‘Perhaps There Is Hope’

As we know, the Jewish year is a circle. Every year, on more or less the same day (because the lunar-solar calendar is more complicated than it is straightforward), we celebrate the same holiday. We’ve changed, and the world has changed, but the holidays remain, anchoring us to the past and the present.

That truth about the biblical holidays seems a little less true of the newer ones, and particularly less true of Tisha B’Av. The mourning on the ninth day of the month of Av, which follows the increasing gloom and strictures of the Three Weeks and the Nine Days, is rooted in the historical calamities of the destructions of the two Temples in Jerusalem, and includes many other historic nightmares and acts of cruelty and depravity aimed at the Jewish people.

Tisha B’Av has reacted to history by picking up more and more horrors, like a snowball if the snow it picked up had become as filthy as if it had been on a midtown street all winter.

Get The Jewish Standard Newsletter by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up

But it’s also a holiday of hope, because in the end the Jewish people pick themselves up and move forward. We’ve done that throughout our history, so why should now be any different?

The Academy for Jewish Religion has published “Perhaps There Is Hope: A Tisha B’Av Supplement,” the fourth in its series of readings, poems, and meditations on holidays since October 7, all edited by AJR’s CEO and academic dean, Ora Horn Prouser of Franklin Lakes, and Menachem Creditor, UJA-New York’s scholar in residence.

All four of them — for Pesach, the High Holidays, Purim, and now Tisha B’Av — are compilations of short pieces, overwhelmingly written for these publications, that were put together quickly, in response to what’s been going on in the world just as they were written. They can be downloaded free on AJR’s website, ajr.edu, and are sold as a paperback on Amazon.

The books fill a need to respond to the world as it has changed around us, Dr. Prouser said. “Whether it’s related to Israel, the United States, or antisemitism, we have a whole big picture of the world that is a different world than the one we’ve been used to.”

Still, she and Rabbi Creditor “wondered whether we should do this one, because Tisha B’Av is a different kind of holiday, but it came down to a feeling that for many people Tisha B’Av is one of two things. For many people, it’s absolutely a day of mourning. On the other side, people often have felt that Tisha B’Av is a day that we shouldn’t commemorate as we used to commemorate it, because now we have the state of Israel.” The holiday was about the destruction of Jerusalem, and our expulsion from it; now it’s back, and so are we. “So the observance was more perfunctory, or at least without the same depth of longing for Israel.

“For those people, this actually is a new world. There is longing and tragedy here that we didn’t have even a couple of years ago. So we felt that this book is for different people, addressing different needs.”

That’s been the approach Dr. Prouser and Rabbi Creditor have taken to all four of their supplements. “It represents AJR’s pluralism,” Dr. Prouser said. “We believe that there are a number of different approaches, and it strengthens us to include them.”

There is one bedrock belief that all the writers share, however. “This is a Zionist institution, and we hold to that, even as we understand Zionism as a big tent that holds many different approaches.”

The supplement includes a translation of Eicha, the Book of Lamentations, the text that’s sung at night, hauntingly, as we sit on the floor in the dark, and read again the next morning. It’s done by Dr. Prouser’s husband, Rabbi Joseph Prouser, who leads Temple Emanu-El of North Jersey. Unlike most translations, it maintains the original’s acrostic structure, logically using the English rather than the Hebrew alphabet. It’s a difficult formal challenge, elegantly met.

One of the themes that runs through Eicha is betrayal; how Jerusalem is beset not only by her enemies but her onetime friends, who turn on her. “I found this resonant this year, in a way that I had never thought about before,” Dr. Prouser said. “It hit me strongly.”

There is also the theme of moving from darkness to the possibility of light. Eicha is structured that way, and many of the pieces in the supplement focus not only on grief but also on hope.

Dr. Prouser talked about Robert Scheinberg’s piece; Rabbi Scheinberg leads United Synagogue of Hoboken and also is AJR’s rabbi in residence. He wrote about how in many ways Tisha B’Av, which always begins on the same day of the week as the first Pesach seder, is the mirror image of Pesach. One holiday is about moving from oppression to liberation, and the other is about the opposite move, back to desolation and despair. The Jewish people have lived through swings in history that take us from one state to the other, Rabbi Scheinberg says, and we cannot say now that we live in Tisha B’Av. Within living memory the Holocaust ended and “hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors of the Nazis… found a home for themselves in Israel.” That is a reversal from one state to the other, he says. “With all my heart, I pray that Israel’s leaders will make wise decisions so that this Passover era will long endure,” he concluded.

Dr. Prouser also talked about Ed Greenstein’s understanding of Eicha. Dr. Greenstein, a professor emeritus at Bar Ilan, is writing a commentary on Lamentations for the Jewish Publication Society. In the AJR supplement, he writes about the book’s connection to an ancient Near Eastern genre of destruction and rebirth. In those lamentations, he writes, we learn that it is necessary to raze a defiled temple to the ground before a new one can be built in its place, and it is necessary to mourn not only their gods’ old house but those old gods themselves. Those verses were written well after the old building was gone, when the new construction was underway, and they were in a way pro forma. It’s sad, yes, but it’s far more exciting to look forward to the new structure than to weep over the old one.

It might be useful to understand Eicha in that way too, Dr. Greenstein suggested. It’s necessary to remember the destruction, the pain, the grief, the devastation, “but in what I believe is the historical purpose of Megillat Eikha, we should channel the sorrow over what has been into an effort to restore and rebuild.”

It is fair to say that although there is a great deal of fear and darkness and anger in the supplement, it answers the question implied in its title, “Perhaps There Is Hope,” with a perhaps tentative but still unmistakable yes. Yes, there is hope. But it won’t fall into our laps. We have to find it, both individually and as a community.

Download the supplement at ajr.edu or buy it in book form — if there’s enough time — on Amazon.