Religion

The Holiness Of Devastating Uncertainty on Tisha B’Av (by Yehuda Kurtzer)

Two phenomena in Jewish public discourse that bother me feel especially acute around and in advance of Tisha B’Av.

The first is the use of Tisha B’Av – the darkest day of the calendar – as a means of advancing a politics of self-satisfaction, the use of the holiday to affirm the rightness of one’s own politics through painting the bleakness and failures of the alternatives. It is amazing to me how wrong this is. Tisha B’Av is a day in which we reckon with the absence of redemption: both the fact that the world is unredeemed, and the possibility that it will not *be redeemed.*

To do hester panim seriously – to acknowledge the possibility of divine absence as the normative and enduring condition of the world – is to come to terms with the fact that it is not just “them,” your political enemies, who failed us and left us in this brokenness; but also “us,” and the folly of what we have pursued as ostensibly righteous alternatives. It is amazing to me to hear people this time of year cite the bleak indictments and prophesies of Isaiah and Jeremiah as means of characterizing their political opponents; doing this betrays the belief in one’s own certainty.

This is the paradox of self-satisfaction: there’s no real moral way to do it. If you are certain in your ways, self-satisfied about the moral superiority of your positions, you have failed. Or, put differently: if you think that the prophets are only talking to other people – your political opponents – I have news for you. Tisha B’Av reminds us that even if you are right most of the year, or think that you are right; if you are on the right side of history, in pursuit of justice for the downtrodden, if you care deeply about the Jewish people and its sufferings – on this one day of the year, you are wrong, and you are complicit. If there is no redemption, if it is a day of sitting with that blackness, how can the day be political?

I say this as someone who loves what the rabbis in the Talmud say and believe about good and bad politics, and their causes in bringing about the destruction. I think we can believe all of that, and still treat the day of Tisha B’Av itself as a day without conviction or certainty. Tisha B’Av is a day set aside to acknowledge failure, and its costs.

And we know that nothing in the history of antisemitism confirms that if only Jews had acted this way and not that; voted the right way, conducted the right domestic policy, smiled more meekly; that there still wouldn’t have been Jewish blood running through the streets on occasion. Mourning our losses once a year, with this consciousness, should strip us – or maybe relieve us – of the belief that a people’s otherness can be so easily remedied by its politics.

The second phenomenon I find so troubling is a general sense I get that so many people who work for and with the Jewish community, including those who study and write about the Jewish people, actually detest a lot about the community and the people. I understand what it is to be disappointed, to believe that your community, your people, your nation has fallen short. But at a certain point, totemizing Judaism – the ideas, the aspirations – and then denigrating the actual Jewish people – misses the point. It’s like being a chef and hating food, and then telling people that you just wish all food was better, with perpetual bitter disappointment.

Isn’t this a part of what Kamtza/Bar Kamtza is about? What it takes to set aside your own affinities in order to build a community that values the dignity of even your ideological enemies, because together that community can withstand its adversaries?

I was talking to a junior colleague recently about working in the Jewish community and I implored her – as she grows into a career that will be successful – to try to love the people she will study and serve, in spite of them. The alternative is easier. I find so much of Jewish public discourse is rooted in hatred and again in self-satisfaction more than it is in empathy, and this time of the year I find it so irredeemably bleak. At Tisha B’Av, I lean into this intragroup hostility, and I try to understand it as an enduring condition – and not something we may ever be able to overcome.

Nearly 11 years ago my Tisha B’Av was permanently changed. Our son was born at hatzot that day, a literal living metaphor. Midday on Tisha B’Av is the moment of shift: like the middle of the night, when you know it’s still dark outside but you also can start operating with the belief that you are closer to the dawning of the light than you are to the ominousness of the darkness. The moment that the worst has passed is when you can start to become political again and planful and maybe even maybe can start believing in redemption. Our צמח ישי helped me understand this in the most embodied and immediate way. At first I thought his birth would ruin Tisha B’Av; it’s a birthday in our house (absence of cake notwithstanding.) Now, it has helped. You can have a dark day, and then it can lighten in unimaginable ways. We found love, if you will, in a hopeless place.

This year I am going to lean into the darkness again, and I will be trying to avoid the neatness of feeling my convictions confirmed. I will be mourning the nihilistic murder of a yeshiva student in Gush Etzion without concluding that if only my political instincts on how to bring peace between Israelis and Palestinians were followed, he wouldn’t have been killed. I’ll be mourning the conditions experienced by the millions of asylum seekers around the world – people without refuge – including those caged at our borders, without the certainty of blame or responsibility, and without sloganing – at least for Sunday – what it means to respond. I’ll be mourning the martyrs of Jewish history without the convenient theological narratives that affirm that their lives had “meaning” in their death. I will try to experience divine hiddenness as absence, rather than shadow.

And then, at some point in the middle of the day, I plan to commit to radical love. Not just to my own convictions and politics, which I still think are right; but to something transcendent, for the people whose team I’m on for better or worse, for those that even in fighting with them politically we ultimately hope to serve. First darkness; then again, light, made possible by love. Same as it ever was.

(edited for clarity by Marisa Elana James)

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