jUmPIN' JULY DEALS
The Danger And
The Possibility
:•5•5A.F,4
'36 month lease based on 12,000 mi. per
year and approved credit, plus tax, title, plate
doc. & acquisition fees. Total dues at signing
$1045.
RABBI ARTHUR WASKOW
Special to the Jewish News
he Temples burn. No sur-
prise: the Holy Temple is a
microcosm of our universe,
so it burns in searing dry
midsummer when there is no rain,
when the chamsin
wind scorches the
A
earth until the land
itself seems ready to
burn.
We are exhausted:
the burnout of our-
selves and souls. And
yet, with all its pain,
the image turns to
birthing. The rabbis
Tisha BAv
of the Talmud teach
that on the afternoon
of Tisha B'Av, the
very day of the
destruction, Mashiach
— Messiah — is
born; not yet to come
into the fullness of
messianic time, but already birthing
new life.
This is a teaching that in our own
lives we know is true. When someone
we love.dies, Jewish wisdom teaches that
we must lift a shovel full of earth to
place upon the coffin. With our own
muscles, we must acknowledge that the
death has happened. Only then are we
freed into new life.
And in the same way, when an old
idea dies, or an old friendship, or a
worn-out social system — when these
things die — we must mourn them
fully and deeply if we are to free our-
selves to move forward into new life.
We could have dismissed the burning
of the Jewish Temple as a momentary
military defeat. The Babylonians burned
the building? So what, that is what
armies do. The Romans destroyed it
once again? So what, that is what all
empires do.
Instead, we affirmed that this
destruction encoded an existential,
archetypal truth. God's Own Self went
into exile.
This notion that Tisha B'Av encodes
a universal truth is not an invention of
the modern age. Long ago, the rabbis of
the Talmud assigned as the prophetic
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year and approved credit. $2350 due at
signing, plus tax, title, plate & doc. fees.
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44 Detroit Jewish News
KinderCare
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reading of the Fast of Av, the book that
begins eicha! — the howling outcry of
the book of Lamentations, "How lonely
sits the city"
And then the rabbis ask the terrifying
question: Where and when was this
wailing "eicha" first heard? And they
answer that it was when God first called
ayekka (the same con-
sonants with only dif-
ferent vowels),
"Where are you??!!"
to Adam after the
misdoing in the
Garden of Delight.
This is not an
answer out of Jewish
pain for the sake of
Jewish history. It is an
answer that brings the
Temple's burning into
every individual
human heart, and all
the human race.
The first and
deepest exile: spiritual
galut. To say it is
"spiritual" is not to cut it off from earth-
iness; indeed, this first misdoing in the
Garden of Delight was precisely that we
ate wrongly from the earth, and the
result was that we were cut off from
earth and found ourselves at war with
her. Every spiritual exile involves an ethi-
cal/political alienation, and every politi-
cal exile is rooted in a spiritual failure.
The political exile and the burning of
the Temple come because we have as a
society failed to encounter God. We
have exiled ourselves.
As the rabbis taught, the first exile
came because we embraced idols insteacr\
of the One Breath that breathes the uni-
verse — idols that are only bits and
pieces of the Whole, idols that have no
life in them.
We, not just the Jewish people but
the whole human race, stand today on
the brink of burning the holiest Temple
— the whole earth. The fire that besets
us comes from a new form of idolatry:
techno-idolatry. It is not the technology
itself but our addiction/idolatry of it
that endangers us.
Automobiles are useful, but to make
tens of millions of them when we know
that the carbon dioxide they produce is
scorching the globe, that is addiction.