the City of David. For the rabbi, the profound significance of the event in that location was not its link to the original Bronze Age settlement that was to become Jerusalem, but the Arab village that took root on the site since the 1870s. The event, including his presence there, was a violation, an intrusion. "The event was held in the City of David, a heritage site located in the heart of a Palestinian neighbourhood in East Jerusalem," he says, profaning the Jewish national birthplace. As if for the avoidance of doubt, the rabbi makes quite clear his dissociation from that sacred memory, and who is responsible for offending Palestinian pre-eminence:
Needless to say, this is a place with an eastern spirit, and most of the thousands of attendees that night were Jews who identified with that powerful wind and came to this place precisely on the night of Tisha B’Av to say to their God in heaven: “We returned to Zion, we returned to build Jerusalem.” (My emphasis)
Referring to his colleague's inner struggle over her presence in the City of David, a conflict that he shares, Rabbi Lau says:
Her spirit is of the west, which directed her gaze toward the Palestinian neighbours watching beyond the walls, from the streets of Silwan, the Arab neighbourhood that surrounds this ancient site. Still, she wanted to be there, bound as we all are by the Covenant of Destiny, to meet with her eastern-spirited brethren, to connect with them in truth on this powerful day of remembrance, a genuine encounter to protect against the kind of baseless hatred our sages say led to the Temple’s destruction on that very spot nearly two millennia ago.
I cannot help wondering whether the ambiguity is deliberate. Was this “baseless hatred” that the sages say destroyed the Temple between the two “winds / spirits” of Israeli Jews, or between the Jews and those who sought to colonise their land: Greeks, Persians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs and Turks? If the hatred was between the Jews and latter, then the “genuine encounter to protect against” can do nothing about it. If the former, the “baseless hatred” between the two “spirits,” then “the split began” millennia before the Yom Kippur War. The rabbi recalls his musing at the time:
What would my grandparents, who were murdered in the Holocaust, give to walk down the cobbled steps of the City of David? In that period of great domestic turmoil, I still felt wrapped in the Covenant of Destiny.
That "that period of great domestic turmoil" that could not dull the glow around him, also convinced Yahya Sinwar that this was the moment. Rabbi Lau says about his conversation with his colleague: "In our conversation there was no room at all for the Covenant of Fate." This is a strange assertion, given that while they were sitting in the heart of Jerusalem with “the Palestinian neighbours watching beyond the walls, from the streets of Silwan, the Arab neighbourhood that surrounds this ancient site”, conflicted, since they were “beholden to the choices and external powers around them,” which sounds very much like a Covenant of Fate to me. This brings me to the heart of Rabbi Lau's inversion of reality.
We are the fruits of the tree planted and rooted in the secure Land of Israel, not the Diaspora wanderings. What mattered in that conversation was not what we had experienced at the hands of other peoples but what the work of our own hands can give to the world. We sat from a place of home, not of refuge — a beacon, rather than an island. It was the feeling of a dark day turned lighter.
What actually matters is what those Palestinians beyond the walls, in the streets of Silwan, dream of doing to the Jews with their own hands, exactly as they did and boasted about on 7 October. Provided the Jews do not intrude on “a Palestinian neighbourhood in East Jerusalem,” those Muslims promise, "their lives and their property will be safe." Not trespassing on the prerogative of the Palestinians is Rabbi Lau's inescapable concern, even in the birthplace of Jerusalem. Some Jews may no longer be in the Diaspora, but the Diaspora remains very much in them.
The Palestinian killing of Jews with their own hands on 7 October did not deflect Rabbi Lau from his semantic thought experiment:
In an instant, the post-exilic winds, both east and west, stopped. There we were, thrown from the messianic age back into the feeling of exile, standing still with trembling hearts — seemingly from the Covenant of Destiny back to the Covenant of Fate.
I want to feel sorry for this man, but I cannot. Does he mention anything at all of what happened on that Simchat Torah holiday, that very special Shabbat? No, he does not, and it is not the only critical thing he fails to mention in his 2,312-word article. It induced no thoughts about the very large Palestinian neighbourhood across the fence in Gaza. The closest the Rabbi gets is:
Like the post-exilic return to the east, this return to the Covenant of Fate and its stories of the Jewish past was more than a feeling. It was literal. My first personal encounter with the October 7 tragedy was with Rotem Matias, the 16-year-old son of Shahar and Shlomi Matias, grandson of Professor Ilan Troen, who wrote of his loss in these pages. Rotem survived the attack on his family home in Holit because his mother, Shahar, shielded him with her body. The bullet that killed her pierced him as well, and she lay on top of him for hours as life left her.
Does this mean that had Rabbi Lau not known Rotem Matias, the unspecified “it” not have been literal for for him; it would have remained just an abstract notion subsumed within the idealism of his "Covenant of Fate/Covenant of Destiny" dichotomy? Rabbi Lau's refusal to engage with reality is very stubborn, indeed:
Standing in his grandparents’ home, Ilan pointed to a picture on the wall: “That’s my mother,” he said. In 1919, her parents were murdered in their home when a years-long series of attacks known as the Petliura Pogroms came to her village in Druzhne, Ukraine. She survived the attacks only because Ilan’s grandmother pushed her under the bed when the marauders entered the house. Ilan’s mother left her village for another Diaspora community: Boston. There, she rejuvenated the family tree and named her son after his heroic grandmother. And now, more than 100 years later, her great-great-granddaughter was murdered in nearly exactly the same way, in the act of saving her own child in her home.
Who murdered the great-great-granddaughter? Who?! I feel no pity for this rabbi or for the shattering of his post-exilic fantasies. I feel disgust, revulsion. Rabbi Lau escapes this question by seeking refuge in the Torah, according to him, reasserting itself on 7 October. The rabbi quotes Deuteronomy 28:64–67 to make his point:
[You] will flee from them by many roads; and you shall become a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth ven among those nations you shall find no peace, nor shall your foot find a place to rest. God will give you there an anguished heart and eyes that pine and a despondent spirit. The life you face shall be precarious; you shall be in terror, night and day, with no assurance of survival.
This is his ticket to ride on the coattails of Prime Minister Golda Meir, who famously said (apparently to Joe Biden, no less): “We Israelis have a secret weapon: we have nowhere else to go.” Rabbi Lau segues from here into: "This is what the Jewish people have always done. Exile after exile, wandering and more wandering," combining the Torah and Golda Meir, whom, in order to do, he had to misrepresent.
Golda Meir did not say: “We have nowhere to go.” She said, “we have nowhere else to go.” In other words, Israel is something you have to fight to keep from those who would take it away from you: the Arabs across the wall in Silwan who vex the rabbi's conscience so much; some people who did something in Southern Israel; and whoever else went unmentioned. But to Rabbi Lau, after the Simchat Torah massacre, it became both the fate and the destiny of Jews to be forever in exile:
Now we carry both covenants, and this year, as in the past, we will get up from the ground, daven mincha, and march to the remnant of our temple, the Western Wall, and stand there to end the fast with a promise and hope that we will do everything in our power to be worthy of this house.
This notwithstanding those “thousands of ...Jews who ...came to this place [the City of David] precisely on the night of Tisha B’Av to say to their God in heaven: “We returned to Zion, we returned to build Jerusalem.”
The pain of this Tisha B’Av comes not only from the horrific events of October 7, but from the burden of our former Covenant of Fate. Here in Israel, our first non-Diaspora destination, the last stop on our exilic journey, the catastrophe of Black Shabbat forced us from the Covenant of Destiny — the clash of the east and west winds — back into the Covenant of Fate.
The historic lesson of this moment is the persistence of the Covenant of Fate: the hostages and their families, the refugees from the north, the injured and fallen from the war.
“The hostages and their families, the refugees from the north, the injured and fallen from the war.” Let us not mention the raped women, the dismembered bodies, the burnt babies. Let us not talk about the sadism with which the Palestinians slaughtered Jews with their bare hands and the glee with which they broadcast it to the world. Let us not mention the thousands of Palestinian civilians who scrambled to beat, to taunt and to humiliate the captured Jews. Let us say nothing of how they imprisoned us in their homes. Let us only whisper of "the horrific events" of October 7, for we are a people destined to suffer. The Torah and Golda Meir told us so.
Here in Israel, our first non-Diaspora destination, the last stop on our exilic journey, the catastrophe of Black Shabbat forced us from the Covenant of Destiny — he clash of the east and west winds ack into the Covenant of Fate.
What this mind-game twaddle actually means is: "Here in Israel, our first non-Diaspora destination, the last stop on our exilic journey, the catastrophe of Black Shabbat forced us" back into exile, right here in Israel.
Now we carry both covenants, and this year, as in the past, we will get up from the ground, daven mincha, and march to the remnant of our temple, the Western Wall, and stand there to end the fast with a promise and hope that we will do everything in our power to be worthy of this house.
This is obscene.
There is much else that is misrepresented in this screed of denial, pathos and fantasy. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, for example, is not mentioned once in Rabbi Lau's article. The most significant omission is Jabotinsky's June 1936 exhortation to the Jews, all of them, to make haste to Eretz Israel, and thereby not only save themselves from imminent threat to life in Europe, but eliminate the Diaspora: “If you won't eliminate the Diaspora – the Diaspora will eliminate you.”
If a writer on the first Tisha B’Av after the Simchat Torah massacre will not consider Ze’ev Jabotinsky, then he will not reflect on Jabotinsky’s dire warnings. It would escape him that there may be more to Jabotinsky’s words than might at first seem. He is, therefore, unlikely to conclude that while the bodies of the descendants of the Labour Zionists may be in Israel, their souls remain in the Diaspora, and to the Diaspora they wish to return, only this time without leaving Israel. The threat comes not from the Jews in the Diaspora, but from the Diaspora in the Jews. Rabbi Benny Lau has done nothing to disabuse me of this conviction.
Rabbi Lau's opening muse, the Labour Zionist leader Berl Katznelson, on the occasion of the central socialist holiday of May Day, 1936, just two years after his 1934 Tisha B'Av rebuke that inspired the rabbi to pen his article, brings the present review to a close. In Edward Alexander's 2019 review of The Crack-Up of the Israeli Left, by Mordechai Nisan, he recalls:
On May Day, 1936, the Labor Zionist leader Berl Katznelson angrily asked, “Is there another people on earth whose sons are so emotionally and mentally twisted that they consider everything their nation does despicable and hateful, while every murder, rape and robbery committed by their enemies fills their hearts with admiration and awe?” Nisan locates this perversion on the Israeli Left, and especially its professoriat.
It would seem that the greatest tragedy to befall the Jewish people did not take place on Tisha B'Av, but happens over and over again on every single day.
Picture credits:
Matson Collection - Library of CongressCatalog: http://lccn.loc.gov/2006686287Image download: http://cdn.loc.gov/service/pnp/cph/3c30000/3c37000/3c37000/3c37056v.jpgOriginal url: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2006686287/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=107930450
Mark Neyman / Government Press Office of Israel, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67553167
Unknown author - Unknown source, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=535645
Unknown author - http://artbelarus.by/cms/pictures_viewer/big/422_photo_1394704064.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31796388
Ali Zifan - File: October 2023 Gaza−Israel conflict (7– 8 October)File:October_2023_Gaza−Israel_conflict_(7–_8_October).svg NYT & WSJ.Blank map : File:Israel_location_map.svg, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=147178000