By Tal Bahar, Community Shlicha
On the ninth day of the month Av, we mourned the destruction of the First Temple and the exile that followed, the destruction of the Second Temple and the 2000-year exile.
Other events that Tisha B’av symbolizes are the slander of the spies that Moses sent to the promised land, the day when Beitar was captured, a year later when the Temple Mount was plowed by the Romans, the expulsion from England, the expulsion from France and the expulsion from Spain.
In the modern context, it was impossible not to feel the painful and frightening image of the destruction that we experienced 11 months ago and the black cloud of destruction hanging over our heads. Tisha B’av was present this year more than ever. Why?
The third State of Israel was built on the foundations of a 2000-year longing for sovereignty, for refuge, for a home, for nationhood. But also, and perhaps in some contrast, on the knees of socialism.
The question of the place of Judaism was asked a lot among the leaders and among the people before the establishment of the state, after it, and still to this day.
In 1934, 13 years before the establishment of the State of Israel, one of the youth movements in the Land of Israel went to a summer camp on Tisha B’av.
On the face of it, the secular context does not exist for Tisha B’av. After all, the “seculars” who established the summer camp, “the sons of Kibbutzim” for the most part, socialists; did not observe Shabbat and the holiday, for them is a time for those who wear kippahs. Berl Katznelson, a leading intellectual of socialist Zionism and one of the prominent leaders of the labor movement, was a full-fledged secularist.
Surprisingly or not, Katznelson wrote a critical article called “Destruction and Detachment” (in my translation, due to a lack of available English translations).
His poignant article provoked sharp criticism, and as a response, Katznelson wrote another article, “Never-Ending Sources (Heritage).”
Berl Katznelson believed that the young instructors of the movement did not insist on moving the date of the camp set by the leadership for one simple reason – lack of knowledge. They innocently accepted the fact, but that is no excuse.
In his eyes – this is even more infuriating and shocking – Katznelson claims there are two powers that belong to us, and they are memory and forgetting.
If there was only memory and no forgetting – we would become slaves, in view of the complex history experienced by our people. A history of exile and a history of slavery.
And what if there was only oblivion and we existed without the memory?
We would not have remembered periods of prosperity and efforts for freedom and heroism, no revolutionary movement based on the foundations of the past would have arisen and we would have languished in our ignorance and even then – our end would have been as slaves.
He claimed in the following sentence toward the end of his second article on the topic “Never-Ending Sources (Heritage)”:
“A new and creative generation does not throw the legacy of the generations into the trash. He examines and checks, distances and brings closer, and sometimes he clings to the existing tradition and adds to it, and sometimes he descends into waves of scraps, uncovers forgotten ones, removes them from their rust, brings back to life an ancient tradition, which feeds the soul of the new generation.”
The symbiosis between forgetting and memory cannot exist without our work. The indifference and the fear of dealing with what is foreign are biting off a piece and another piece of our identity.
And basically, how did we get to the point where Judaism became something foreign?
The question to whom Judaism belongs has occupied me a lot over the years, as a Jew, Orthodox, and secular according to dry definitions, but not according to my definition, as one who grew up in the Jewish and democratic state of Israel, where “political Judaism” sometimes overshadows and makes this belonging ambiguous.
And what is this Judaism anyway? This Judaism is a family, this Judaism are questions like the height of the moon and the sun; it is deep values like the depth of the ocean.
This Judaism is a tradition over 3,000-years old; it is wisdom and knowledge and learning and “Limud.”
This Judaism is “the people of the book,” so, who are we to be ashamed or afraid to open our oldest history book, which tells the history of our people?
This Judaism resurrected a language that was almost dead, this Judaism kept this people in a bubble when needed and broke the walls when needed. This Judaism is who we are.
Memory and forgetting have made us cautious but brave, a nation that remembers what Amalek did to it but loves and pursues peace, a nation that sanctifies beliefs and rituals from exile but from which the start-up nation and the smartest people in the world were born.
So, who does Judaism belong to?
For all of us, Judaism has many faces, as God has 72 names, and the Torah has 70 faces.
Judaism has many faces and Jews have many faces. The struggle is pointless – Judaism does not belong to one and only.
Judaism belongs to everyone, and we had better start believing in it and break through the walls of shame, in these days of the feeling of destruction and the heroism of the people even more than ever.
