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Synagogue Sermon

June 18, 1962

Thanks for Nothing: The Origins and Expression of Responsibility (1962)

Three Weeks & Tisha B'Av Prayer
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The Veil of God (1965)

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 …
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When We Try to Keep God in His Place (1964)

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…
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Why So Angry, O Lord? (1974)

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…
Three Weeks & Tisha B'Av