Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 33: Thoughts for Tisha B’Av - We live in history

Episode Date: August 3, 2025

Our Patreon subscribers asked for a dvar Torah, a short homily, on the Jewish fast day of Tisha B'Av, which commemorates many of the great tragedies of Jewish history, including and especially the destruction of the two Temples in Jerusalem millennia ago.Tisha B'Av, Haviv argues, is a window into the Sages' conception of history, their view of the brokenness of the world reflected in the tragedies of history, and the power of the study of history to mend that brokenness.This episode is sponsored by Alex and Betty Verjovsky in honor of Sayeret Tzanchanim, the reconnaissance company of the Paratroopers Brigade, in memory if their fallen and wounded, and the soldiers who have been fighting since October 7 and have paid a heavy price for Israel's defense. The sponsors' close friend, the unit's top NCO, is finally retiring after 35 years of service.Please join me on Patreon to support this project: ⁠www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnything⁠.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Hi, everybody. This is a short little contemplative episode. It's Tishabba'av, the ninth day of the month of Av. A fast day, a day of mourning on the Jewish calendar, a day that commemorates a great many tragedies that happened to the Jews, not because they all happened on this day, but because the sages of the Talmud, the rabbis told us to commemorate them on this day. They wanted, first of all, to make sure that we don't remember some tragedy or another on every day, right? This is a very ancient and old history in which Jews are often vulnerable, often a minority where they live.

And so there isn't a day of the year where something bad didn't happen, but also they wanted to thread through a single day and a single moment and a single act of commemoration that happens on the 9th of all the great tragedies, because they wanted to use those tragedies, the destruction of the first temple and the Babylonian exile, the destruction of the second temple by the Romans, and the 2000-year exile since, the expulsion from Spain that reshaped the Jewish world, a great many of the tragedies of Jewish history, they wanted them to be part of a continuum,

and they wanted us to think of them as part of a continuum. Obviously, every community has its own traditions, its own history, its own triumphs, and its own tragedies, but Jews as a whole have a thread of tragedy that all form a kind of single unified memory that Jewish culture instills in us through this day by bringing them all into a single day. I want to just say one important thing about Tishabababah

that I think is relevant to this podcast, to my work, and to what I think Jewish history, the sages, try and tell us about history. This is going to be a podcast about how Tishabababab, I think, is a window into the rabbinic conception of history, of what it is, of how it operates. And I think that's important now, because we are at a pivot of history. We have lived through a very trying and complex time.

There is a terrible, painful war underway. There is a period now of tremendous opportunities and tremendous good, and tremendous tragedies, and tremendous pain and evil. And Tishabé Abbaev is a window into how the sages of the Jewish tradition, especially of the Talmud, and of the Taoism. the Talmudic period, want us to think about these kinds of moments. Moments, they themselves were very, very versed in and had tremendous experience in moments like these.

Before we get into it, I just want to thank our sponsors for this episode. Alex and Betty Verhowski, thank you for sponsoring this episode in honor of the IDF reconnaissance unit called Sayerate Zanchanim, the reconnaissance unit of the paratroopers brigade. They're fallen, they're wounded, soldiers who have been fighting from the first moment that news filtered in of October 7's massacre and of the attack, and who've paid a heavy price for such a small unit. The sponsor's close friend is the unit's top NCO, who is finally retiring after 35 years. Folks, this is an occasional podcast that I do about Judaism, about our religious world, about our religious bookshelf. I think in its terms, I was raised in its world, in its way of thinking. It is a powerful toolkit for dealing with complexities, with tragedies, with joy, with all of the little things in life that in the end produce a life.

to be strong, to be resilient, to know how to be happy in a world of an attention economy and pressures that are never ending and a modernity that is deeply alienating. All these tools that are built out to build community, to build a sense of self, to build a sense of the world, to build a sense of the sacred and the precious, these exist in these old bookshelves, and not just in Judaism. I have enough friends who are deep, not only believers, but learned believers. of other religions to know that this is a superpower that religion grants you. Don't be so quick to dismiss religion, especially the old traditional kinds that have

stood the test of time and been useful to societies and civilizations over many years. They tend to offer benefits that you don't realize they are giving you until you've lost them. And it's not easy to reclaim. The Bible in Genesis talks about the fall from innocence to experience in the eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Once you've left innocence, gained experience, innocence can't be reclaimed. I had the good fortune of growing up in a home where religion was serious and innocent, and therefore powerful. I have every ability to critique it.

I went to learn religion in the university once I was old enough, but also I have it. And so I'm very grateful for that. There are many, many texts that reveal to us how the rabbis understood history. And I think it can help us think through this moment. In the Jerusalem Talmud, in Tractate Yoma, page 5, the rabbis tell us any generation in which the temple is not rebuilt in its days is considered as if they themselves destroyed it. The sages are discussing the causes of the destruction of the temple, and they arrive at a deep moral conclusion, the very destruction

we commemorate on the 9th of Av. And the conclusion is that if the temple has not yet been rebuilt now, if redemption hasn't come and the messianic age hasn't arrived and the temple been rebuilt and the proper order of the cosmos in the sense of the human coming before the Lord and service and gratitude hasn't been restored. The generation in which it has not been restored, which is to say every generation in 2000 years, is the generation that committed the sin for which the temple was originally destroyed. We have not yet repaired the sin for which it was destroyed, and therefore our response

for it, are complicit in it. To the sages of the Talmud, the fracturing of the world represented in the destruction of the temple, in one tragedy after another, the whole lineage of tragedy. That breaking of the world, that fracturing of the world, is alive, it's here, it's present. It defines our reality. It creates the conditions in which we live here and now. The temple was destroyed now because of us, here, and we, it is incumbent on us to repair it. We live in a state of destruction. Our lives, our world are shaped by it, both in some deep spiritual dimension, of course, there's always a mystical element as well, but also in the plain historical sense. William Faulkner once wrote,

The past is never dead. It isn't even past. We live inside it. Do you want to understand yourself? You want to understand your condition, your situation, your surroundings? You have to deeply understand your past because it's still here. The conditions that produced exile, the conditions that produced all the pain of the Jews, aren't an event. from two millennia past. There are a fracture in the world,

a structural, deep one, that is still happening. Think of the pogroms, beginning in the 1880s, after the assassination of the Tsar, and the anti-Semitic laws that were passed by various European empires and governments that drove millions of Jews to flee Europe,

that began the emptying of Europe of its Jews, over 60 years, that created the Jewish world, of today, which forgot all its old languages and en masse, almost to the last living Jew, learned Hebrew and English. We very much live in our past. That's still the world, that moment of history, is what and who we are. If you don't know that moment of history, you don't know what and who you are. Our perception of the world, every ordinary Israeli Jew perceives the world through the lens of those events. And if they don't know those events, then they perceive

their own existence in a clouded way, imperfectly. In that sense, Tishabé Ab'av isn't a simple day of mourning. The morning we are called to perform on Tishabé Ab'av, when we're supposed to, for example, in synagogue, sit and read lamentations on the floor, we are supposed to enact some of the rituals of actual mourning, mourning if our parents die, for example. Morning if loved ones are gone, mourning for the destruction of those first generations who are deeply traumatized by the destruction of the temple. We have a hundred stories of that in the Talmud. People who came out of the destruction period of the exile

that the Romans imposed on the Jews stopped eating meat because meat was sacrificed at the temple. Stop drinking wine because wine was sacrificed at the temple. the whole world was defined by this great tragedy, this dismantling of their sense of self and sanctity and the world around them. We don't just mourn that breaking, Antishabyev. What we're called to perform

is not mourning of the kind that you, if a loved one passes. It's not nostalgia either. It's not sit and remember and imagine the temple period to have been fantastic and better and rosy-colored and perfect. It is mourning that is, at its core, a deep reflection on the world as it is, and what makes it so. Morning that is the beginning of repair, of mending, of restoration, of ticun. Those are all what ticun means in Hebrew.

Is a mourning that is a contemplation of how the world is, what it is, how it became what it is. And once you know how it became what it is, You lay that first stone on the path to redemption, to the repair, to the fixing, to that different future. Point number two. We fall not only because of our sins. The first temple, the sages tell us, was destroyed because of three sins, and they are some of the greatest sins possible in Judaism. idolatry, the worship of idols, sexual immorality, up to it including abuse and sexual criminality

and incest, and bloodshed, the spilling of blood, murder. These are three great sins, these are the three great sins for which a Jew is required to be willing to die in order to avoid committing. In every other possible commandment and sin, a Jew must, favor life. In other words, if somebody puts a gun to your head and says to you, rob a bank, or I kill you. You rob that bank. Obviously, you try and get out of it and alert the police, but imagine those are your two, only two options. You rob the bank rather than die. Your life is too precious for you to not commit the sin that saves your life. We are required to observe

the Sabbath and observe holidays during which some of them we can't drive unless you're an ambulance driver and you are called to help somebody who had a heart attack. And then you are required by you are forbidden to observe the Sabbath. You are required to drive. Every single law, every custom, every commandment is displaced by the need to preserve life, except for these three great ones, which are idolatry, sexual immorality, and murder. But the second temple, the sages tell us. Also in tractate Yoma was destroyed. Not because of those specific sins, but because of senseless hatred. Sinat Hinnam. Thichabab for many Jews is a day when we contemplate the terrible costs of senseless hatred. Now, that idea of senseless hatred, it's not a

great translation. There's actually a debate among many of the scholars and sages about what the heck is sinat chenam. Is it hatred that has no cause? The person didn't do anything to me. them because of my own inner jealousy, my own inner motivations that are petty and wrong, and some of the Ten Commandments tell me to oppose? Or is it hatred that has no constructive purpose? All things are only morally what humans make of them. A handgun can protect and a handgun can murder. Humans decide whether it is good or evil. And that's true of almost everything in the Jewish understanding of ethics. Well, hatred itself can be a powerful mobilizer for good.

There are things you are supposed to hate, crimes that you are supposed to hate, inequalities that you are supposed to hate, and that hatred is a powerful emotional motivator to correction, to repair. A hatred that dwells within you and has no constructive purpose or outlet or capacity to do any good in the world.

Is that what senseless hatred, sinat chinnam means? Whatever the answer is, whether it is hatred without cause or hatred without purpose, this idea that this kind of hatred destroyed the Jews, destroyed the last kingdom, destroyed the ability to bring the sacrifices to the temple, the heart of ritual in ancient Judaism. the heart of it all in ancient Judaism. This idea means that we do need to understand what the heck it is we're talking about.

Rav Kuk, the great sage of modern Israeli religious Zionism, wrote in his book Orotakodesh, Lights of the Sacred. Senseless hatred is hatred toward anyone who is not like you. Senseless hatred is seen by just one interpreter or after another over the millennia, as a structural hatred, an automatic hatred, a hatred you could fall into accidentally because it's built into the human soul and psyche,

a hatred that is foundational to what it is to be a person. One of the stories given about Tishabab and about the destruction of the temple is given in the Talmud in Gittin, page 55. The sages say, give us the story of a man named Kanzah and another man named Bal Kanzah. There's a man who's putting on a meal, a feast, a party of some kind. I forget the details of what the party is. And he invites his friend Kamsa. But the emissary he sends to invites his friend, whose name is Kanzah, accidentally goes to a different person who is an enemy of this man. And his name is very similar to Kamsa. It is

Bar Kamsa. Bal Kansa sees the invitation. He says, well, I, a person. Apparently I'm welcome at this place, even though I didn't, right? And he comes and he shows up. And the host is so horrified that this man who he considers his enemy has come to his party that in public he says to him, you don't belong here, leave. And Belkentza says to him, don't shame me in public. I'll pay for the food I eat. And the man says, no, leave.

And Belkanza says, just, I think he says, let me leave quietly. and the man stands in front of everyone and demands leave. And there were sages at the event, at the meal, who were silent. Balcamsa walks away, having been shamed publicly. Second to those three great crimes for which you should be willing to die rather than commit, public shaming is equated by the sages to murder. It's that second level of very great crimes. And he's so horrified, both at his...

treatment by the host in public and at the silence of the sages, who should have known better, that in his rage he goes to the Romans and he tells the Romans the Jews are going to rebel. And that's what brings the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. I don't think the sages actually believed, literally, that that's what brought the destruction of Jerusalem. I am absolutely certain that the sages understood that the Roman Empire had an imperial policy. It treated the Jews like it treated many other parts of the empire that threatened to rebel, that weren't controlled, that didn't have a puppet regime that the Romans could control.

But that the sages want us to know that from these small things, from everybody, there's no absolutely evil person here. There's a host who's a little too angry at this Balcamsa. We don't know the story. Balcamsa might have done something terrible to him in the past. There's Balcansa who feels profoundly betrayed and abused and humiliated. There's sages. We don't know why they're quiet.

Everyone does one thing a little too wrong, just a little bit beyond the pale. But nobody does anything spectacular. We're not described here, not some kind of mass murder, mass theft, mass destruction. Small things. Small things that happen to us in our day-to-day lives. Disrespect, humiliation, anger, bitterness. ostracizing, that build up into a tidal wave that brings upon us destruction. No one is an absolute villain.

And that's the strangeness of this idea that senseless hatred, hatred without purpose, hatred without cause, hatred that can define us, dominate our lives, in a thousand petty things that never amount to anything big. Senseless hatred can undermine the moral foundations of society. foundations of society. It becomes a house built on hatred. A thousand small, petty abuses

can make a family toxic and unlivable. A house full of Torah, full of scholarship, full of ethics. But without that interpersonal element of respect and dignity, the good Jews in this,

listening to this, will say, how could you have a house full of Torah, but without respect? Folks, the sages say you can. As Ramban says about the commandment in Leviticus to be holy, there's a commandment, a mitzvah, to be holy. What the heck is the mitzvah to be holy? And he says, you can be a vall by reshout a tauter,

a vile person with a permission of the Torah. You can follow the law to the letter and still be kind of evil. Don't do that. That's what the commandment, you know, Here's all the commandments. Don't steal, don't rob, don't, you know, covet. Also, be holy. Like, actually make sure that the final result is the person you should be.

Even if you followed all those things, still don't find clever ways to abuse while obeying the law. The house built on hatred, even if it is a house full of wisdom, cannot stand. But then the sages tell us there is hope. Whoever mourns for Jerusalem, merits and sees in her joy.

So the sages tell us in tractate to Anit, page 30B. Whoever mourns for Jerusalem, as Antishabelle, merits in the present tense and sees in the present tense her joy. It's not that we will see her joy in the redemptive age when the temple is rebuilt, when Jerusalem is rebuilt by the messianic age. Now we see Jerusalem's joy, written, right, 15 hundred years ago. Now we see Jerusalem's joy while it is ruined as we mourn her. If the past is not past and mourning of Tishab'Av is contemplation of why this is our condition,

how it became our condition, what our condition actually is, and therefore we can begin to see the path forward, the joy, the redemption. Whoever feels the pain of destruction is already laying the foundation stone of the redemption. Collapse can come even without a clear conscious sin. It can be systemic, it can be cultural. The things we get used to, a certain kind of politics,

a certain policy, a certain culture can carry enormous costs. Not just visible explicit sins. This is an idea that comes back again and again and again among the sages of the Talmud. In Echah Rabbah, which is a midrash stories told by the rabbis about the scroll of lamentations that we read, Echa that we read on Tishabav. It says every generation and its interpreters, every generation and its judges.

If they are worthy, the interpreters of the Torah and the judges, of that generation, if they are worthy, it is as if the temple was built in their days. And if not, as if it was destroyed in their days. How we build the structures of our society will determine whether we can see the redemption. In Midrash Tanchuma for the Torah reading called Titsai, in every generation that repeats their sins, it is as if it was destroyed in their days. Every generation that repeats the sins of the generation in which the temple was destroyed. Folks, every generation repeats the sins of sinat chenam of senseless hatred, baseless hatred, purposeless hatred.

It is as if the temple was destroyed in their days. The rabbis constantly talk about this. The past is not the past. And you fall not just as every child learns in their earliest religious education for your sins. you can fall for very subtle systemic things too, for the small things that propagate into very big systemic ones. Look at the Middle East.

What led centuries of civilizational decline? What determines whether one society is strong and another is weak? What the heck is unhinging the democratic world in our own time, leading to the similar kinds of crises in almost every democracy. These are not grand sins. Nobody feels evil.

These are small systemic things propagated across large systems. And yet the fall comes. And reflection and contemplation and observing the collapse, mourning the state of things, mourning the brokenness of things. Is itself,

the beginning of the repairing, knowing the collapse inoculates to further collapse and allows the repairing of that collapse. And the final point, from a particular act of repairing, of mending, of ticoon, one can achieve a universal redemption. Our small ability to fix can create systemic repair. In the book of Isaiah, we are told to imagine. a future in which nation shall not lift up sword against nation. The redemption is a universal redemption of all nations.

But it comes from the temple. It comes from a reparation of the redemptive arc of a very small people in place, and is a moral universal reparation. Think of democracy. Democracy was born in a very particular and specific place in time, and almost could not have been born anywhere else at any other time. And it was so successful as a system, solved so many problems that society struggled with so much,

that it was lapped up, gave people the courage to attempt it on larger and larger scales. Half of humanity today lives under democracy, and the other half has to live in the shadow of the moral successes of democracy, and so does a little bit better. A particular pinpoint, cultural, political context can produce a solution that like the small failings, that like the small failings that propagate and collapse the system, rebuild and repair and bring redemption to the system.

make it whole Israeli Jews are a society built in a certain history if you understand that history you understand them you humanize them you'll be able to criticize anything you think is wrong they're a society

there's probably a few things you think that they're doing wrong Palestinians are a society built in a certain history if you understand it you understand them you may also think some Palestinians are doing a few things wrong understanding the very act of observing it seriously deeply as a human phenomenon by

three-dimensional intelligent human beings is already the laying of a stepping stone amending a restoration on the path to redemption and the finding of that systemic thing the identifying of it the seeing it that is the morning of of Dishabar. Can propagate far faster and larger than you could possibly imagine. And you end up through understanding

driving a vast act of repair. Look, I can't fix the Middle East. I can't solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I can barely get a handful of people to listen to me on occasion. Neither can you. But I can sit in the morning

in the trauma. I can contemplate the past that is not past until I understand something of it. I can try my best to see the complexity of the people living in that past that is present, who are far too serious and knowledgeable and know too much about their own story

to be fixed by outsiders. Some of the people whose history I sit and contemplate and try to share on this podcast I'm an outsider to them. But if we can see the structures of our failures, if we can not just sit and mourn an event that happened 2,000 years ago that affects some of our ritual lives today, but otherwise, what does it even mean?

Worse things have happened to my people in the lived memory of my grandparents. But if I can see the structures that I live in because of those events, I commit those sins, those failures, and therefore my generation is a generation that has failed to bring about redemption because it remains inside that destruction of the temple.

The temple is still being destroyed because redemption hasn't come, so I haven't fixed the thing that made the destruction happen. If I can see the structures of our failure, if I can see the past that we still live in, not just my own moral judgment, but understanding, true understanding, I lay a small stepping stone

to the great mending and restoration, to the ticoon of the thing that is broken. If you're fasting, I hope it's an easy fast. Thank you to our Patreon subscribers who asked me to put together a short lesson on Dishabeav. I hope this was helped. This is a little bit of my belief about what is needed in the world today. Learn history, and you begin to fix the future.

That's basically the theory of history of the sages of the Talmud. Thank you for joining me.