I’m discuss the Jewish fast of Tisha B’Av (begins at sundown July 19) with Dr. Kirschbaum on my live cam and Monday at 7 pm PST with Rabbi Rabbs.
Dr. Kirschbaum writes long ago for Tikkun magazine:
There is a well known teaching that appears several times in the Talmud and Midrash (JT Yoma 1:1, Yalkut Tehillim 886), which states that “any generation in which the Temple is not rebuilt, it is considered as if that generation had itself destroyed the Temple.” Certainly this would seem to be a rather severe judgment, for as the Sefat Emet points out, many generations containing many great and righteous people have passed without the Temple being rebuilt, and it would be fairly extreme to say of them that they had personally destroyed the Temple. Actually, it would be fairly harsh to say of any innocent people that they had committed crimes of such magnitude in a reckoning of a non-event, that is, in the Temple not being rebuilt. Thus, the question for us, is whether there is some other way to understand this teaching, that might perhaps give a whole new way of looking at the Jewish tradition of historical mourning?
To some extent, this question is provoked by some of the more standard approaches found in some Jewish popular writings. For example, in this week’s LA Jewish Journal, a Rabbi affiliated with one of the outreach programs writes:
“The fact that Tisha B’Av falls in the summer is not just a stroke of bad luck. Gd deliberately destroyed the Temple in the summer. Summer, when the world is outside their closed homes and offices, taking vacations, having fun. Summer, when there is the greatest propensity for calamity, because of our carefree attitudes…”
