Tisha BeAv: Rising Above Oneself

I said that it is forbidden to taste the joy of study on the day of Tisha BeAv. The joy of Torah study is forbidden to us quite simply because we are in a state of mourning, for all that we have lost and for all that we have not yet achieved, and this calls for a certain pause before we take up the reading of the Torah again. A given reading may become outdated for our age, for our level of culture, as we move forward. So we should try to make the Torah current again. If the Torah no longer speaks to us and its message has become foreign to us, it is not that the Torah is no longer relevant; it is we who are no longer relevant to the message of the Torah.

This is very important, because there are always two ways of seeing things. One is the objective way: just as we subject the science of things to our analysis and try to master it with our minds, so too, if we regard the Torah and its injunctions, the mitzvot, in that manner, then yes, we will draw certain lessons from them and we will understand them, but it will always be a teaching cut off from its inner dimension. For every reading of the Torah must be done through the mind and through our inner trembling. This finds expression in the very way we say our blessings. There are two kinds, two versions of blessings.

We say asher kiddeshanu be-mitzvotav ve-tzivanu al ha-milah, “who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us concerning circumcision”; asher kiddeshanu be-mitzvotav ve-tzivanu al netilat yadayim, concerning the washing of the hands, the raising of the hands. But the father, when he circumcises his child, does not say al ha-milah; he says lamul et ha-ben, He has commanded us to circumcise our child. There is a difference between al, “concerning,” and le-, “to.” Lehadlik ner: who has commanded us to kindle a light, the light of Chanukah. We do not say al hadlakat ner Chanukah or al ha-Chanukah. In lighting the flame there is an extension of myself: it is my own light that extends itself through the light of Chanukah.

When I circumcise my child, it is not, at that moment, the performance of a mitzvah imposed on me from outside. No, it is an initiative, the expression of the mitzvah being fulfilled by my own self. This is very important, because the reading of the Torah, like the practice of the mitzvot, ought to follow an inner breath of my own person. As long as that breath does not take part, the Torah is like an object subjected to the analysis of the mind; there is no ahavah, no love, no adherence of my whole person to the text I am studying or to the mitzvah I am performing. I discharge it like a duty imposed on me from outside.

It is not the expression of my nature. It is not the expression of my emunah, my faith. And that, in sum, is what lies at the center of the destruction of the Temple. When the sanctuary becomes a place outside us, we will go there all the same, simply because there are three pilgrimage festivals and we must fulfill the commandment of the Torah; we will do it. But we will draw only a minimal benefit from it. True renewal of being comes when I feel that need from within and await it impatiently. Then, when I go up to the sanctuary, it is in immediate contact with the deep aspiration I carry within me; an exchange takes place between two lights, two contributions, one from outside and one from within, and that is the true […].

So I would like to approach the study of the Book of Iyov from this perspective. You know that there are several opinions about who he was. A rabbi? Certainly not. A prophet of the nations? Perhaps. A non-Jew. Some say he was among Pharaoh’s servants, and that when Pharaoh was considering how to put an end to the descendants of Avraham, the first genocide in the history of the Jewish people, he did not speak up. That is for those who place him among Pharaoh’s counselors. But those who place him in the time of the spies say: yes, he was a man who dwelt in the land and protected the Canaanite population through his wisdom, his knowledge and his stature; but he had just died, and therefore the borders lay open to the people of Israel. The Canaanite people no longer had Iyov’s protection, and so Iyov is identified with the prophets of the nations. Others say he lived in the time of Yaakov, in the time of Yitzchak. It makes no difference. I will tell you that Iyov belongs to every age. There is no one time that is his: it could be you, it could be me, it could be anyone at all who truly wants to give meaning to his existence. But there are different ways of giving meaning; we are not all going to fit into the same mold. That is impossible. There is a variety of people, and that is how it should be: different sensibilities, different personalities and different approaches to perceiving the Divine. Yet we must know that this effort we make in the quest for spirituality is never without difficulty, without pitfalls, without trials, without suffering. The righteous man knows no rest; his whole life is movement forward, and in that movement, what should have been a time of rest for him is only a new departure toward something else, another challenge.

Iyov is the prototype of the man who founded his life on the desire to feel the presence of G-d, but within a faith that we might call somewhat rudimentary. We are not all carried by the desire for knowledge; and a piety that is not accompanied by a desire for dialogue with the Divine, but only by an unconditional faith unsupported by knowledge, is criticized by the biblical text. Tzaddik ve-ra lo, “the righteous man who suffers”? That is not a question; it is a statement. It is entirely natural and normal that a person gripped by a high moral level, concerned not with himself but with the other (that is: I do not suffer only for myself; my suffering is above all that of the other, who does not have the same resources in difficult trials), should find himself in an uncomfortable position, because once again I must make myself smaller and borrow a rudimentary language for a simple conversation. Yet what we want is the higher level, and that is what we must call ourselves to. And this quest for G-d tolerates no conformism, none of the concessions one makes in politics, unfortunately, because there one must come to terms with everyone. But such compromise in the world of the spirit, in the world of morality, is impossible. So I was saying that Iyov is not necessarily a Jew; he is a man of the nations, but a believer. Where did he exist? Where did he live? We do not know.

Ish hayah be-eretz Utz, “There was a man in the land of Utz” (Iyov 1:1). A man who lived in the land of Utz. Where is the land of Utz? In the region of Damascus, in the Arabian Peninsula, and so on; there is a good deal of conjecture. The idea is that this man is not the product of a particular place; he is the prototype of the human being, on whatever continent. And that is the universalism of biblical thought, of Jewish thought. For what have we learned from Iyov? You know, there is only one law we have taken from Iyov: that in mourning one must tear one’s garments. That is what Iyov taught us. Do we need that? But it remains a formality: tearing one’s garments does not mean that one has torn one’s heart, or that one’s heart is torn.

But we are told that the man was tam, wholehearted, and upright. If the Bible translates tam as “wholehearted,” I would be inclined to say “naive.” Yerei Elokim: trembling before G-d, fearing G-d; ve-sar me-ra, turning away from evil. Well, was he wise? No, and that is Iyov’s problem. He carries within him a rudimentary faith, a desire for uprightness that one can respect, a fear of G-d that is not sustained by a love of G-d, and I have no use for it when it stands alone. It simply means that I am always afraid the sky will fall on my head, and it is indeed in my interest to walk straight with G-d if I do not want trouble.

So I am afraid of Him and I serve Him as a servant, as a slave would serve his master, but not as a son would serve his father. The Rambam says that in life we are buffeted by three conflicts of existence. That of nature, which is external to us: a tsunami, a violent storm, a fire; they cause damage. It is unexpected, and we can do nothing about it. The second thing that unsettles us is war: discord between peoples and the violence it brings, of which we are the victims, because there are people who defend a flag, some ideology, their own honor, and we are their victims. But there is a third: that of man facing his own destiny.

It is the conflict that man forges in his way of being, in his way of transmitting, and also in his way of apprehending his world. And he says that the first ones we can, in the end, place outside ourselves (although it is our duty to try to ward off those conflicts), whereas the third engages our responsibility completely. And that is how Iyov is confronted with these three conflicts. I did not ask you to read the first three chapters, so let me summarize for you: Iyov has seven sons and three daughters, and wealth as the text describes it in the terms of the period: many people in his service, much livestock.

He is the richest of all the people of the East. But although his life is full and blessed, the children do not follow. His children hold feasts, a dolce vita from time to time, that is what it is, and they invite their brothers and sisters to eat and drink. So the first thing: there is what we call a rupture between parents and children. We are always trying to fulfill our children’s every wish and give them everything; but to what extent does what we have invested in them ensure continuity beyond the material support we have provided by working for them without counting the cost? That is Iyov’s first failure.

Iyov gave everything to his children. But his children did not display the same qualities he had. And what does he do? He is a religious man, as we would say today, in quotation marks. He offers sacrifices to G-d for his children, to atone for his children’s sins. Perhaps his children had displeased the Divine by their conduct. “They are young, you can’t hold it against them, it’s a new generation, you have to meet them at their level” — rather than bringing them up to ours and supporting them spiritually, and not only through the studies we provide for them, because that too is a trade we give them, a means of earning a living. But being a man worthy of the name, a ben adam, a mensch: that is something Iyov did not succeed in, even though he was a man truly carried by this religion, this fear of G-d, this will to uprightness, yet without influence, because he lacked knowledge, lacked the sharing of a spirituality, the will to share with others. That is what is missing first and foremost.

You know, when we have failed in this transmission from parents to children, we have cut our life off from its essence, because the first thing beyond our own being is the child. So he did care about them, from afar, and yet G-d […]. For here only Elokim is spoken of, and when we speak of Elokim we are speaking of fear, of the manifestation of the Divine in the forces of nature, which we fear as best we can, because we would so like them to answer our expectations, and we would so like no imbalance of forces to come and damage or destroy everything we have invested. And that is why Elokim asks the Satan to put this approach of Iyov’s to the test.

Is this what it means to serve G-d? Is this what it means to believe in G-d? Does serving G-d mean seeking one’s own salvation in life and telling oneself, “Well, I live in this intimacy with the Divine and have nothing more to fear”? This faith of Iyov’s is put to a harsh test. There is a dialogue between G-d and the Satan. What does the Satan represent? Strict justice, pure justice, rigor itself. We shall see: in the end, is this whole religious movement not simply a subjective sense of well-being? A curtain behind which man seeks to hide and to protect himself, a way of resolving all these worries and anxieties, and perhaps even of shifting his own responsibility onto a higher Other?

And it is here that the dialogue between Elokim, who is justice, and the Satan, who is severity, comes to light. Va-yehi ha-yom, “And it came to pass on the day” (Iyov 1:6): it is said that this was the day of Rosh Hashanah. And every day can be made a day of Rosh Hashanah, that is, a day of reckoning. We take stock of what we are, because bnei ha-Elokim, all these princes who govern us, are bnei ha-Elokim. Not the children of G-d; there is no such thing, G-d has no children. Rather, bnei ha-Elokim are those who truly believe themselves above the fray and want to manage all our problems. They mock us; they mock this religious movement that carries man. He [the Satan] says it is self-interested, and G-d says that, in spite of everything, it is better than nothing.

He must be tested; we must see. So G-d gave the Satan the green light to put him to the test, which means that we are subjected to these trials permanently, constantly. Will we bend our backs or not? It must be said that Iyov did not give way. He did not give way, since G-d had said: “Touch everything, but spare his life.” And they bring him the news (I spoke to you of those natural phenomena): fire and storm come and strip him of all his possessions, blow after blow. And Iyov is not shaken. Then they come and tell him of wars (we spoke of wars earlier): here bandits, terrorists, have appeared. Did they kill the children, or take them hostage? The fact is that in those days, being killed or being taken hostage came to the same thing. When they tell him that his children have fallen victim to these terrorist bands who came and raided everything, it is then that he tears his garment. What is astonishing is that he does not weep, does not weep for his children. And what does he say? “Naked I came out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; Hashem gave and Hashem has taken” (that is a well-known, hallowed formula), “blessed be the name of Hashem” (Iyov 1:21).

His children have fallen victim to brigands, there is not the slightest tear in his eyes, and he says: well, it is what G-d wanted. And it is said: be-chol zot lo chata Iyov bi-sfatav, “In all this Iyov did not sin with his lips” (Iyov 2:10). Iyov did not sin by uttering any improper word toward G-d; he did not rebel against the Divine will. On the contrary, he blessed G-d. But our Sages said: no. He did not utter an improper word, so as to demonstrate his faith, but deep within himself he was being eaten away: “With his lips he did not sin; in his heart he sinned” (Bava Batra 16a). We are about to witness the decline of this man, of this man’s faith, because what is said, what is recounted, is that this man is in the service of G-d, lives with G-d.

But we are not told that he performed an act of kindness toward his neighbor, toward his society. So far we have been shown a man at peace with himself, blessed on every side. Now he is subjected to harsh trials, and there we have a faith that does not entirely do him credit. You know, the Satan returns, presses his charge and says: even losing his children, the main thing for this man was that he saved his own skin. But now let us try to afflict him in his own person, to subject him to real pain in himself, and you will see that in the end he will not hold out. And G-d consents to Iyov undergoing the trials the Satan wants, and a leprosy seizes him from head to foot, and his whole body itches. And at last his wife says to him: how long will you cling to your convictions? “Curse G-d and die” (Iyov 2:9): take your own life.

What is the meaning of life? Why will you go on living, go on living while suffering? Does it make any sense? And what does he answer his wife? “Shall we accept the good from G-d and not accept the bad?” (Iyov 2:10). So for him G-d is at once the source of good and the source of evil, and that in itself is proof of paganism. Good and evil cannot both emanate from the Most High, because if evil were in some way an expression of G-d, then G-d would be evil. That is impossible. He is the source of goodness. So everything that is evil is, in a sense, forged only in man’s way of apprehending the good and manipulating that good. It is the work of man. But, as I told you, this man, after losing everything, sinks into a deep depression. He no longer even tries to console his wife. His friends leave him; he has no friends left. But there are three friends who come from here and there (by which we should understand: three proponents of different approaches to the Divine), and these three friends will… we will not have time to see everything; this is an introduction. We will have occasion to analyze it in greater depth, be-ezrat Hashem (with G-d’s help), in the course of the studies we will do later. But these three friends who remain to him, or these three sages, or these three prophets, since they regard themselves as having had visions of the Divine, come from different places, which shows that G-d’s revelation is not reserved for one people alone, for one segment of humanity alone.

They come from Teiman and […] Tsofar, and a fourth will later join them. And what is the main theme of the speeches of these three who come, when, after a period of silence, a dialogue begins between Iyov and his friends? That if there are trials we are called upon to endure, we must look for the cause in man, and at no price accuse G-d. We must not put G-d on trial. “There is no righteous man who does good and never sins” (cf. Kohelet 7:20), as we have said; but in every person there is some aspect that has been neglected and has caused the balance to be broken. Now what emerges from the text (and I see that time is moving on) is that throughout this exchange between Iyov and his friends, he regards himself as never having sinned.

He is a man of faith; it is G-d who has turned away from him. And he does not realize that in fact it is he who has shown contempt toward everyone around him, because he regarded himself as truly the backbone of humanity, the savior of humanity, the standard, the model. It is a pity I do not have time to read you the text: how he regards others as unworthy of his attention. And because the friends set themselves to show him that there is really no fault on G-d’s part in the governance of His universe, that there is first of all man, man in his relation to others, when Iyov corrects his way of seeing things (but only after some thirty chapters), it is then that G-d reveals Himself to Iyov and enters into dialogue with him, telling him: You served Me, but you paid no heed to the desire to know G-d. Yet wanting to serve G-d without sharing knowledge with those around you, with others, cannot give you access to knowing G-d’s true designs, nor to wanting to share with everyone the happiness of living in this closeness to G-d. The story of Iyov ends with a happy ending, since he regains his children and gives them other names. It is not other children that G-d gives him; he regains them. He has recovered dialogue with his own children. For when we have no dialogue with our own children, it is not that the children are strangers to our teaching. It is because they do not believe in us. We are not there for them; we have not found the right language to win them over to our cause, so that they will carry on our way of thinking and serving and contribute to raising the level of our society. That is why he gives these children new names. It is a conversion of being, a way of saying: yes, my children were in captivity. In captivity: they were prisoners of a closed ideology that did not seek to find a common language again; sometimes a patriarchal spirit is at the root of this. That spirit, that assurance one has and wants to impose, simply did not work. And that is the teaching of [Iyov]; I will link it briefly to Tisha BeAv. We lost our spiritual center, and to this day we have not been able to rebuild it. We have returned to our land, but we have not yet found the language of sharing that would prevent these breakdowns of dialogue at the level of our society, at the level of our children, of the new generations. And even in the religious world we sometimes withdraw into a halachah (Jewish law), into the practice of a dried-out halachah that does not breathe joy of living, transmission, community. But such a practice does not withstand the storms, does not withstand natural catastrophes, does not withstand conflicts, and each time we are exposed to enormous losses of substance. We are waiting to mature, to mature carried by the rare individuals who have understood that what one owes oneself in the service of G-d is found in the service of the other: in accepting, and indeed approaching, the other with the utmost intelligence and wisdom. Wisdom is the true fear of G-d. That is the inner trembling: one must explain; practices should not be imposed. Knowledge comes first, and we must ensure that practices are a natural expression of ourselves and not an obligation imposed from outside.

Love and fear must go hand in hand, in agreement, so that each time, in the way we view our relation to others, we are not Iyov. For in the word Iyov there is oyev, enemy: self-hatred, self-contempt, a self-contempt that seeks comfort in something else, seeks to protect itself. On the contrary, one must grow, grow through study, through wisdom. And that is why there are two days on which we fast in the same way: Yom Kippur on the one hand, and Tisha BeAv on the other. Yom Kippur? It was not said that the Mashiach is born on Yom Kippur.

It was said that the Mashiach is born on Tisha BeAv. On Tisha BeAv we fast, but what else do we do? We weep for what we have lost. We weep for all the tragedies of our history. We weep for our loved ones. And what do we do on Yom Kippur? On Yom Kippur we are aware of our sins, and we implore Hashem to grant us forgiveness. On Yom Kippur we are still dependent on G-d’s forgiveness: He still has to be willing to forgive us. Remaining in that dependence, even on G-d’s forgiveness, is no guarantee for the coming of the Mashiach. Because it means that in the end I place myself in G-d’s hands and count on Him to grant me His forgiveness.

The whole problem lies within me. It is I who must make the effort to overcome my weaknesses, my inadequacies, my relation to others, to the world, to G-d. And if everything depends on me, and I alone can right the course and set the situation straight, then the Mashiach is born on the day of Tisha BeAv, because on the day of Tisha BeAv the people realized that it is from itself that all rebuilding can come. There, I will stop here if you have questions. This was an introduction; I have not yet begun the real study of Iyov, but one always needs an introduction, and there is much to say. If you have questions, with pleasure. Well then, I wish you… — Rav Benizri, excuse me, I am actually thinking about questions. You said that one must avoid a dry practice, at least that is what I understood, a dry practice devoid of study.

In any case, that is what I understood… — You understood nothing! — I understood nothing. I was going to ask: conversely, does study without practice not fall into the same trap? — Yes, it falls into the same trap, quite simply because study without practice is in reality a platonic love that leads nowhere. It is an added suffering, because it is an inner tearing: you cannot give it real expression, so you remain in a sphere of knowledge revolving around theories, and that leads nowhere. — I also wanted to say… You said that Iyov feared, he feared G-d, that in fact he did not rebel at all, he did not revolt. Is one allowed to rebel?

Well? Because sometimes, in the face of things that happen and are hard for certain people, illness, for instance… — There is an expression that tells us: chutzpah kelapei shemaya mehani (Sanhedrin 105a), meaning that boldness toward Heaven can be of use. For G-d likes us to take on responsibility; but if one takes on responsibility, one must rise to the proper level in order to express things. For that is how Avraham approached G-d, saying to Him: “Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?” (Bereishit 18:25). Would the Judge of the whole universe commit injustice? That is bold; it is one way. And the point is not to ask the question and slip away. Wait for the answer.

— Yes, all right. A very interesting lecture. No, no more questions. — Good. Then I wish you a pleasant vacation, and we […]