Tag: history

Reflections on Eicha, Tisha B’Av and Jewish Meaning-Making

Last night, I had the privilege of attending a reading of Eicha for the first time in two years. Recited each year on Tisha B’Av, the annual fast day in memory of the destruction of the Temple and the beginning of the Jewish people’s Exile, Eicha is more popularly known in English-speaking culture as the Book of Lamentations.

COVID had kept me away, and in returning I found myself reading with new eyes. Rediscovering a religious text is supposed to be a profoundly spiritual experience. But my immediate reaction was quite different. Despite my best efforts, I found myself recoiling in disgust. Eicha is a very graphic representation of the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem. Listening to it as liturgy is hauntingly beautiful, but the text itself is disturbing, deserving of a trigger warning for painfully detailed description of slaughter, famine, cannibalism, and wanton destruction.

Aside from the violent imagery, Eicha also makes extensive use of the traditional interpretation of the Exile: as divine punishment for failing to abide by G-d’s law. “We have transgressed and rebelled, and you have not forgiven.”

This is a common theme in Jewish liturgy: “because of our sins we have been exiled from our land and sent far from our soil”. It represented the dominant interpretation of the Exile for most of Diaspora Jewish history. In some ultra-Orthodox sects, the Holocaust itself is blamed on the Jewish people prematurely seeking to return to the Land of Israel prior to the messianic age, a horrific divine punishment for failing to maintain obedience to this holy decree.

Of course, to any modern eye, this explanation stinks! The destruction of the Temple and subsequent Exile was the result of larger geopolitical circumstances, including the overwhelming power of the Roman Empire and the particularly ill-timed Judean revolt led by Simeon ben Kosevah (messianically dubbed by his supporters as “bar Kochba”, or son of the star). It had nothing to do with acts of sin – only hard realities of poor politics and superior military force. This is precisely the sort of victim-blaming that modern discourse winces at.

Nonetheless, the narrative makes a great deal of sense in the context of rabbinic Judaism’s status as a diasporic religion. Faced with little secular authority and the need to encourage religious observance on the part of a scattered people, the destruction of the Temple was framed as a moral failure. This was practically useful and psychologically necessary. Having experienced a cataclysm that could not be fully recovered from, it was necessary to ascribe it meaning to construct a future from the wreckage.

Once we start to think about religious texts in this critical light, it is difficult to stop. The deliberate construction of moral lessons – meaning-making – is one of the most important roles of religion. Consistent with the instrumental purpose of ascribing causes to Exile, different generations of Sages offered wildly different explanations for the destruction of the Temple, likely dependent on the changing lessons they wished people to take from it. Various Sages place blame on sinat chinam (baseless hatred), inadequate religious observance, lack of shame for engaging in sin, failure to pay adequate respect for one’s social superiors and – in one somewhat self-interested explanation – insufficient deference being given to Torah scholars.

My favorite explanation brings us back to politics. For an ancient text of rabbinic law, the Talmud can be surprisingly practical, directing particular ire on those who prioritized religious zealotry over badly needed pragmatism.

When the Romans besieged Jerusalem, the Talmud tells us that the city’s storehouses held supplies to sustain the people for twenty-one years. The rabbinic Sages urged making peace with the Romans, fearing their superior military might. This proposition was refused altogether by the zealots of the city. Filled with the confidence of their righteous cause, they wished to leave the city’s walls to do battle with the superior Roman force.

“You will lose,” warned the Sages, suggesting they wait out the siege at the very least. But confident of divine deliverance, the zealots refused this prudent course of action. To force the people to fight, they burnt the storehouses, destroying the food supply and beginning a devastating famine.

Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, predicting Jerusalem’s fall, sent for the leader of the zealots, Abba Sikkara. He came to him, whereupon Rabbi Yohanan asked, “Until when will you do this and kill all through starvation?”

Abba Sikkara, like many radical leaders aloft on events they no longer fully controlled, sought to absolve himself of all responsibility: “What can I do? If I say something [to my fellow zealots], they will kill me!”

Rabbi Yohanan asked Abba Sikkara to smuggle him out of the city, whose exits were now guarded by zealots committed to prevent any from fleeing to safety. He justified this request on the grounds that “it is possible there will be some small salvation” if he might escape to keep the rabbinic tradition alive. This Abba Sikkara agreed to, and together they hatched an ultimately successful plot to remove Rabbi Yohanan from Jerusalem disguised as a corpse.

This is a remarkable story, made even more so by the fact that the authors of the Talmud identify with Rabbi Yohanan! He is the hero of our story! Not the zealots, committed to bravely fighting for freedom against the Roman Empire’s legions. No, the Talmud bids us to see ourselves in the intellectual, who lets himself be carted out of the city while playing possum. Even by modern standards, Rabbi Yohanan is far from a traditional protagonist.

Continuing in that spirit, at least one Talmudic author defends the later tactical decision of Rabbi Yohanan, offered his choice of gift by the new Roman Emperor Vespasian, to make the relatively modest request that the Romans spare the academy at Yavne, from which the rabbinic tradition of present-day Judaism emerged. Had Rabbi Yohanan instead asked Vespasian to abandon his military campaign against Judea altogether, we are told, such an outlandish request might not have been granted, and the chance for even this small salvation would have been needlessly lost.

An exercise in meaning-making, yes, but these sections of the Talmud also represent a very cogent reflection on the nature of power and strategy in the face of overwhelming, unbeatable odds.

The rabbinic tradition is usually skeptical of conducting oneself with the expectation of direct divine intervention. Having experienced the disastrous failure of the Bar Kochba revolt, the rabbis of the Talmud counseled a very practical approach towards power relationships, free of the suicidal messianism that had led to the Exile. With very few exceptions, Jews are expected to keep both ourselves and our tradition alive, not deliberately seek martyrdom. There is much to learn from here. The grubby practicalities of disappointing but productive compromises are better than romantic failure in pursuit of a perfectly righteous cause.

There is a deep physicality to Tisha B’Av, especially this year. Eicha opens late in the evening. I am seated – very uncomfortably – on the wooden floor of a dark room. I have joined others to read by candlelight about gruesome acts of violence. My back aches, my eyes squint and I must constantly slap my legs to keep from them losing feeling. I am here because it is the first in-person egalitarian Jewish service I know of since the onset of COVID. My own synagogue is not yet doing in-person services, Zoom does nothing for me, and though my relationship to religion is complicated, I am starved for spiritual connection.

Speaking of hunger, the hot and muggy temperature of the room reminds me that I have just begun to abstain from food and drink. As the sweat rolls down my forehead, I start arguing with myself about whether to maintain my fast for the traditional 25 hours or instead resume eating and drinking in the next afternoon, as some do in acknowledgment of 1948’s restoration of Jewish sovereignty. Is it appropriate to place religious significance on a comparably recent political event? Shouldn’t some acknowledgment be made of partial restoration of what was once lost? Religion is supposed to be timeless! But relevant to the present day!

Thinking back fondly to the two slices of pizza I had eaten before sunset, I feel utterly incapable of weighing the matter in a truly impartial fashion. I am already exhausted. And yet, as the recitation begins, there is something stirring in me.

Whether or not one fasts, the physicality of Tisha B’Av is a powerful experience. We render ourselves vulnerable to meaning, making our minds a canvas onto which we paint significance intended to stay with us throughout the year. This observance is best understood as a delivery vehicle, a capsule that can be filled with a different payload in each Jewish community and in each generation. Intensity of experience makes the soul receptive – without any specifics as to what we are receptive to.

There is nothing inherently manipulative about this – or if it is manipulative, it is not necessarily a bad thing that it is so. Observance offers a container for personal growth – how we define that growth depends on what meaning we pour into that container. This is how we decide what kind of Judaism we want to practice. The law is alive, subject to interpretation and, by interpretation, change. In choosing which of many competing Jewish sources, communities and leaders to place our trust in, we select what meaning to expose ourselves to. Some are healthy and some are hateful. It is in choosing which is which that we express our values.

Good meaning-making, like good ritual, serves a purpose. It is a mistake to think that religion holds no practical function. We turn to it not just for spiritual fulfillment, but also in order to frame decisions that have implications for our day to day lives: how we relate to each other, how we relate to the larger world.

In modern day America, religion is often made use of as an offensive weapon, to force the dictates of a single sect onto the rest of us through aggressive policymaking and culture war shaming. The reaction against this tendency has led many of my class and social background to feel understandable discomfort with letting religion play a role in so-called regular life.

Even most Jews, whose religion is particular to our tribe and seeks no observance from the gentile majority, often feel uncomfortable with being too explicit about religious inspiration for day-to-day living. This is thought to belong to the ultra-Orthodox and the Christian Coalition. Religious experience is seen as safe only when cordoned off into its own sphere, severed from the realities of modern life. Only thus can we protect ourselves from the harms of excess zealotry and the rejection of liberal modernity’s many wonderful gifts.

I think this is a mistake. To be clear, I have nothing against the fine and illustrious traditions of Jewish atheism and agnosticism. Indeed, I applaud the spectacular ability of so many of my people to take G-d out of religion without becoming anything the Christian world would understand as secular. To be a Jew is to confound modernity’s categories! But I believe that specifically religious forms of Jewish meaning-making offer something valuable and are perfectly reconcilable with the tolerance and inclusivity we prize in modern liberalism.

In experiencing religion – truly experiencing it, as a force with relevance to our daily existence – we can choose what kinds of meaning we make. The container can be filled with the fiery passion of resistance or with moralistic preaching against personal immorality. It can be used instrumentally, to encourage obedience and promote social cohesion. Or it can be used as an end-unto-itself, in pursuit of that continuity which is its own kind of fulfillment. We can pour into it any set of values we wish – so long as we are prepared to live with the consequences.

We make ourselves receptive – be it for personal growth, communal expression, or self-sacrifice to a larger cause. What we use religion for should be our choice. But we must take seriously the tremendous burden that comes with a tool capable of shaping our inner life and that of others.

Today, for me, Tisha B’av is an opportunity to ponder the merits of pragmatism. It makes me think about my father’s parents, who were born into a country that epitomized the nature of Exile. Romania was the last European country to emancipate its Jewish population, opposing doing so until after World War I. It was only when the Paris Peace Conference required Romania to offer citizenship to its Jewish population as a precondition for receiving new territory that this changed – despite intense Romanian resistance. My grandparents were born just as this reluctant reform came into effect.

What followed was a period of great change for Romanian Jewry. Having received citizenship, Jews started to enter professions that had previously been forbidden to them (backlash ensued). In time, Romanian Jews became involved with politics. Under the Romanian Monarchy, one of my grandmother’s cousins, a sixteen-year-old boy, was executed for his involvement with the Communist Party. Somewhat ironically, when the Communists later came to power, other members of my family were arrested and jailed for Zionist activism.

All the while, Jewish life became more and more untenable, leading to the Second World War, when Romania stood as Nazi Germany’s ally and collaborated enthusiastically in the murder of between 280,000 to 380,000 Jews in territory under Romanian control.

My grandparents lived through this time. They survived the war. Finding the new Communist regime as inhospitable to Jews as many that had come before it, they finally left Romania. After a brief period in Italy, supported in part by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (please donate!), they made their way to the State of Israel and there set about starting anew in their forties.

I think about the ingenuity of that generation, who collected languages and passports in the knowledge that any one of them might save their lives and that of their children – and knew that, in Exile, no single one of them could be counted on to do so. I think about their pragmatism. My grandparents were not zealots. They simply wanted to build a better life for their family. In pursuit of that goal, they started over with nothing in a new country. They rebuilt themselves in middle age, like so many others of their time, because they wanted their children to live with something other than the ever-present fear that defined the Romanian Jewish experience. I admire that.

There is a school of thought, popular in the first half of the twentieth century, that says that my grandparents’ departure was a betrayal. They should have stayed and fought for a better Romania, goes one version of this argument, calling on them to educate the people who persecuted them so that they could all greet each other as comrades. Leaving Romania was a failure of solidarity, so to speak.

Alternatively, it was the view of the Romanian government that emigration constituted desertion of the international Communist project. Having received a publicly funded education in Romania, they were legally obligated to stay and help build the worker’s state. It was for this reason that my grandparents and other Romanian Jews were only permitted to leave after the State of Israel and the international Jewish community purchased their freedom with cash, shipments of heavy equipment and – perversely – pigs and other livestock. This was also the reason my grandparents were required to leave behind almost everything they had when they left the country. To be a Jewish refugee from a Communist country required paying for the privilege.

I don’t think my grandparents owed anything to Romania or Communism or any combination of the above. I have a hard time believing any Jew owes anything to any part of that blood-soaked soil called Europe. But even if I did, I think I would still admire their pragmatism in placing a better life for their children over the propagandistic calls of national and international solidarity. I admire them for this, as I admire the many Jews who came before them, who put survival over the ecstasies of martyrdom in a holy cause. This is the pragmatism of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakki. The pragmatism of those who reject zealots.

In life, even amidst the security and comfort of modern day America, there are times that call for martyrdom and times that call for pragmatism. It seems to me that religion should be prepared to offer something meaningful to each of these difficult moments. It is a mistake to turn to religion only when we are ready to die for a cause – sometimes, religion can teach us how to live for one – or even how to abandon one not worth fighting for.

Jewish life and Jewish ritual offer Jews a pathway to shaping our own souls – but it is still up to us to choose what kind of Judaism we will select to do so. There are many options. My Judaism tells me that, even in heartbreaking calamity, our responsibility is to chart a path towards a real and living future.

Disability Wasn’t Mentioned in the State of the Union. Should We Care?

This past Tuesday, President Obama gave his last State of the Union address. As a policy wonk and a card carrying member of the politics fandom, I enjoyed it tremendously. As a disability rights advocate, I was underwhelmed. Except for a heartfelt section calling for more medical research on curing cancer, the President failed to bring up people with disabilities in his remarks. This is not altogether unusual. While President Obama will have many disability rights achievements as part of his legacy when he leaves office next year, he has rarely acknowledged the disability community in his remarks to the nation.

I have complicated feelings about that. After all, it isn’t as if President Obama has not done a tremendous amount for the disability community. The President’s Affordable Care Act is perhaps the single most important piece of disability rights legislation since the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) itself, though most people don’t see it as such. And yet, the benefits of the ACA are designed first and foremost for the general public, and it has been sold in those terms. Very few people think of Obamacare as a gift to the disabled. Perhaps that is as it should be. But the minimal attention paid to the disability community in President Obama’s public addresses does leave one with the impression that the White House does not view disabled Americans as a group worth pandering to.

It is not as if Presidents addressing the disability community in their State of the Union remarks has no precedent in modern political history. George H.W. Bush, who championed and signed the ADA, made reference to the legislation in three of his four State of the Union addresses. Bill Clinton used his 1999 State of the Union to propose a modest long-term care tax credit as well as to call upon Congress to pass legislation making it easier for disabled people to remain in the workforce. In his 2000 address, he followed up to commend Congress for passing that bill into law.

George W. Bush focused on a more specific part of the community, but still emphasized disability services in at least three State of the Unions, twice calling on Congress to re-authorize the Ryan White Act supporting individuals with HIV/AIDS, and held a legitimately impressive record regarding improving treatment for HIV/AIDS internationally. An earlier State of the Union referenced his New Freedom Initiative, a Presidential agenda for expanding disability equality (albeit one with rather limited outcomes).

What’s galling is that President Obama has an extraordinarily strong disability rights record, arguably far more so than that of most or all of his predecessors. The Affordable Care Act’s ban on insurers discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions is a potentially game-changing step for disabled Americans. The Obama Administration’s Justice Department has engaged in unprecedented enforcement of the Supreme Court’s Olmstead v. L.C. decision, a 1999 court ruling requiring states to offer community services to seniors and people with disabilities that sat ignored for most of the Bush Administration. And thanks to an executive order signed by the President in 2010, the federal workforce has reached a record high in employing workers with disabilities.

So does it matter that President Obama doesn’t talk about people with disabilities, if his disability policy record is impressive? I think it does. During my time on the National Council on Disability and in my ongoing work with ASAN, I’ve seen the policy process up close and personal. Many of us in the advocacy community are aware of how many of the Administration’s most important disability policy outcomes came from the personal commitment and expertise of senior appointees. As Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Tom Perez made freeing people with disabilities from institutions and nursing homes a personal cause. Similarly, figures like Sharon Lewis, Sam Bagenstos and Patricia Shiu made aggressive enforcement of disability rights law a priority across every area they had responsibility. Much of the disability policy legacy of the Obama Administration can be attributed to the energy and vision they and others like them brought to their roles.

No doubt the President approved of those initiatives, and he deserves credit for appointing people who sincerely care about the community to important positions. Personnel is policy, after all. But not every political appointee comes with a personal connection to the disability community. Most take their cue from the White House as to which constituencies and projects should be prioritized on an agenda that can not possibly encompass every worthy cause. When people with disabilities are mentioned as a priority in a State of the Union, it lights a fire under every government employee. We need that kind of attention and focus.

Jefferson, Jabotinsky and the St. Bartholomew’s Massacre

As I mentioned in my inaugural blog post, this being a personal blog I will on occasion write about things that interest me and perhaps few others. The internet being a vast and bizarre place, maybe someone of similar interests will stumble across this post.

Thanks to my newfound love of the hip hop musical history Hamilton, I’ve been reading some of the Founding Father’s correspondence on founders.archives.gov. I’d recommend the hobby to anyone. Few pleasures compare to going through someone else’s mail – all the more so if they happened to have started your country.

There’s a lot worth writing about in those archives, but one thing that jumped out of me in particular was a letter Jefferson wrote to John Jay on September 19th, 1789 while America’s Minister to France. Shortly before his departure, Jefferson began writing regular updates on the state of internal politics in Revolutionary France to John Jay, then Secretary of Foreign Affairs for the nascent United States.

“Civil war is much talked of and expected: and this talk and expectation has a tendency to beget it. What are the events which may produce it? The want of bread… A public bankruptcy…[and] the absconding of the king from Versailles.

This [last] has for some time been apprehended as possible. In consequence of this apprehension, a person whose information would have weight, wrote to the Count de Montmorin adjuring him to prevent it by every possible means, and assuring him that the flight of the king would be the signal of a St. Barthelemi against the aristocrats in Paris and perhaps thro the kingdom. M. de Montmorin shewed the letter to the queen, who assured him solemnly that no such thing was in contemplation. His shewing it to the queen proves he entertained the same distrust with the public. It may be asked what is the queen disposed to do in the present situation of things? Whatever rage, pride and fear can dictate in a breast which never knew the presence of one moral restraint.”

There is much of interest in this correspondence – the casual contempt Jefferson possesses for the morals of the 33-year old Marie Antoinette and the perilous political situation in France are both crystal clear. But neither of these things are new for any reasonably educated student of history. No, what I find fascinating is the particular reference Jefferson uses to warn of a potential massacre of the French aristocracy.

“The flight of the king would be the signal of a St. Barthelemi against the aristocrats in Paris and perhaps thro the kingdom”

What is this St. Barthelemi that Jefferson and the French aristocracy feared? How well known must it have been that he felt he could drop it casually into an official diplomatic communication to his superiors in the new American government?

As it happens, I had heard the term previously – in Hillel Halkin’s excellent recent biography of Vladimir “Ze’ev” Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism. In 1898, over a hundred years after Jefferson’s letter, Jabotinsky attended a lecture by Nachum Syrkin, an early proponent of socialist Zionism. Jabotinsky, then an 18-year old law student at the University of Berne with little prior knowledge of Zionism, commented that he had insufficient knowledge of socialism to commit to that ideology, but he felt that Europe’s Jews must make plans to flee to Palestine as “the only hope of avoiding a Bartholomew’s Night”.

What was this St. Bartholomew’s Massacre? More importantly, how was it so well known that a world renowned statesman like Jefferson and a Jewish teenager like Jabotinsky could each casually drop it into conversation a century apart from each other, both with a perfect expectation of being understood by those around them?

The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre took place in 1572 during a brief interlude in the French Wars of Religion between the Catholic establishment and the Protestant Huguenots. Huguenot leaders had gathered in Paris, a rabidly Catholic city, to celebrate the upcoming wedding of the King’s sister Margaret, a Catholic, to the Protestant prince Henry of Navarre. The marriage was designed to cement a fragile peace between the warring factions.

Unfortunately, several days after the wedding, the Huguenot leader Admiral Gaspard de Coligny was shot by an assassin working for parties still unknown. The bullet failed to inflict life-threatening injuries, but Catholic leaders feared retaliation from the Huguenots and decided to preemptively kill their leadership. Acting on instructions from the King and his mother, Catherine de’Medici, the King’s Guard engaged in a coordinated assassination of several dozen Huguenot leaders in the early hours of the morning.

Seeing that the King was ready to sanction violence against Protestants, Parisian mobs quickly formed to hunt them down throughout the city. For the next three days, mass slaughters ensued throughout Paris, with men, women and children murdered in their homes and in the streets, their bodies then dumped into the river Seine. Elsewhere in France, similar events took place over the next several weeks. Modern historians place the death toll somewhere between 5,000 to 30,000 people. After the Paris massacre, the city had to pay workmen to bury and pull from the banks of the Seine over a thousand bodies.

These grisly details certainly justify the use of the St. Bartholomew’s Massacre as a natural allusion for mass violence against a specific group. But how to explain the persistence of this reference, centuries after the event?

This is what I find truly striking, and indicative of the degree to which 1898 and 1789 (and perhaps even 1572) belonged to the same era in a way that 2015 does not. The St. Bartholomew’s Massacre remained a common reference as late as 1916, when the famous (and incredibly racist) filmmaker D.W. Griffith incorporated it as a major part of the narrative in one his films. But as World War One raged on, it would soon become irrelevant as a symbol for mass slaughter.

In the end, the St. Bartholomew’s Massacre could persist for three hundred years as an easy reference for horrifying violence because it was relatively rare in European history that such violence took place against a group that was accepted as part of the European polity. While Jews were regularly subject to such massacres, most European nations legally prohibited Jews from citizenship till the 19th century, with horrifying anti-semitism continuing (and in some places, intensifying) well beyond that. Europe’s pervasive and institutionalized anti-semitism prevented such events from being seen with horror in the historical record.

Ditto colonial massacres or the many and varied forms of violence that accompanied the slave trade. Europeans did not see violence against Jews or Africans as truly capable of motivating any form of visceral horror. St. Bartholomew’s Massacre, taking place as it did against a European Christian population (albeit a minority one rabidly hated by the French populace), carried more resonance. After all, it was very unusual to see violence on that scale against people who “mattered”.

The 20th century brought a succession of sectarian massacres that made insignificant the mere tens of thousands of victims of St. Bartholomew’s. After Gallipoli or the trench warfare of France in World War One, let alone the industrialized murder of millions of Jews in the Holocaust, the St Bartholomew’s massacre no longer stood out. Even Jabotinsky, who foresaw the danger and spent his entire adult life attempting to open the gates of Palestine to allow Europe’s Jews to escape before it was too late, would have had a hard time imagining the depths of horror that the 20th century would bring. No modern commentator would reference St. Barthelemi as the archetype of eliminationist violence. Terrible as it is to realize, the 20th century made small potatoes of the most horrifying event that 18th and 19th century thinkers could think of.