Tisha be-Av: The Destruction of the First Temple

Good evening, everyone. As usual, I dedicate this lecture to the memory of my brother, the great Rabbi Shalom Benizri, and also to all those who are not present. Tonight’s theme is the destruction of the Temple — the First Temple. First, a little history. We are in the seventh century before the common era. New empires are rising around the small kingdom of Israel — which, after the glorious reign of King Shlomo, had already become two kingdoms: the secular one, on the one hand, the kingdom of Israel, and the “religious” one, in quotation marks, the kingdom of Yehudah. So this tension between the secular world and the religious world is nothing new; it is ancient, and it considerably weakens the people’s resistance to the assaults of its enemies.

The kingdom of Israel will surrender its authority to the power of Assyria, and the ten tribes of Israel will be driven into exile. The kingdom of Yehudah will survive it by almost a century, and in the year 586 Nevuchadnetzar sounds the knell of its ruin. It had already begun with King Yoshiyahu, a model king, a man zealous both for the independence of the Land of Israel and for his faithfulness to the charter of the Torah. But it happens that at that time the new power, Babylonia, which wished to rule over the whole Middle East, asks King Yoshiyahu to lend it his country so that it may cross through and fight the Egyptian people. Yoshiyahu’s refusal was curt; meanwhile, Egypt had formed an alliance with Syria to fight this new Babylonian power.

As it turned out, Yoshiyahu fell victim rather to the archers of the Egyptian troops. It is his son, Yehoyakim, who succeeds him, but he had none of his father’s virtues. He will then have to face the assaults of Nevuchadnetzar; he will attempt to revolt, and Nevuchadnetzar lays a first siege and deposes him. He leaves his son to reign, but his son Yehoyachin too rises in revolt against Nevuchadnetzar. The siege of Yerushalayim lasts two years; in 587, on the seventeenth of Tammuz, the besieged city of Jerusalem gives way: it is the first breach made in the enclosure, in the wall of Yerushalayim. Unfortunately, inside the walls of Jerusalem there were three factions quarrelling with one another.

They quarrelled over this resistance against the enemy, and this too considerably weakened the struggle of the Jewish fighters. And we know what happens next. The Babylonian troops invade Yerushalayim and put it to fire and sword. From then on, indeed, the Jewish people knows exile. It is followed by an outline of reconstruction seventy years later, but it will be only an outline, short-lived, and the Temple — the Second Temple as well — will be destroyed on the very same date, the ninth of Av. Now the ninth of Av had already been inscribed, ever since the spies, as a fatal date in the history of the people of Israel, for it marks the return of the spies, who reject the idea of a national life in the Land of Israel and consider themselves bearers of a moral ideal, or an ideal of faith, that they could carry far away without the body of a state. That was their error. As we have said, the charter, the covenant, concerning the Land of Israel preceded the covenant of the Torah, because without the Land of Israel the people could not fulfil its role among the nations.

This is the theme of the elegy pronounced by the prophet Yirmiyahu. The prophet Yirmiyahu is the witness of that era, the moment when the dream of the Jewish people — to establish a state borne by the charter of the Torah of Israel — is shattered. And that is why the second date retained as such, the seventeenth of Tammuz — forgive me — is the day on which the first Tablets of the Law were broken. It is the day on which the daily offering was abolished — it is no longer practised, the Temple no longer functions; it is the day on which Apostomos burned the Torah; it is the day on which an idol was set up inside the sanctuary of Jerusalem. What is the link? The link is simply this: the breaking inscribed in the history of the Law of Israel is necessary, because it is precisely this breaking that will allow the Law of Israel to rise again in a new form.

Without the breaking of the first Tablets there would be no Oral Law; there would be no second Tablets. The first Tablets are those of the Written Law. Now everything that is written and recorded in such a way that it cannot move and must be observed absolutely — full stop — everything so stated is destined to be broken. It must be given the capacity to express itself through the spoken word, through each person who thinks it, feels it and expresses it in his own way. And that is why we said that the repetitive daily offering was also abolished, in a sense, as of the seventeenth [of Tammuz].

That is it — and this is an important idea — the Jewish people integrates death into life. It does not treat it as an exception, as something from beyond the grave. No: death is part of life, because it is what allows a new start, a recycling of being, for oneself and for the generations to come. Consequently, the fact that the Torah was burned — the written path burned — while it was preserved by the oral path, belongs to the thought, or rather the designs, of the Creator, in order to save the witness-people. We speak of a witness-people. We are a witness-people. We are not simply a people; we are not merely an entity, a crowd of persons.

We are not a national entity. We are a moral entity: witness to a history, witness to a word, witness to a revelation. And our whole life revolves around four very precise themes. Remember this: there are four letters which designate, at our level and to our measure, the Being par excellence, Yud-Kei-Vav-Kei. They are four letters: mishkan — mem, shin, kaf, nun. Mem is the melech, the king, the guarantor of order and of the constitution. Shin is the shofet, the judge — the High Court, so to speak. He is the one who legislates. The judge uses his reason to consider every situation and to legislate accordingly. Then there is kaf, the kohen. The kohen is the spiritual leader, the teacher, the one who guarantees the intellectual and spiritual advancement of the people, and we cannot live without the kohen, without this man of ritual. Nun is the navi, the prophet: he is the one who bears the testimony of the divine and gives this teaching a new breath. These are the gedolei ha-dor today, the great ones of our generation — for even if prophecy no longer exists, there is a ruach ha-kodesh, a holy spirit, that animates exceptional persons who have the duty to inspire the people.

Well, when one of these notions, one letter of this mishkan, is lacking, the history of the people limps. It limps when there is no guarantor of order, no guarantor of the law, no one to inspire the people, and no worthy teachers to ensure continuity. For [G-d says]: “Would that they had forsaken Me, but kept My Torah” — let them keep drawing inspiration from My Torah, let them indeed continue to be inspired by the Law and to preserve it, because then an awakening is assured, sooner or later. The prophet of that era is Yirmiyahu. Yirmiyahu is a tragic prophet, and indeed his very first prophecy is a warning.

An upheaval is brewing within Israel, coming from the north: an evil foreseen. But this ruin is indispensable in order to build and to plant anew. So, in reality, there is no notion of death that does not carry within it a new life. And that is why a woman, when she has released the life she carried in her womb, becomes impure — momentarily. The impurity of death is this contraction of being in her who has released life; so there is an interaction between death and life at one and the same moment. And this is precisely the difference between Jewish thought and all the other religions, for which death represents another order, another domain, as though it were situated at the far end of a life. No: death is included in being.

And that is also why, on the day of Tisha be-Av, from the moment the day begins to decline, a renewal of being begins. There was a custom against which a certain authority […] rose up before reconsidering: namely, that as the day declined, the women would go out and sweep the front of their houses, because after the destruction of the Temple, after the national mourning, it was the moment to hope for a messianic awakening. He wanted to abolish this tradition, then he reconsidered and asked that it be maintained. For one must not separate the renewal of life from this crisis, which is indispensable — I would even say inevitable — when one settles into the repetitive.

So this prophet, Yirmiyahu, presented himself before King Yehoyakim, son of Yoshiyahu, to tell him: “You know, you ought to try to take up again the manner that inspired your father’s reign and continue along that path, because a great misfortune awaits, lies in wait for the people, for the history of Israel.” And the Midrash says that he began to recite Eichah before him. Eichah is the lamentations that the prophet Yirmiyahu dedicated to this chapter of the history of Israel. It consists of five chapters — five chapters that are in fact seven, because six of these “chapters” are composed in alphabetical order, from aleph to tav, twenty-two letters. That is the span of each chapter. But within it there is one chapter that contains three alphabets: that is, three verses that begin with aleph, three verses that begin with bet, three verses that begin with gimel.

So in the five chapters of Eichah the alphabet appears six times. Only the last chapter, while it still contains twenty-two verses, like the number of letters of the Hebrew alphabet, is not in the order of aleph-bet. It is confusion, in a sense, but at the same time it is consolation, because it is a new putting-in-order. You know, we have already spoken of how the whole Torah rests [on its letters], and each letter has its autonomy, its meaning. It is adorned with four significations. First, the letter itself; then the crown that surmounts it; third, the vowel, which gives it one meaning or another — everything depends on the vowel, on the intonation; and finally all the white space that surrounds it. For we have said that each letter must be independent of the next: we have no letters joined to one another, and if, unfortunately, in a Sefer Torah one letter touches another, the Sefer Torah is declared unfit, because that letter has been deprived of its poetry, of its inspiration; it has been amputated of many suggestions by being made to lean on another letter. Each letter has its autonomy. But there is something else, says the Gaon of Vilna, there is something else: every letter of the Hebrew alphabet from aleph to tet finds its complement; from yud to tzadi [the tens] finds its complement; and in the hundreds, from kuf onward, including the final letters — mem, nun, tzadi, pe, kaf. But there is always one letter that has no partner, no companion, no company.

Let me explain. Aleph and tet make ten; bet and chet, two and eight, make ten; gimel and zayin make ten. When we come to hei, it has no partner. It has no counterpart. It is the same in the tens: yud and tzadi, a hundred; kaf and pe, a hundred; lamed and ayin, a hundred. When we come to the letter nun, fifty, it has no counterpart, no companion. And it is the same in the hundreds: kuf is a hundred, pe — that makes nine hundred — […] two hundred, then we have the tzadi — no, sorry, the tzadi is nine hundred and the pe is eight hundred. Yes — no, I am getting muddled. Let me repeat: kuf is a hundred and the final pe is eight hundred; that makes nine hundred.

And resh is two hundred, and we will have seven hundred; the pe is nine hundred — we will have nine hundred; what remains is the final kaf. The final kaf has no companion, for the final letters are mantzepach — mem, nun, tzadi, pe, kaf. So, says the Gaon of Vilna, the three letters that have no companions are hei, nun and kaf: hinach — “hinach yafah ra’yati” (“behold, you are beautiful, my beloved”), and “u-mum ein bach” (“there is no blemish in you”). You are beautiful, my companion; you are unequalled, incomparable; there is no blemish in you. That is the model I wished to present to the people: “all the peoples of the earth shall see” that you bear the testimony of G-d. And that is why this people will remain solitary. It will not, in fact, pair itself with anyone outside.

It will remain the companion of the Holy One, blessed be He, so to speak. That is what Israel is, and it is what we will read — “hen am levadad yishkon” — in Parashat Balak this week, the coming week: this people will be solitary; it will not be considered — it will not be reckoned among the nations, will it? The Eternal wished it to be solitary; He leads it, but it may associate itself with no foreign people, with no foreign deity. So you see, this “people that dwells alone” is what the prophet Yirmiyahu will lament in Lamentations. When he began to read the Lamentations before King Yehoyakim, and said to him: “How she sits alone, the city once so populous; she who was mighty among the peoples has become like a widow,” King Yehoyakim replied: “Like a widow — but I remain her king.” “She who was a princess among the provinces has become tributary.”

“She is tributary,” said Yehoyakim, “but I remain her king.” “She weeps bitterly in the night, her tears are on her cheeks; she has no one to comfort her among all her lovers. All her friends have betrayed her; they have become her enemies.” “I remain king,” he said. “That is the essential thing: I continue to occupy my throne, whatever the conditions.” But when he said to him, “Hayu tzareha le-rosh, oyeveha shalu” — “Her adversaries have become the head, her enemies are at ease, for the Eternal has afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions,” he took the megillah, the scroll, and burned it. And it was then that Yirmiyahu had to summon his secretary Baruch ben Neriyah to his prison, and dictated a second time the Scroll of Eichah — which the Geonim instituted as a reading, let us say an obligatory one, for the day of Tisha be-Av. And that is what we do.

That is what we do, because it is a matter of the awakening of the consciousness of the whole people. You know what is told of Napoleon, who, while on his rounds in Strasbourg, heard the weeping of those reading the elegies of this night. He said: if after two thousand years this people still weeps for its lost nation, it will surely find it again one day. And indeed that is how the book of Eichah in principle ends — with a movement of return: “Hashivenu Hashem elecha ve-nashuvah,” “Bring us back to You, O Eternal, and we shall return.” So one says to oneself: well, here at least is a prayer the Jewish people addresses — we would have liked to end on that note. But no: the last verse of Eichah is “ki im ma’os me’astanu,” “for if You have utterly spurned us” and rejected us, “katzafta aleinu ad me’od,” “You have been exceedingly angry with us.” We cannot regard this as a rejection, but as a surge of anger. A surge of anger — yes, the anger will pass. When You have seen […], You will calm down a little, You will come back to us. It is an outburst.

But we trust You. This comes down, in sum, to the idea that ketzef, the anger of G-d, is limited in time, and that the people is called to be netzach, the people of eternity — but of eternity within this movement of perpetual rebirth. That is the project of Eichah through the mouth of Yirmiyahu. In fact, there are three kinds of eichah in the Torah, in the Tanach. “Eichah yashvah vadad” — how the city of Jerusalem found herself alone. Yeshayahu said: “Eichah hayetah le-zonah” — how the city of Yerushalayim has become a harlot. Moshe said: “Eichah essa levadi torchachem u-massa’achem ve-rivchem” — how can I alone bear your burden, your disputes, your quarrels?

Eichah, which our Sages calculated numerically through its letters: thirty-six. They said that the people had transgressed the thirty-six prohibitions of the Torah whose penalty is karet, being cut off. And do you know what death by karet is? It is — Heaven forbid — a death without a morrow, without children, an atrocious death, yes. A premature death, which does not leave a person the time, the possibility, to repair his misdeeds. That is Eichah, the cry of Eichah, we are told. But where does it come from? Where does this word eichah originate? Its first resonance is in the call G-d addressed to man: ayekah. Ayekah and eichah are the same letters, except that eichah laments over an accomplished fact, while ayekah asks man: where are you, where do you stand?

You have eaten of the tree of knowledge and you hide. Instead of showing that you were capable of integrating evil into good and death into life, you feel naked, you feel incapable. So you go and hide from the call of G-d, from the call of the Divine. Ask yourself the question. Then you need — you truly need — to go out into exile. You will be sent out of the Garden of Eden, repudiated, sent away; you will take stock of yourself a little, of what you want, of what you must be, and you will return to what was conceived for you.

Now the Land of Israel is, in a way, the Eden of the Jewish people. I have already sought to explain that it is the place where the pure and the impure merge into one another, because there is no longer any partition, no longer any barrier. So if the people of Israel is exiled from this place of Eden, where pure and impure, finite and infinite, meet, it will have to go out among the nations and learn that this path, where it is badad, boded — alone, isolated — exposed to the mockery of all, is not one that can be envied for it; it is not an enviable situation. It must think of returning to its Garden of Eden, to its Eretz Yisrael. And in this sense the reading of Eichah on the night of Tisha be-Av is not simply a lament over the past; it is a reflection on what our line, our orientation, must be in the future.

That is why this destruction of the Temple on the ninth of Av encompasses all the misfortunes the Jewish people can know throughout its history: a proper reading of Eichah will indeed show us that everything is there, point by point. Everything the prophet Yirmiyahu describes, we have lived through; we have been witnesses to it throughout our history to this day. And our Sages say that G-d showed Himself conciliatory for the sins of avodah zarah (idolatry), of gilui arayot (debauchery, perversion) and of shefichut damim (bloodshed), because there are uncontrollable situations; and that is why it was remediable at the end of a cycle of seventy years. You know very well that whenever there is a number seven, it is a life-cycle that calls for a restart — the eighth day, the messianic era — at every level.

That is why the Shemittah, which we are going to inaugurate next year, is seven years; then we begin again, and the fiftieth year is the start of the eighth. That is how the Hebrew alphabet works, and that is how our history works. And that is why Eichah is structured on seven times the Hebrew alphabet — seven times the Hebrew alphabet, but the eighth is not written according to alphabetical order. There is a Hasidic teaching that says that in the time to come, at the advent of the Messiah, the Messiah will set about restoring alphabetical order to this fifth chapter, which speaks of the consolation of the Jewish people. So I return to this idea: that G-d, at the end of seventy years, brought the destruction of the First Temple to a close.

The Second — which was the object of baseless hatred, which divided the people — has not, to this day, found its resolution. Here too we are witnesses to the ravages this hatred can cause. For what is avodah zarah? What is idolatry? It is to cling to a single idea, to cling to one single way of thinking — even in the Torah; not to consider that there could be another point of view, another mode of interpretation, at the boundary of the pure and the impure. That is to turn the word of G-d into a form of idolatry. For if the Torah, which is made to unite, divides people, each in his own way of thinking, well, that is the door open to every perversion within Israel. And that is why the messianic era is late in finding its resolution: quite simply, because we have not yet spoken to one another — at a mature level, without taking the extremes in any position whatsoever.

For if we do that, we return to the situation of the dor ha-flagah, the generation of the dispersion, who came together solely for technological and scientific achievements — and that was not the goal. [Their] goal was to dethrone the word of G-d, whereas the goal, on the contrary, is to carry this word of G-d to the summit of what it can express and of the unity it can achieve, as was the Jewish people: “va-yichan sham Yisrael” — Israel encamped there, as one. What is “one”? The people of Israel found itself, despite all its diversity, through the words of the Torah, like one man with a single sensibility, [one heart]. There — I will stop here. If you have a question, with pleasure.

[Question:] You have not spoken of the difference between Judaism and the other philosophies regarding life and death. All the philosophies speak of death as a consequence, as bound up with life, as the end of life — just as people give birth to life, as birth to death. And in fact, even where there is the world of the living and the world after death, with us too it is a one-way world: one goes in only one direction, not the other. So I tell you, I do not really understand the difference between the notion of life and death in Judaism and in the other philosophies; I do not see a great difference. The second question, if you will allow me: you spoke of the definition of the people through the mishkan, but if you say there is a people — then there is no people, because there is no one who has […]: we have no melech, we have no shofet, we have nothing. We have it within ourselves, we have nothing, so we have nothing.

[The Rav:] One must be one’s own shofet, one must be one’s own kohen, one must be one’s own navi. First of all, that is what the mishkan is: each person carries this mishkan — on the one hand. On the other hand: I explained this week the theme of the red heifer, which, paradoxically, made the pure impure and the impure pure. And the problem was bound up with death. Now it is said that [Moshe] Rabbeinu was not given the meaning of the mitzvah of the red heifer; it escaped him. Shlomo HaMelech, on the other hand, was granted it — you will ask why — but since Shlomo HaMelech was a universal encyclopedia and everyone came to glean wisdom from him, he knew; whereas Moshe Rabbeinu, who was gadol ha-nevi’im, the greatest of the prophets, did not have the secret of the red heifer, which made the pure impure and [the impure pure]…

Now you know very well that impurity is bound up with death. Death is avi avot ha-tumah, the “father of fathers” of impurity; the matrix of impurity is death. In fact, Moshe wondered what would become of things afterwards, once he was no longer in this world, since it had been decided for him that he could not enter the Promised Land. And what do you expect? Given Moshe’s demands — had Moshe entered the Promised Land, we could not have measured up to him; we would quickly have given up, or we would have been lost, and then we could not have held on at all… [Question:] I have heard that if Moshe had entered Israel, he would have built the Temple, and since everything Moshe built was eternal, the redemption would have come.

[The Rav:] Yes, but that is precisely the problem: Moshe’s Temple would have been built, it would have stood there forever, but the people would no longer be there — it would be absent, because it cannot meet the demands of holiness. So what would be the use? If the city of Yerushalayim is holy in itself and the people cannot measure up to its holiness, then, in the event of [His wrath], He will pour out His anger not upon the stones and the trees, but rather upon the people. Now it is preferable that He destroy His sanctuary rather than destroy His people. So Moshe was a sun.

“Penei Moshe ki-fenei chamah” — the face of Moshe was like the face of the sun: he was blinding. Like the sun — he had to put a veil over his face. But Yehoshua, who came after him, was like the moon. The moon only receives the light of the sun and reflects it. But the moon has a faculty: in the middle of the night, while giving light, it also allows the stars, the little stars, to assert their existence, their presence. And that indeed will be the man of the land: the one who also left room for all the small ones around him, so that they could express themselves, assert themselves, become themselves, fulfil themselves. I say this in parenthesis — but Moshe was compared not to King Shlomo; Moshe was compared to Rabbi Akiva. He was told: “Do not worry, my dear; on the other side, if you wish, I will show you in the generations to come an exceptional personality who is your counterpart: you are in the Written Law, he is in the Oral Law” — and that man is Rabbi Akiva. Oh, Rabbi Akiva — what was his aspiration? “When will I be able to give proof” that I love the Holy One, blessed be He, that I devote myself to the demands of the Torah, even if He takes my soul — “you shall love the Eternal your G-d with all your heart and with all your soul”: even if He takes your soul.

Even if He takes your soul — and he longed for the moment his soul would be taken. Why? Because for him death was not an end in itself; he had integrated it into his life. It was part of his way of seeing death as always a cycle of extinguishing — of absence, as the Maharal of Prague would say. The person is absent; he is not […]; he does not answer the call, but that does not mean he has disappeared. He is there, but occupied with something else; he is preparing something else. And that is it: this theme of death as absence is essential. And that is why it is said, “chayav adam levarech al ha-ra’ah ke-shem she-mevarech al ha-tovah”: a person must bless for the bad just as he blesses for the good — he must say a blessing for misfortune as for well-being, as for happiness. But we have not yet reached that level; it is very difficult. In the letter [of the law], yes, it exists, but we are not […]; it is a becoming, an ideal to which every being aspires — to “laugh at the last day.”

And to see that through a crisis a new start, a new life, is taking shape. [Question:] Along the same lines: at the end of Tisha be-Av one should not already […], because if we began mourning when the first […] of Jerusalem occurred, we should not be rejoicing. [The Rav:] In truth, you are right. Only, it turns out that it was on the tenth day that the Temple burned — the tenth, and not the ninth. So we do not allow ourselves [to rejoice]: it had not yet been consumed. [Question:] Thank you, honored Rav. [The Rav:] Another question? Well, if there is no question, I will leave you.

Thank you very much, honored Rav. I wanted to announce that there will be no lecture because of the fast of the seventeenth of Tammuz. The lecture will be postponed; you will receive a message later. There we are. Thank you very much. Goodbye. Thank you very much. Goodbye. Thank you very much.