Catastrophes of our Past
In the Kavana office, our staff has recently been in peak summer planning mode: visioning and goal-setting, assembling the calendar of events for our new programming year, pulling together High Holidays plans, and more. Along the way, we’ve been discussing what this past year has meant and considering the current mood of our Jewish community. While it seems that the last couple of weeks have felt somewhat brighter and more hopeful for many in our community when it comes to the American political landscape (phew!), when considering our identity as part of a global Jewish people and thinking about the future of the State of Israel, a sense of pessimism and foreboding remain at the forefront of our community’s collective consciousness. It’s no wonder. Over the past year, we have witnessed the terror and horrors of October 7th and the shockwaves it sent through Israeli society, Israel’s retaliatory war against Hamas with its staggering death toll for Gazan Palestinians, the ripple effects of settler violence and land annexation in the West Bank, the displacement and casualties of Israelis who have been under attack by Hezbollah near the northern border, and now a potential escalation into a broader regional conflict with Iran. It is frightening to feel like the half of the world’s Jewish population that lives in Israel is perched at the precipice of a deep abyss, facing down both internal and external existential threats simultaneously.
The dark cloud that hangs over this collective Jewish moment matches the mood of the season where we find ourselves on the Jewish calendar. At sunset time on Wednesday evening, I happened to look up at the sky at just the right moment to witness a sliver of a silver crescent moon hanging in the brightly-colored, vaguely smoky skies on the western horizon. This scene – at once beautiful and ominous – was a poignant reminder that we are now solidly in the Hebrew month of Av, with its accompanying themes of destruction, grief and lament all waxing along with the moon as we near Tisha B’av (the 9th of Av).
I have written before about how the mourning rituals over the destruction(s) of the Temple, which our tradition moves us through each year, catapult us into the season of introspection that follows. In a few weeks, Av will resolve into Elul, shifting us towards the High Holiday season of turning and returning, repentance and repair. For now, though, from our vantage point at the beginning of Av, it is our duty to consider what lessons we might draw from the calamities of our collective past that might help us deal with our complicated present and sidestep future calamities.
The centrality of the destruction of the Temple in our collective Jewish consciousness simply cannot be overstated. The Biblical period culminates in the establishment of a monarchy that unites the northern and southern kingdoms of Judah and Israel, with King Solomon building a Temple. Then this (first) Temple is destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, and the ancient Jewish community is sent into exile “by the rivers of Babylon.” The community returns from exile under Cyrus of Persia and rebuilds, constructing a second Temple that is even bigger and better than the first. After several hundred more years, this too is destroyed, this time by the Romans in the context of a brutally destructive and deadly siege of Jerusalem. (If you’re curious to explore further, check out “The Temple and its Destruction: A Look into the Psyche of Ancient Judaism” by Rabbi Irving Greenberg.) To this day – some two millennia later – Jews around the world continue to break a glass at every wedding, leave a corner of our homes unfinished, and observe customs of mourning each summer in the lead-up to Tisha B’av as a testament to the enormity of the manifold losses that these destructions represent: of the Temple itself, of so many Jewish lives, of our direct connection with God, and of our collective autonomy.
Eicha (the Book of Lamentations) that we will chant on Monday night was written in the wake of the destruction of the First Temple. On the one hand, the whole book asks the question of “how” (as in: how could this possibly have happened?), as though nothing could possibly explain the enormity of this catastrophe; on the other hand, the text also seems clear that we must have done something to bring this suffering and destruction upon ourselves. A similar lens applies to the destruction of the Second Temple in Roman times. So many of our core Jewish texts emerge from then, and again, the rabbis of that period struggle with the idea that the level of suffering and destruction they observe cannot possibly have been deserved, while also holding that we ourselves are somehow to blame. (It’s rather shocking how little responsibility is placed by our tradition upon the Babylonians or the Romans.)
Over the last few weeks, I’ve watched a new-ish Israeli film by director Gidi Dar gain traction. Legend of Destruction tells the story of the end of the Second Temple period, tracing the outbreak of the First Jewish-Roman War and probing how zealotry and sectarianism led to the eventual downfall of Jerusalem, along with the deaths of a million Jews and the destruction of the Temple. (Click here to view a Forward article about this film and here to view a trailer; if there’s interest, perhaps we can pull together a Kavana film screening and discussion sometime this year.)
Meanwhile, I want to invite you to join me in unpacking one key rabbinic text that is associated with the lead-up to Tisha B’Av. Of the many stories our tradition tells about the reasons the Temple was destroyed, the single most famous one is the Talmudic story of Kamtsa and Bar Kamtsa. You’re welcome to read the story directly from the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Gittin 55b-56a but – because it’s a bit terse and requires some unpacking – I am also going to share a solid summary here (courtesy of Wikipedia’s entry on “Kamtsa and Bar Kamtsa”):
The story, as it appears in Tractate Gittin, tells of a wealthy man who lived in the 1st century CE. For an upcoming party, he sent his servant to deliver an invitation to his friend, a man named Kamsa. However, the servant mistakes the recipient as Bar Kamsa, an enemy of the wealthy man. Upon seeing the hated Bar Kamsa at his party, the host orders him to leave. Bar Kamsa, attempting to save face, thrice offers to make peace with the host, first offering to pay for the food he eats, then for half of the expenses of the party, and then for the entire party, each time rebuffed by the angry host. Finally, the host forcibly removes Bar Kamsa, in the presence of the communal leaders present who lacked the courage to protest his shameful actions (from the context, it seems like the host was an affluent and politically powerful individual).
Humiliated, Bar Kamsa vows revenge against the rabbis present who did not defend him allowing him to be publicly humiliated. He visits the Roman Caesar who controls the region and tells him that the Jews are inciting to revolt against the Roman Empire. The Caesar, unsure of whether to believe Bar Kamsa, sends an animal to be sacrificed as a peace offering in the Temple in Jerusalem along with Bar Kamsa. On the way, Bar Kamsa purposefully slightly wounds the animal in a way that would disqualify it as a Jewish sacrifice but not as a Roman offering.
Upon seeing the disfigured animal, the rabbis of the Sanhedrin present at the Temple have to make a decision as to how to respond to the delicate situation presented. Some advocate dispensing with the law and offering the animal anyway to avoid war. This plan is vetoed by Rabbi Zecharia ben Avkolos who fears that people will begin to bring blemished animals to the Temple to be sacrificed. They then suggest putting Bar Kamsa to death to prove that he is at fault, but Rabbi Zecharia ben Avkolos again refuses, because this is not the mandated penalty for intentionally bringing a disqualified offering to the Temple.
Rabbi Yochanan says because of the actions of Rabbi Zecharia ben Avkolos, the Temple was destroyed and the Jews were exiled from the land.
The Caesar, incensed, sent an army to lay siege to Jerusalem, eventually leading to its downfall in the year 70 CE. Josephus (Wars II, 17:2) also ascribes the beginning of the war to the refusal to accept the offering of the Emperor. The Talmudic record is meant to illustrate how internal tensions among the Jewish people exacerbated the external threat from the Roman conquerors.
There are several lessons from this story that strike me as incredibly relevant to our present moment.
First, with the mix-up between Kamtsa and Bar Kamtsa that begins the story, we see that an inadvertent slight leads to humiliation, and that humiliation fuels retaliation which then spirals out of control. In fact, this exact phrase – “humiliation fuels retaliation” – came up in this Tuesday evening’s conversation with Elisheva Goldberg of the New Israel Fund, as she was speaking about the fact that this week, Israelis are braced and waiting for an anticipated attack from Iran. The Israeli assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh last week -- not at his home in Qatar but rather while he was in Tehran to attend a funeral -- was an embarrassing blow to Iran. The risk of “poking the bear” is the escalation of violence, which is exactly what we see play out in the Kamtsa and Bar Kamtsa story. Of course, the Kamtsa and Bar Kamtsa tale could have ended very differently had the host at the very outset permitted the accidental invitee to save face by remaining at the party, or had the rabbis who were privy to the interaction stood up for him. This story contains an important lesson about human behavior – one we know to be true to this day: that unchecked humiliation can easily take a dangerous turn.
A second big takeaway is that this story offers a surprisingly strong condemnation of extremism and zealotry. In the second part of the story, Rabbi Zecharia ben Avkolos is punctilious about upholding the law. His opinion is – by any account – technically right: according to Jewish law, an animal with even the smallest blemish was not permitted to be offered as a sacrifice in the Temple. Given Jewish law’s focus on details and correct observance, it’s not hard to imagine that the Talmud could have argued that when it comes to observing mitzvot, we should never compromise our standards. And so, it’s a bit shocking that this very radical text seems to argue againststringency, suggesting instead that Rabbi Zecharia should have just let this one slide for the sake of peace, and claiming that in insisting on perfection, he gave up on the possibility of a conciliatory act and brought the calamity of the siege and destruction upon his own people! Today, we are witnessing the most extreme right-wing Jewish nationalist government of Israel’s history. There is an unholy alliance between the self-serving Netanyahu, who it seems will do anything to maintain his own power, and extremists like Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who support policies of broad-scale violence and annexation, publicly oppose the creation of a Palestinian state under any circumstances, and refuse to compromise on their Jewish supremacist vision of “greater Israel.” This week, we have also witnessed Hamas – already an extremist group – move even further towards radicalization, as the killing of Haniyeh fueled the appointing of Yahya Sinwar as the formal head of the Hamas, consolidating both military and political might in the hands of a man who not only is the mastermind behind the October 7th attacks, but also had previously earned himself the nickname “Butcher of Khan Younis” for his brutal killing of Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel. By lifting up the Kamtsa/ Bar Kamtsa story as an explanation for why the Temple was destroyed, our Jewish tradition decries radical extremism, and implicitly calls for real-world pragmatism and a softening of edges, in order to avoid danger and disaster.
The final point I want to make about this story is that, in its arc, the personal becomes political – that is, a story about the relationships between individuals sets off a chain reaction that results directly in the collective downfall of the central Jewish institution of its day. If we can unwind the story, we can see the power of a single small, individual act. When we consider the bleakness that so many of us seem to be feeling as we think about the future of Israel in this moment – we might wonder whether there is anything at all that we can do to help a situation so huge? This story’s chain reaction demonstrates that it’s possible that everything could hinge on something as tiny as an invitation to a dinner party. Of course, the challenge is that we cannot possibly know which action we might take that could set off a chain reaction, for good or for bad. All we can do is the next right thing. The Kamtsa/Bar Kamtsa story encourages us to push ourselves towards greater tolerance of discomfort than we might ordinarily embrace in the service of building community across difference.
This weekend, as we move towards our Jewish calendar’s peak moment of destruction and devastation, we are induced to think about how, in our present, we might avoid a repeat of the giant catastrophes of our past. Are we brave enough to learn from the cautionary tales we have told ourselves for the past two-thousand years? If we are willing to act on the lessons of the Kamtsa/Bar Kamtsa story, we would be pushed to consider one another’s feelings and to take pains to avoid humiliation; we would take seriously the need to temper extremist impulses, both within and without; and we would feel empowered to start small, with actions of generosity and human connection. With each tiny act we do, we have the power to build interpersonal bridges and effect repair. We can't possibly know what the ripple effects might be… all we can do is make the best choices we can. It is possible that the entire Jewish future rests upon the decisions we make today.
As we move through this season of pain, uncertainty and grief, I wish each member of our Kavana community a Shabbat Shalom. May we help move our community and our world towards a better tomorrow, one small step at a time.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum
