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The Power Of Tisha Bvikv

S

ticks and stones can break my
bones, but words will never hurt
me." That was a really popular
aphorism when I was about 8. Now as
an adult, I realize that there is as much
truth in that statement as there is in a
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad press conference.
Words are power. Words heal and build,
but words also destroy more than all the
weaponry in the world.
Tisha b'Av is a time when we mourn the
tragic results of speech used as a weapon.
The first Tisha b'Av in history was the
night that a delegation of spies returned to
the desert camp of the Jewish people and
slandered the land of Israel. They failed
to see the incredible goodness of the land,
and instead, read negativity into every-
thing they saw. The people readily believed
the defamation and mourned all night,
saying that they would rather just die in
the desert than go into Israel. The Torah
commentators tell us that God declared,
"You cried in vain on this night, for gen-
erations this will be a night of mourning!"
Since then, it has indeed been a calami-
tous day for the Jews. Both the First and
Second Temples were destroyed on Tisha

b'Av. The current Jewish Diaspora, began
with the violent destruction and burning
of the Second Temple in the year 70 C.E.,
and the subsequent exile of the Jews to
the far-flung reaches of the vast Roman
Empire. That horrific event was caused by
the deep enmity between two men, as told
in the Talmud (Gittin 55B). One of them,
upon being publicly shamed by the other,
went to the Roman emperor and slandered
the Jewish people. This eventually caused
the Roman siege on Jerusalem, the deaths
of millions, and the destruction of the
Temple.
Tisha b'Av's infamy doesn't stop there.
In 1290, King Edward expelled the Jews
from England on Tisha b'Av, and in 1492,
the Jews were expelled from Spain. The
Inquisition was intensified on Tisha b'Av.
The First World War (the clear precur-
sor to the Holocaust) truly started with
Germany declaring war on Russia on
Tisha b'Av, 1914. The Warsaw Ghetto
Deportations began on Tisha b'Av. The
forced withdrawal from Gaza began on the
night after Tisha b'Av, 2005. It has clearly
been the Jewish people's least favorite day
for the last two millennia.

about what we can do to make
That being said, how are
our community more tightly
we supposed to feel on Tisha
knit. Then finally, we can think
b'Av? Depressed? Despondent?
about how we can bring har-
Dejected? No, those are emo-
mony
to the world.
tions that are not constructive
Tisha
b'Av is a day where we
and, therefore, not part of the
should
look
for specific actions
Jewish day of mourning. Rather,
that can benefit each of the
we should use the day to intro-
relationships mentioned above.
spect and see what we can do to
Rabbi Yehuda
They
should be small and easy
end this continuum of suffering.
Burnham
to accomplish like making a
The sages tell us that since
Community
weekly call to Aunt Sylvia, put-
divisiveness and speech abuse
View
ting our spare change at the end
is what caused the Tisha b'Av,
of the day into a donation box
the destruction of the Temple,
for terror victims, or calling up that neigh-
and the arduous exile that followed, unity
bor "we don't talk to" and inviting him for
is what is required to reverse the equation
coffee. These actions will add up slowly,
and bring redemption. Tisha b'Av is a day
and soon we will be living in a better
in which we focus on how we can build
place, one on its path toward redemption.
harmony, consonance and togetherness.
If we use Tisha b'Av as the catalyst for
The impulse is to think global; to think
unifying change, we will find Tisha b'Av a
Darfur, Israel, or some other war torn
region of the world. But our sages teach us very uplifting and empowering day.
that the right way to fix divisiveness in the
Rabbi Yehuda "Leiby" Burnham is associ-
world is to start with ourselves, and then
ate director of the Jean and Theodore Weiss
move out in concentric circles. We need to
Partners in Torah program hosted by the
first make peace with ourselves and then
Southfield-based Yeshiva Beth Yehudah.
work to improve our relationships with
family members. After that, we must think

❑

Wisdom Guides Compassion

Ann Arbor

A

nn Arbor is a rare
community — lib-
eral, caring, deeply
involved in many humanitarian
causes. It is not surprising, then,
that so many of its citizens take
such active roles in the affairs of
their nation and the world. What
is surprising, however, is that
so many of these intellectually
gifted and engaged people allow
themselves to be coerced by some of the
appealing cliches of tragedy.
One of our local newspapers recently
ran a full-page advertisement grieving for
the dispossessed Palestinians and provid-
ing "evidence" (a map charting an increas-
ing regional Jewish population) assigning
blame for region's violence on the forma-
tion of Israel in 1948.
The complaint is not without some
merit, but the history of hostilities was
well established long before the birth of
Israel. It was already a painful reality in
1946 when the Arabs were busy with their
own programs of discrimination and
expulsion, cutting their native Jewish pop-

26

July 19 • 2007

ulations from 850,000 to just
7,600. And it was evident when
the five most powerful Arab
nations attacked the 1-day-old
infant state in a failed effort to
destroy it.
And a bit before that the tone
of violence and discrimination
was evident in the actions of
the Grand Mufti, the Arab ruler
of that region for the several
decades after the 1920s. When
he heard about a shipload of
900 Jewish children in Hungary who had
been saved from the Nazi Germany con-
centration camps and were being shipped
to sanctuary in Palestine, the Grand Mufti
intervened, stopping the boat en route and
ordering its return to Germany — and the
children to the camps and to their deaths
(Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial).
The advertisement's map implies that
all the trouble began with the theft of
Palestinian lands and the explosion of an
illegal Jewish population, but history does
not begin at a moment of convenience,
or as backup for political theories, or to
justify deadly and destructive violence. In
the Middle East, deadly conflict between

chosen and advanced by self-serving pro-
tagonists on both sides of the issue, adver-
saries who remember and repeat only
what furthers their cause or satisfies their
egos. There is little value in "evidence" of
injustice revealed in old records of dubi-
ous authenticity, or by victims' memories
warped by time and pain, or by any of the
narrowly chosen "facts" selectively culled
from past realities. So it is past time to
deal with yesterday's truths and time to
start addressing the hopes of tomorrow.
Staying Focused
The history of the region, like the histories The tortured condemnations of Israel and
the lumping of all Jewry into a monolithic
of the two peoples, goes back very much
entity (witness the picketing of syna-
further than the declaration of Israeli
statehood. It goes back, for example, to the gogues and Jewish-owned stores) remains
the tactic of those public protesters who
planned and programmed extermination
claim to seek relief for the Palestinian vic-
of all the Jews in almost all of the coun-
tims, but whose limited vision tends more
tries of Europe — even while the rest of
the world looked on in callous indifference to prolong the conflict and fuel its fires.
As a community we are better than
or with silent approval. (A different map,
that — more caring and compassionate
challenging the role of Israel as a destabi-
and not so blindly judgmental as those
lizing threat to the region shows Israel as
the small red dot surrounded by 22 hostile producing the ads of hatred would have
us. Our university-centered community is
Arab or Islamic dictatorships 640 times
more distinguished by its search for truth
its size.)
and justice and less likely to join a mind-
But as they relate to today's tragedy, all
less stampede of blind protagonists or
these maps and statistics and examples
are beside the point. They are too selective, thoughtless antagonists.

Arab and Jew literally goes with the terri-
tory. While Palestinian passions are inevi-
table, their promotion by outside agitators
whose interest seems limited to the "feel-
good" pleasures of siding with victims
takes on more the aura of bigotry than a
desire to be of real service. (It is a telling
commentary on the motivation of the pro-
testers that the advertisement's map was
lifted from a Web site named "Jew Watch!')