Tisha B'Av addtional thoughts--5776

Each year I pick up on different parts of Eicha and the Kinot.  This year it was right near the beginning...Eicha 2:1-9.  It talks about all the things Hashem has done to destroy Tzion.  The destroyer was not Babylon...not Nebuchadnezzar...but Hashem.  Our enemies are only the tools He uses...rather than hate the tools, we should take away His reasons for using them.

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I am pleased to report that this year, for the first time in many years, listening to the New York news during the Nine Days did NOT produce any Chillul Hashem stories.  Either they are too busy with local troubles, the Olympics, and those two unfit-to-be-president people that they don't have time, or there are actually less frum Jews making bad headlines.  IY"H it's the latter and will continue.

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There WAS Chillul Hashem at the Kotel again on Rosh Chodesh Av, but it didn't make the international news, and, thank Hashem, no one called the Torah a "questionable object" this time.  The anti-women-of-the-wall people, intent on destroying this most evil group of women, blew whistles all through their davening.  (I guess whistles aren't as exciting to the New York press as thrown bottles and diapers.)

We all know the stories about simple shepherds who could only reach Hashem by whistling, but I don't think that's the case here.  Rather, I think that in their irrational, relentless drive to destroy an evil-that-isn't, these "anti-"s have disrespected their fellow Jews, the Kotel, and Hashem.

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As I write this it is only a few more hours until Tisha B'Av is over.  As I say almost every year in one way or another, if we can get our acts together and start behaving like true Torah Jews, we can make this the last Tisha B'Av of mourning, and meet next year on Har Habayit for a Korban BBQ.

Inviting Bar Kamtza to Kinot--Tisha B'Av 5776

I mentioned this as a minor point several years ago. In our shul, and I'm sure many others, they give out an extra "kina" mourning the "churban" of the hitnakut.  This year and last they preceded it with a speaker...either someone who lived there or someone who was there at the end to provide chizuk, to give first-hand testimony of this "churban."  They ended up spending as much, or more, time on this than on the Shoah.

A Churban?  Equating Gush Katif to the destruction of the Temple?  How ridiculous is that?  Adding this to the Tisha B'av Kinot is a political act, not a religious one, and it has no place here.

It doesn't even fit the pattern of the Kinot...in the Hitnakut, NO JEWS DIED, and NO JEWS WERE FORCED TO LEAVE ERETZ YISRAEL.  It also wasn't our enemies that did it, but our fellow Jews, some of them frum, who believed they were doing it for the best of reasons.  (More on that shortly.)

(Disclaimer:  I had relatives who lived in the Gush Katif region and were evacuated on that day, and it took years and years for them to finally be permanently resettled, so I know how painful it was.  That does not in any way change the wrongness here.)

The Tisha B'Av davening, in addition to containing many kinot about the destruction of the Batei Mikdash, has added kinot for tragedies that befell various Jewish communities  through the Middle Ages.  Then it stops.  No more kinot were added until the ones commemorating the Shoah. 

It makes sense to say that other tragedies should be noted in kinot also.  But which ones?  Since those last Medieval tragedies, there have been hundreds of others in which multitudes of Jews have suffered and died.  A very minuscule and random sample include the Inquisition, the Chevron massacre of 1929, and the Pesach Seder massacre of 2002.  The list goes on and on.  Shouldn't the victims of the current intifada like Rav Miki Mark and Hallel Yaffa be remembered in a kina?

But all we can come up with to add to our lists is this one, little, thing that doesn't even fit the rules.  How sad is that?

It's worse than that.  The kina itself lament that soldiers and police were changed from "beloved brothers" to enemies.

Calling soldiers of the IDF enemies?  A Jew calling another Jew his enemy?  That's tragic.

The phrase "beloved brothers" also implies that we are talking about the frum soldiers who took part.  They, or their rabbis, decided that it was better to go along than to tear Israel apart in a civil war.  There were also frum Jews not related to the actual decisions that felt it was better to go along, and even some few that thought it might in the long run have positive effects.  And so this kina, and the inclusion of it in the Tisha B'Av davening, also seems to be yet another attack on "any Jew who disagrees with me."  (There were, in fact, at the time, public slanders and some threats made against those frum Jews who participated/supported the participation.)

There are two words for that:  Sinat Chinam.  And the perfect example of Jew against Jew that brought about tragedy is the Kamtza-Bar Kamtza story.

So we spend hours on Tisha B'Av morning lamenting the terrible things that have happened to us, and admitting (see my previous posts about the p'shat of Eicha and some of the kinot) that we are to blame, and we wrap it up by doing more of the thing that got us in trouble!  (K'tovel v'sheretz b'yado...like a person who goes into the mikva still carrying a rat. )  And tomorrow morning we'll wake up and wonder why all our kavana and sincerity hasn't brought Mashiach yet!

It makes perfect sense, if you realize that most of us have not really taken the bull by the horns and admitted, deep down to the bottom of our hearts, that we are the cause, and only by changing our attitudes can we bring the solution.

When I got home from shul I caught the tail-end of the live webcast of Kinot at the Yeshiva University Israel campus with Rav Dovid Gottlieb.  He was talking about Sinat Chinam, and he said that if you ask enough you can get Jews to admit to most other sins...maybe they broke Shabbat once, or ate treif...but never sinat chinam, because every time they hate it's for a good reason so it's not "chinam".

But usually it IS chinam...there's no problem with our fellow Jews that can't be solved without hate.  (Non-Jews, too, at least after we re-establish ourselves as a true or lagoyim and my favorite pasuk comes true.)  And only when we all come to that realization can we get out of this evil cycle and bring Mashiach.  במהרה בימינו