Question 20: Eicha—What do we need to see clearly this Tisha B'Av?

We are hovering an inch from rock bottom. 

On the 17th of Tamuz, 3 weeks ago, we recalled the day when the walls of Jerusalem were breached and we felt our sense of wellbeing crack as enemies forced their way into our sacred city. 

Now, we are hours from the 9th of Av, a day when the number of tragedies that has befallen our people is woefully high. The destruction of both Temples. Rome’s beating down of the Bar Kochba rebellion. The start of the 1st Crusade. The Spanish Inquisition. The deportation from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka. The Mishnah even says that Tisha b’Av was the day when God told the Israelites that they were to wander in the wilderness for 40 years until the generation that had left Egypt was no more. 

Tonight we will gather to lament, and from our collective rock bottom we will begin our slow and painful climb to the Days of Awe. 

Tisha b’Av, in asking us to place ourselves in this low place, is one of many Jewish holidays that carry an emotional expectation. Our calendar actually asks quite a lot of us. Joy on Sukkot and Simchat Torah. Extroverted miracle publishing on Hanukkah. Topsy turvey delight on Purim. And the full gamut of feeling on Passover as we see ourselves in every generation as having been a part of the exodus from Egypt. 

Some years, it may be difficult for us to lower ourselves to Tisha b’Av’s place of despair. 

Not this year. Not last year. The unprecedented difficulties of this decade make it all too easy to place ourselves in a seat of sadness. Even if we are lucky enough to be experiencing good in our personal lives, our collective society is riddled with horrors. We need merely glance at our phones or turn on our TVs or look up while walking along the street to encounter that which merits lamentation. And that takes a toll. 

Of course, much which merits lamentation is not about the Jews, per se, and this is a Jewish day of mourning. But again, the heartache is right here. Dozens of hostages are still held by Hamas. Thousands of Israeli young adults are at war instead of in college. Israelis regularly wake to sirens warning of rocket fire from terrorists and hostile foreign powers. And many, many Jews even in a place as Jewish as New York City are reasonably afraid to wear a kippah or a Star of David necklace. For these things, I weep. For these things, we weep.

In a sickening inversion of dayenu, yes, this would be enough. Enough tragedy. Enough fear. Enough to cry out and beat our chests and wish was different. And yet, we can’t stop there. Even on a Jewish day of mourning. 

Today is Shabbat Hazon, Shabbat of Vision, named for the Haftarah preceding Tisha b’Av in which Isaiah begins to rebuke the Israelites for their misdeeds and inform them of the tragedy that will befall them if they don’t repair their ways. This haftarah is meant to cushion us— to give us a shard of hope as we gaze forward into the darkest day of our year— because in addition to rebuke and warning Isaiah reassures us that although rebels and sinners will be crushed, Zion and her repentant ones will be saved. All is not lost. We are in the depths but it’s not forever. We are in the depths but we too could be among those repentant ones. 

But to do this, to be adequately repentant, we do need vision, and we need it to be clear, and to fully open our eyes is painful work. 

My husband is a therapist. Sometimes, after a session, I ask him how it went and he’ll say something along the lines of “Fine but pretty surface level. He’s not ready.”

When he first gave me this answer, I questioned him. Wasn’t it his job to make his clients face the stuff they didn’t want to face? But as he explained to me, our minds are incredibly adept at keeping us from confronting that which we don’t want to address. Therapists can hold space, ask the right questions, and read between the lines with great skill, but ultimately if we’re not ready we’ll evade our real work. Interrupting our status quo, even a deeply unsatisfying status quo, is often something that our minds won’t allow unless we strongarm them into it. We have to be ready. 

I’m no therapist, but as a rabbi leading a congregation through this immensely difficult time for the Jewish people, I feel this struggle. Our status quo is broken. I’m here to stand beside you as we gaze upon that reality, to hold your hand and offer words of comfort, but I can’t make you open your eyes. Perhaps our sacred text can. 

Tonight, we’ll chant passages from Eicha, the Lamentations of Jeremiah. Here are a few verses selected from chapter 4:

The tongue of the suckling cleaves

To its palate for thirst.

Little children beg for bread;

None gives them a morsel.

Those who feasted on dainties

Lie famished in the streets….

Their skin has shriveled on their bones,

It has become dry as wood.

Better off were the slain of the sword

Than those slain by famine,

Who pined away, [as though] wounded,

For lack of^-a the fruits of the field….

Even now our eyes pine away

In vain for deliverance.

As we waited, still we wait

For a nation that cannot help.

Our steps were checked,

We could not walk in our squares.^-f

Our doom is near, our days are done—

Alas, our doom has come!

This is, thank God, not an experience most of us have had. Many of us have never experienced hunger at all save of the self-imposed variety or that of inconvenience — missing lunch because of a busy day and the like. For many Gazans, however, this hunger is a daily reality, and more and more Gazans are starving. Hamas’s responsibility for the hunger in Gaza, along with their responsibility in the rest of the war, cannot and should not be understated. But the power source in Gaza is Israel. For over two months earlier this year, Israel prohibited the entry of all aid and arrested Israeli and international activists who attempted to get food in. Now, Israel controls what aid enters the Gaza strip and how it is distributed. Israel positions its soldiers at aid distribution sites and shoots at civilians. And while Netanyahu continues to cling to power and thereby evade trial for corruption charges, Israel continues to receive immense amounts of support for offensive weaponry from the United States. 

I don’t expect Hamas to behave in an ethical manner. It’s a terror group. But I think it is reasonable to expect and demand ethical conduct from Israel, especially when Israel claims again and again to be a moral state that every Jew should support. 

So here we are today. Gaza is hungry. Gaza is starving. We do not know exact numbers, but if a single civilian is starving, is that not enough to cry out? 

According to NPR, a new report from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, an organization made up of 21 organizations and intergovernmental institutions including the WHO and Oxfam, found that “Between May and July, the proportion of households experiencing extreme hunger has doubled, surpassing the threshold for famine in most areas. In northern Gaza, 81% of households reported poor food consumption in July, up from 33% in April. Nearly 9 out of 10 households resort to extremely severe coping mechanisms, including taking significant safety risks to obtain food and scavenging from garbage.” 

In HaAretz this week, anthropologist and famine expert Dr. Alex de Waal shared that "For children who are suffering acute malnutrition – they're losing body fat and muscles. They're losing energy, and also cognitive functioning. Their cries are weak, their eyes are glazed. And if they are exposed to this for anything more than a very short period of time, the impacts are lifelong. They will not recover fully. When you get to severe acute malnutrition, the body is not only consuming body fat but also vital organs." In other words, even if the famine ends, children who have been starved will live the rest of their lives with the impact of having gone without sufficient food, just like the children who’ve lost limbs or family in this war will suffer from those losses forever. 

The reality of this famine is a modern Lamentation. This is happening right now, in the land that so many Jews love, to a people who are our cousins and whose roots in the land are as deep as our own. Much as we may be tempted to look away, or to hurl all of the blame at Hamas’s feet, it is time to take an honest look. We cannot sit in our comfortable synagogues and chant Lamentations and ignore the picture it paints of the horror that befell our ancestors that is befalling the people of Gaza and in all likelihood the hostages at this moment. 

This morning we began the book of Deuteronomy, most of which comprises Moshe’s final words to the Israelites before his death. From his introduction at the start of Exodus Moshe has evolved from being a man with trouble speaking to a man able to orate for chapters on end, reviewing the Israelites’ journey and the laws passed down from God. Over the course of the 40 year trek, Moshe found his voice, and in this last book of Torah he uses it to help the Israelites become the people they must be to inherit the future God wishes for them. It’s worth remembering that Moshe learned to speak only after bearing witness to the realities around him that were not right. He left Mitzrayim the first time after seeing a task master beating an enslaved Hebrew and intervening. And he set out to return to Mitzrayim after he stopped and stared at a burning bush long enough to comprehend that it was not being consumed. Moshe turned aside to look at both of these sights— one tragic and demanding intervention, the other miraculous and demanding awe— and after each his life changed as his understanding of his place in the world shifted dramatically.  

None of us here today is Moshe, but like our most powerful prophet, we cannot turn away from this tragic sight. On this Shabbat Hazon, on this Shabbat of Vision, it is our responsibility to look at the starvation in Gaza not with a defensiveness around Israel — however much love we feel for it— but with an eye to the reality of suffering. How fortunate we are, in a way, to have Tisha b’Av as a container for such suffering tonight. In a commentary written for the commemoration this year, Rabbi Aviva Richman wrote:

“[Lamentations] blames our enemies and ourselves – and even God – for rampant devastation. Eichah offers scathing critiques of our leaders, and not just our tormentors. As the words of Eichah echo in our ears, we must be open to the many resonances of rebuke – of Israel’s tormentors, Jewish leaders, global leaders, and ourselves. It is easy, and even understandable, to grow defensive when we are in pain, but Eichah asks for an openness to self-criticism so that we might draw lessons from even the hardest moments we face…. Sitting together, we must summon the strength to open ourselves to the fullness of lament.” 

Today, we are hovering just above rock bottom. In a few hours, we will reach it. The question is, where do we go from there? 

The Book of Lamentations ends: “For truly, You have rejected us, Bitterly raged against us” but even on this day of rock bottom that wasn’t where the rabbis wanted us to conclude. And so after we chant the final verse we go back to the one before, הֲשִׁיבֵ֨נוּ יְהֹוָ֤ה ׀ אֵלֶ֙יךָ֙ (ונשוב) [וְֽנָשׁ֔וּבָה] חַדֵּ֥שׁ יָמֵ֖ינוּ כְּקֶֽדֶם׃. Take us back, God, to Yourself, And let us come back; Renew our days as of old!” We end not with rejection but with hope of return, the same hope that Isaiah offers us in today’s Haftarah. It is not too late to speak out against the famine. It is not too late to painfully acknowledge Israel’s role in the horror. It is not too late to give as generously as we can to organizations working to feed civilians. It is not too late to see ourselves in the innocent people trying to survive a seemingly endless siege. And it is not too late to advocate for an end to all of this. 

Karen Harel, whose son Oran was killed on October 7th, wrote this poem: 

“Don’t turn my son’s murder into an instrument for war

Don’t send missiles in his name

Don’t send soldiers in his name

Don’t send messengers of revenge

Send in his memory love

Send in his memory condolences

Send a blessing in his name”

As we begin our slow reflective arc to Rosh Hashanah, may we be those blessings to one another, to Israel, to Gaza, and to all who dwell on earth.