Tomorrow is Tisha B'av, which commemorates the day the second temple fell to the Romans. But more than that, it commemorates all the tragedies of Jewish history... Egypt, both temples falling, the exiles, our treatment in Spain, The Holocaust, you know, our history. It's a day of mourning in which everything you do should simulate (or not simulate, if you're very into it) mourning. No eating, no drinking, no showering, no listening to music. You're supposed to wear shoes that let your feet feel the ground. You're supposed to sleep on the floor or with a rock under your pillow to make yourself uncomfortable. You're supposed to refrain from greeting anyone... no hi! how are you doing? As my Dad reminds me, you never ask someone in mourning how they're doing, even reflexively. You can read or watch movies, but they should be sad ones. Even Torah, you should only read sad parts.
We're all going to hear some lamentations tonight. I regret a little not being at the Kotel (Western Wall) tomorrow. It seems like it would be very powerful, although everyone has told me that it's super crowded and difficult to even approach. And if the plaza is full of jacket/hat wearing people in super desert July heat who aren't showering because of the holiday....
Anyway. If you choose, Israel can be a place to keenly feel mourning. There's evidence of tragedy everywhere. Most of the time the fall of the Temple feels incredibly distant to me, and indeed it was almost 2,000 years ago.
But a few weeks ago we were at the City of David, which is an archaeological site that's excavating the old, old old city of Jerusalem. One part they uncovered is a very long, wide road that leads from the outskirts of the city all the way up to the Temple. Jews were commanded to go to the Temple to make sacrifices a few times a year, so it was a route every pious Jew took on those special days in their lives where they left their farms and journeyed to the center of the universe. It was really cool to stand on those same stones.
Then the guide pointed out fallen bolders, cracks in the street, evidence of the sacking of Jerusalem by the Romans. And the thing he showed us that really got to me and still kind of gives me the chills is how there were these big flat slabs on both sides of the street, and every third one was missing. The guide described how under the street was a very shallow sewer, really just the size of a crawl space. And in that crawl space were found pots and pans and cooking utensils and all of this evidence of Jews who'd lived down there during and after the attack by the Romans, retreated to this tiny 2ft by 2ft (maybe) tunnel and existed down there. And the missing slabs are from when the Romans figured this out, and legionnaires methodically lifted road stones, in all their gleaming armor, and reached down and dragged the Jews out from under the road and slit their throats.
And here I was standing both on the place of joy and piety and then a place of final hiding, the last resort, from which the Romans hauled my ancestors and murdered them. All the Jews had to be smoked out, plucked out, one by one, and killed and tossed aside.
So yes, Israel is a place where it's easy to recall the destruction settled on Jewish shoulders continuously throughout the ages.
But the other thing that I've been doing a lot of (compared to my usual life) here is Torah and Talmud study. We studied Daniel, who was a governor in Babylon when Nebuchanezzer destroyed the first Temple and he did nothing, nothing at all. We studied rabbis who bargained with the Romans for the lives of Talmudic scholars and let the rest of Jerusalem burn. We've studied the strife between the Jews, how little they did to defend or prepare themselves, how they watched tragedy approaching and did nothing (which is of course eerily repeated in the Holocaust to an extent.) We read about the Jewish bandits who destroyed Jerusalem's food supply and refused to let anyone leave the city as the Roman troops camped outside.
And then I think... what are we mourning exactly? I asked Eitan about this, about how we mourn the fall of the temple when the Jews rather brought it upon themselves. He said that's part of what we mourn - our behavior and what became of our society and perhaps how it even brought our own destruction, and we mourn any evidence of a similar downfall we see in Israel.
Maybe that's true, but there's something that really chafes me about how much mourning Jews do. We're such a weepy group in general. We have a tragic past but there's something so masochistic about it. I'm really not into victim blaming, and I realize this is how it might sound. But I feel like people who are used to abuse, we just roll in it, we just bathe in it, we're drawn back to it over and over. We have this strange love for our own agony.
Someone referenced the "Yiddish mother" this morning, who would say to her child, "Sure, go out with your friends. I'm just your mother who birthed you, I just slaved all day making this dinner for you, but don't worry, I'll sit here staring at the wall and wait while you're out having a nice time and I'll stay up all night and heat it up for you when you come home. Go ahead. This isn't the worst thing that's happened to me yet today and worse things will happen still."
There's something particularly troubling to me about this designated day of mourning where you try to make yourself upset. It really does feel masochistic to me. Rocks under pillows, only watching sad movies. It feels like theater when I'd think of something sad to make myself cry.
On the one hand, I believe in remembering pain and acknowledging it. I think history is so important, and I'm a big "never forget" type. On the other hand, remembering and wallowing feel different to me. Are we paying respects to someone? That's not what this feels like.
The issue here is not to criticize observance of this day. Far from it, I always think people should practice as suits them. The issue is I'm trying to decide if I want to partake.
Part of me thinks of those people getting dragged out from under the road and I want to fast. And I think, I'm in Israel, I want to participate as much as I can, I should put my mattress on the ground to sleep tonight.
But then I think of Ursula LeGuin writing "The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain."*
Again, I'm not saying that people who observe Tisha B'Av are saying happiness is stupid. I'm not concerning myself with them at the moment. I'm thinking about the heaviness of Judaism as a whole, the focus on rules and rules and rules and rejection of sensation and the intense, boa constrictor embrace of pain. I'm getting bored of pain. I don't want my Judaism to be a masochistic on, a self-flagellating one.
(*On the other hand she might be speaking sarcastically given the nature of the story.)
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