Another Tishah B’Av in the making?
It has been said that the past is not just a record of what was; it’s also a window into what may yet be. What I see through the window of two events in our past and what led to them — the destruction of both Temples, the eviscerating of Jerusalem and the rest of the Land of Israel, and the First and Second Exiles — is that yet another Tishah B’Av-like tragedy is a very real possibility because the sins that led to the first two events are being repeated in the present.
Sixteen days ago on Tishah B’Av, we once again heard the mournful chanting of Megillat Eichah, the Scroll of Lamentations, apparently authored by the Prophet Jeremiah, who witnessed the cataclysmic events of 586 B.C.E. Words he wrote in the very first chapter about what was then called Judea could just as easily have been written about Israel in 2026. (“Jerusalem” in Lamentations represents both the Holy City and all of Judea.) Jerusalem, he wrote, had once been “great among nations” but now sat lonely and despised, because “her allies have…become her foes” and “all who admired her now despise her.”
Those same words could be written today, because the State of Israel once had many friends and allies. They did not always agree with the way it dealt with Palestinian issues, but they also understood that Israel had the right to defend its people and to ensure the survival of the state itself.
Israel still has that right, but world leaders have misguidedly narrowed how far that right extends because of how they view Israel’s massive offensive against Hamas, perpetrator of the horrific events of October 7, 2023. Going after Hamas, however, unavoidably also meant a massive offensive against Gaza and its people, which was what Hamas had hoped for. Just 19 days after October 7, for example, Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh said in a speech broadcast over the pan-Arab satellite news network Al-Mayadeen that Hamas needed the blood of Gaza’s women, children, and elderly in order to awaken “the revolutionary spirit” and “strengthen Palestinian resolve.” Obviously, the world chose to ignore that and similar statements. Rather than blame Hamas for the death and destruction, Israel’s friends turned into its detractors. Israel, they charged, was committing “war crimes” by carrying out “genocide” against the Palestinians in Gaza.
They made such charges despite the evidence, and despite the repeated insistence of West Point’s world-renowned urban warfare expert John Spencer that the “IDF has gone to unprecedented lengths, not seen in the history of modern warfare, to abide by the laws of war and avoid harm to civilians, even when doing so puts the IDF’s own soldiers at risk.”
Spencer’s words fell on deaf ears in world capitals that otherwise valued his expertise because they heard other words that told a different story — words that came and still come from two ministers in Israel’s government who claim to be “religious” and who insist that the Torah supports their call for “Greater Israel”: Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. Nothing can be further from the truth, as I have demonstrated in previous columns. Their oft-repeated remarks drip with vitriol.
Just 10 days after October 7, for example, Ben-Gvir insisted that “the only thing that needs to enter Gaza are hundreds of tons of explosives from the Air Force, not an ounce of humanitarian aid.” For his part, Smotrich called for “opening the gates of hell… [in Gaza as] lethally as possible…..”
The world also notes that these two government ministers upon whom Benjamin Netanyahu’s hold on power depends not only advocate making Gaza a hell on Earth, but they also encourage Israeli settlers on the West Bank to make life a living hell for the Palestinians living there.
Just last week, for example, the daily newspaper Haaretz reported that according to “senior IDF officials” and other security officials, “Israel’s political leadership is emboldening settler violence.” If the government continues on that path, they warn, the Palestinians will rise up and all hell will break loose, albeit not the one Ben-Gvir and Smotrich hope for.
One way that the increasingly deadly settler violence is being encouraged by the Netanyahu-led government, and by Ben-Gvir especially because he is in charge of West Bank security, is in deliberately understaffing the IDF units tasked with combatting it. As a frustrated IDF reservist told Haaretz, “We’re dispatched to violent incidents with forces that are completely inadequate, facing dozens or even hundreds of rioters…. We cannot influence the situation, bring it under control, or end the incident. We simply stand by and watch it unfold.”
The world sees the ever-increasing deadly settler violence, hears Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, and also hears Netanyahu’s reflexive and contemptuous dismissal of every complaint. Is it any wonder that, to paraphrase Jeremiah, all who once admired Israel now despise it? Even here in the United States, the tide is turning against Israel, or at least against its prime minister. A new Economist/YouGov poll released last week shows that just under 50 percent of Americans believe Netanyahu should be arrested and tried by the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges.
In Chapter 4 of Eichah, Jeremiah claims that the first catastrophe — the first churban — came about because Judea’s “guilt” had “exceeded the iniquity of Sodom.” He doesn’t elaborate, but our Sages of Blessed Memory did in an unrelated discussion found in the Babylonian Talmud tractate Sanhedrin 109 a-b. They said that the people of Sodom had turned selfishness into public policy, injustice into law, and made theft of land a communal sport. Sodom’s courts, in their view, functioned more like courts of injustice because they looked the other way at the criminal behavior of its citizens when the victims were non-citizens. The people of Sodom also viewed compassion as a crime punishable by death.
In a very real sense, Israel is on a similar path. There is no question that it must devote a large part of its budget to security matters, but the demands of the nationalist and extreme religious right — Netanyahu’s base of support — have only added to the security outlays, which limits Israel’s ability to deal with serious social concerns. Currently, one Israeli in five is officially poor, more than one child in four is poor, and nearly three Israelis in 10 experience food insecurity. More than 20 percent of local governments need the state’s financial help to function efficiently.
Israel’s national budget is not the easiest to analyze, but it is fair to say that while it devotes roughly one-quarter of its core budget to security and public order, direct spending earmarked to food-insecure families is considerably less than one-tenth of one percent.
The Netanyahu coalition’s most “Sodom-like” behavior, however, is how it seeks to subvert justice. Netanyahu and company have waged a years-long campaign to weaken the independence of the judiciary, the only check on government overreach, by changing the way new justices are chosen. A law passed in 2025 politicizing the process will take effect later this year if the Netanyahu government wins the upcoming election.
Sodom’s sins, however, had nothing to do with bringing down the Second Temple and the subsequent Second Exile. In BT Gittin (55b-56a), the sage Rabbi Yochanan — the dominant and therefore highly credible rabbinic authority in Israel in the first half of the third century — blamed that catastrophic event on an apparently influential rabbi named Zechariah ben Avkulas, who zealously insisted that God’s law was immutable and inflexible, and had to be followed to the letter regardless of the consequences. Because of that insistence, Rabbi Yochanan said, “our House was destroyed, our Temple burnt and we were exiled from our land.”
Rabbi Yochanan’s point is clear. It follows, then, that if God was the ultimate author of the calamities of 70 C.E., as our texts insist, then it was God’s way of saying that religious authorities must never view God’s law as being immutable, and they must set aside their aversion to compromise when circumstances warrant. They have to admit that their views may not be the only ones that will please God. They can hold to their views, but they must neither demonize nor delegitimize those who think differently.
That is not the Israel of Benjamin Netanyahu. He is on the brink of ending the independence of the judiciary, thus echoing the “sins of Sodom.” He also echoes Zechariah ben Avkulas by repeatedly caving in to Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, who insist that the biblical mandate to settle all the Land of Israel requires imposing extremely harsh measures on the Palestinians living in the West Bank in the hope that they would up and leave. He also consistently caves in to ultra-religious demands for more funds for their schools and communities, which means diverting funds from vital social service needs, and by actively supporting granting yeshiva students blanket exemptions from military service, something that is vehemently opposed by both Israel’s secular and religious Zionist citizenry.
The ingredients for another Tishah B’Av-like disaster are all in place. And God help us if those ingredients come together to produce another such devastating event.
Shammai Engelmayer is a rabbi-emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is www.shammai.org.