We are in the waning hours of Tisha b’Av, at least here in Israel.
Since 1967, and really since Zalman Shazar (who would become Israel’s second president), but at the time in 1929 was the editor of Davar, a center-left “Histadrut” newspaper, proposed to make Tisha B’av a national holiday as the birthday of Shabbtai Zvi, there have been calls for abolishing Tisha b’Av as a fast.
Jerusalem no longer sits alone, a widow, abandoned by her friends. Jerusalem is a beautiful, thriving city. We no longer need to mourn her.
A different notion crystallized for me in Port au Prince Haiti on Tisha b’Av 1991, when I was there to interview President Jean Bertrand Aristide. Fasting in the immense heat, I looked down from my hotel on a hill in Petionville, a relatively affluent neighborhood, and saw the Citi Soleil slums, which I had wandered through a few days before, where people were living in inhuman conditions.
From that moment on, Tisha b’Av for me has been about the enormous suffering that still exists in the world, the billions whose lives are food insecure, sanitation-less, healthcare bereft, and whose cultures are threatened because poverty has forced them into exile.
This universalization of Tisha b’Av does not make it less Jewish but more. It recognizes the holy Temple that was destroyed as “a house of prayer for all nations.” It gestures to the messianic vision we carry with us as the children of prophets, which is nothing if not universal. The Messiah will be born on Tisha b’Av, according to Jewish tradition.
This Tisha b’Av, keeping in mind the hundreds of millions in sub-Saharan Africa, in South Asia and elsewhere who are in grave danger of falling into poverty because of the economic collapse caused by COVID-19 and because of climate change, may it be God’s will that the Temple of human kindness and divine grace be rebuilt speedily in our days.
