For the last three years, ever since the creation of the State of Israel, many of our fellow Jews, good, synagogue-going Jews, have been coming to me with a very intelligent complaint. “Why,” they ask, “must we observe days of national mourning such as Tisha B’av when we already have a State of Israel? Why cry and mourn over some catastrophe which occurred almost 2,000 years ago when today G-d has helped us and the ingathering of the exiles has begun?” And this, my friends, is a query which is difficult to answer. Why, after all, will it be necessary for us to fast tonight and tomorrow, and observe the other laws of Tisha B’av, when the Jews in Israel now have a healthy, progressive government, which is something for which we have dreamed so long? Of what use is it to remember a past tragedy? In short, what meaning does Tisha B’av have for a Jew of Today?Before we attempt to answer that question, let us make one important observation on the nature of Tisha B’av. And that is, that Tisha B’av is an occasion which requires more than memory. Remembering alone is a dull, passive act. A memory by itself is merely a stagnant picture momentarily projected on the screen of one’s mind, and is overlooked as any dull commercial is overlooked by a typical television audience. It may be entertaining but it means little if anything. No, Tisha B’av does not mean remember, it means reliving. It means, if I be permitted to paraphrase the Passover Haggada, that בכל דור ודור חייב אדם לראות את עצמו כאילו הוא ראה בחורבנה של ירושלים, that in every generation every Jew must feel as if he himself lived in Jerusalem as it was being destroyed by the cruel invader, as if he himself was one of the faithful onlookers who wept endless tears as they watched the בית המקדש, the Holy Temple, go up in flames, desecrated by the inhuman legion of Rome, and then threw themselves bodily into those very same flames. Every Jew must feel as if he personally were uprooted from his own sweet Palestinian soil …

If there is one word which symbolizes and characterizes this day of Tisha B’Av – set aside for woe and anguish from the time of the Israelites’ obstreperousness towards Moses in the desert, through the destruction of the two Temples, and from the Spanish Inquisition in 1492 to Hitler’s extermination order in and against Polish Jewry, all of which came on the ninth of Av, the Black Day of the Jewish calendar – that word is eikhah. It is a simple word, which means “how.” But the peculiar poetic construction of the work, eikhah instead of the more usual eikh has a connotation of woe, of gloom and moroseness. It is the word with which Moses in today’s sidra expresses his exasperation – eikhah esa levadi, how can I bear them by myself? Isaiah in today’s Haftorah chooses this word to bemoan the sad fate of Jerusalem: eikhah, “how is the faithful city become as a harlot?” And, of course, it is the refrain of Jeremiah’s dirges, his Lamentations, known in Hebrew as the Megillah of Eikhah. The Rabbis of the Midrash (Introduction to Eikhah R.) were intrigued by the word, and what they say throws light not only upon the word itself but upon the broader concept which informs this day and the historic events it commemorates. Indeed, they see eikhah as part of a structure which expands Tisha B’av from a day of national mourning into a symbol of the most crucial universal significance. They tell us: kol mah she’ira le’Adam ira le’Yisrael, everything that happened to Adam happened to Israel. Adam was placed by God in the Garden of Eden, Israel was brought by the Lord to Eretz Yisrael, a paradise in its own right. Adam was given a commandment; Israel was given 613 commandments. Adam sinned; Israel sinned. Adam was sent away and expelled; Israel was sent away and expelled into a long and bitter exile. What the Rabbis intend by this parallelism is the teaching that Israel’s exile issues from a human failing rather than a specifically Jewish weakness. By pointing to the identical patte…

Tisha B’av is more than the commemoration of the five specific historic events mentioned in the Talmud, foremost among them the destruction of the two Temples in Jerusalem six centuries apart. It is even more than the national threnody for a string of tragedies, beginning from the earliest times, and extending through the ninth of Av, 1492 – the expulsion of Jews from Spain – and the same date in 1942: the signing of the extermination order against Polish Jewry by the unmentionable leader of Nazi Germany. More than these alone, Tisha B’av is a condition of the divine human dialogue, it is a quality of the relations of God and the people of Israel. Man does not always perceive God uniformly. Sometimes He appears close to us, nearby, concerned, sympathetic, involved in our destiny, a loving and forgiving Father. “The Lord is near all who call upon Him” (Ps. 145:18). It is a source of joy and comfort to man when he perceives God in this fashion. But sometimes God appears infinitely remote, distant, faraway. It seems almost as if He has vanished from the world, without leaving a trace. God appears aloof, unapproachable, forbidding, uninterested, and ready to abandon man to eternal solitude. There is no greater agony for man than when God thus veils His presence, when He performs hester panim, the “hiding of His face” from mankind. When God, as it were, withdraws from the world and leaves man to his own resources, forsaken and at the mercy of the impersonal and brutal forces of nature and history, man’s life is worse than meaningless. It is this latter condition that is described in Tisha B’av. That black day was the beginning of the long, ages-old epoch in which God and Israel disengaged from each other, when a seemingly impenetrable veil cruelly separated them. The culmination of Jeremiah’s Lamentations sounds this very note: למה לנצח תעזבנו לאורך ימים – why do You forget us for an eternity, forsake us for so long a time? But if so many generations were born and died …

This is the week when the world will be achieving – hopefully, in safety – one of the greatest triumphs of the human race: the landing of man on the moon. Only time will tell whether this herculean marshaling of technological resources was an act of supreme wisdom, or one of the greatest follies of modern times, spending 24 billion dollars and 10 percent of the national budget on a project that did not deserve it. But no matter what time will show, right now one great paradox stands revealed: on the one hand, the ability of thousands upon thousands of individuals to cooperate in order to send one spaceship to the moon; and, on the other hand, the anomaly of disunity – for not one but two spaceships are approaching the moon, those of the United States and of Russia. It is a symbol of the fragmentation of the human community that the two superpowers had to undertake separate efforts: Russia, in an obvious and clumsy effort to distract from the American achievement, sends Luna 15 to the moon, and the American Congress has nothing better to do than to pass a special act requiring that the United States flag be planted on the lunar surface. How much more promising it would have been had all nations been able to cooperate in pooling their technical resources in achieving this great triumph!But, my dear friends, lest we despair too quickly because of this discord in the family of nations, there remains one consoling thought: the great powers are not always riven by rivalry and torn by dissent. There are times when, after all, all the great nations of the world can come to one common option. It is good to know that within the last few weeks the United Nations Security Council, representing the combined opinion of mankind, finally achieved unanimity: it was united against Jerusalem; all nations agreed that Israel ought to get out of the Holy City. Russia and Hungary, the United States and Yemen – powers of proven peaceful intentions, lovers of Jerusalem all, with vital inte…

In their commentaries on today’s special Haftorah, the Rabbis (in their Yalkut) tell us of the following imaginary yet very real conversation: ר' חנינא בר פפא אמר, אמרו ישראל לישעיהו: ישעיהו רבינו תאמר שלא באת לנחם אלא לאותו הדור שחרב בהמ"ק בימיו? אמר להם, לכל הדורות באתי לנחם. "אמר אלוקיכם" אין כתיב כאן אלא "יאמר אלוקיכם." Israel said to Isaiah: Isaiah, our Teacher, would you say that your consolations were directed only to that generation in whose days the Temple was destroyed? Said Isaiah to them: No, I have come to console all the generations. For it is not written, “comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, said your God,” but it says “comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, sayeth (or: will say) your God.” Consolation, then, is not an act in isolation. It is a process, and it applies not only to one specific time, but it is relevant to all times. It is therefore worth pondering: what does this subtle yet powerful psychological transformation consist of? What are the mechanics of this profound personal redemption which we call nechama?I ask this not only as an abstract or rhetorical question. There are practical consequences. People are caught up in the depths of despair and grief. What should or can consolation mean to them? Or, the menachamim, those who go to console the mourners: very often they are at a loss, they do not know how to translate their good wishes into acceptable words. That is why they often do the wrong thing, why the task of offering condolences is often so difficult, why otherwise intelligent people are frequently reduced to silly prattle. Furthermore, in the history of our people we are the great Generation of Nechamah. We are the generation that has gone from the depths of Auschwitz to the heights of the State of Israel. We have experienced consolation. Therefore, it behooves us to understand it, so that we can better understand ourselves and the times in which we live. The answer to our question, the key to the nature of this phenomenon called cons…

Tisha B’av always a black day. Zohar: on each day of the calendar a different angel is in charge; the Ninth day of Av – שרו של עשו שולט. Yet, Halakhah does not see in it unrelieved gloom. On verse קרא אליי מועד Halakhah maintains that this day also has certain festive aspects, therefore no תחנון. Similarly – Agadah – Messiah was born on Tisha B’av. What is the major idea? That חורבן contains seeds of Geulah, that in destruction there are already contained the seeds of reconstruction.What were such (end of side one not there) (3) I would suggest three such elements. First is — the whole pattern of Torah and mitzvot. Think of how surprising it is. Most pa gan nations thought the cult was relevant only to home countries. If exiled, they adopted new gods and newways. But the God of Israel is the universal Creator, and His word is therefore applicab le and relevant everyplace in the world. Hence, the observance of Torah and the commandments kept us alive in exile and kept fresh our bonds to Eretz Israel, Contribution here was that Torah and commandments apply to hutz la-arehtz as well as Eretz Yisrael. So the Ramban teaches us, in his commentary, that laws of the Torah apply primarily to the Land of Israel, but we are to observe them in the Golanas well.It is therefore both ridiculous and tragic to hear te arguments propounded by so many Israelis, and especially by American emigres to Israel, that Torah and commandments were meant only for galut and they can be safely abandoned in the State of Israel, Such an attitude, which reduces all of Judaism to a form of life insurance for secular nationalism's both contemptible and dangerous. Contemptible — be-cause it mocks 100 generations of Jewish loyalty and self-sacrifice for God and Torah, It is dangerous because it jeppardizes Israel'd soul in these critical *״A fateful days when its future is beung molded. It reveals, in addition, an element of pseudo-Messianism. The Christian heresy and the Sabbatian heresies too were ba…

Tisha B’av raises for us the eternal problem of suffering and pain and evil. Permit me to discuss with you, however briefly, some of these timeless issues, which unfortunately, are always timely. On Tisha B’av, as well as on other fast days, we read the portion which records the prayer of Moses when he was informed atop Mount Sinai that while he was receiving the Torah his people, in their impatience, had built a golden calf and were worshiping it. The Torah tells us ויחל משה את פני ה’ אלוקיו ויאמר למה ה’ יחרה אפך בעמך, “And Moses besought the Lord his God and said: why, O Lord, doth Thy wrath wax so hot against people?” (Ex. 32:11). In modern English, Moses pleaded with God: why so angry, O Lord? True, the people sinned, but why so angry? Why so harsh a punishment? Is there really a correspondence between the extent of the sin and the degree of punishment? In effect, Moses is presenting to God the greatest and most impenetrable mystery for religion and all humanity: Why so angry, O Lord? It is a question appropriate not only to Tisha B’av, but also to every other disaster and cataclysm, every destruction and exile, that has befallen our people. It is a question that troubles us concerning Israel, which this past year has seen so much depression of morale and spirit. It is, preeminently, the great question of the Holocaust. And while all these instances are communal and collective, there is also the acute problem of the individual who suffers. Where is there a person who has not experienced a touch of grief, a taste of anguish; who does not someplace in his or her own heart conceal some great and terrible fear, whether the fear of death and mortality itself, the fear of disease and sickness, or the fear of loneliness and abandonment? All of these force us to confront the question of suffering and pain. When the Rabbis analyzed this verse, they concluded with some rather remarkable insights. The word ויחל comes from the word in Hebrew which means, “to pray fervently…

Introd. Main theme is Respon'g; not analysis of sarcastic retort of petulant child, "Th- for N." Is worthy a common. Yet – in many ways fundamental. שבת נחמו appny't Res'y. Once word to think that after חרבן, at ונתחלתא דגאולה, Nechama = passive... Now, w. our own comtemp. exp'a נחמה and resulting התעוררות, see that נחמה is a challenge: what we do w. it? How use it to bring Isr. תחת כנפי השכינה? H. – confers Res'y on us.