Thoughts on Tisha B’Av - The Jewish Standard

October 7 probably didn’t taint Simchat Torah forever. We probably will be able to feel unconflicted joy on that day sometime again — but the word “we” is doing some heavy lifting there. It might stand in for “our grandchildren.”

On that terrible Simchat Torah, my rabbi concluded each hakafah, which normally ends in pure wild joy, with the haunting, impossibly sad melodies of Tisha B’av.

So now, 10 months later — we’re far enough past October 7 that a baby conceived that day would be about a month old by now — we are left to consider how the terror and evil of that day might join with the other horrors that Tisha B’Av commemorates. Those awful stories are safely enough in our past that they don’t resonate with most of us the way October 7 does. The Holocaust does — but it’s marked with Yom HaShoah, not on Tisha B’Av. (And not by accident, but as the result of long deliberations.)

October 7 seems to have changed Israel’s standing in the world. Latent antisemitism — or to be less mealy-mouthed, Jew-hatred — seems to have congealed around the idea of the Jewish state. The events that we commemorate on Tisha B’Av led to a radical change in Israel — as it was not called then — and we have to hope that 2023 does not mark a similar change.

Last week’s cover story was about a film, “Legend of Destruction,” set to be shown across the area on Tisha B’Av or the days leading to it, that shows, in horrifying detail, how sinat chinam — senseless hatred — as well as run-amok zealotry led to and then past a point of no return, when the nation could not be saved.

Let us all work to ensure that does not happen again.

Meanwhile, though, we can celebrate the connections between Jews, a connection that has kept us alive through a millennium or three. We have a prime example of it in this week’s paper.

Fran Malkin, the subject of this week’s cover story, said that she loved reading stories about Alexander Smukler’s views on Russia and Ukraine. Not only was she fascinated by his analysis, she was drawn to the area he discusses. It’s near where she grew up, on the border between Poland, Ukraine, and Russia.

But she didn’t know how to get in touch with him.

Then, Fran did 23 and Me — and to her astonishment, she found that she’s distantly related to Sasha. She was thrilled. Now she had contact information from him. She got in touch with him. She told him her story, he told me — and here it is, on the cover of this paper.

Meanwhile, the two of them remain in touch. They’re not sure about exactly how they’re related. Sasha can trace his family back to the 19th century, he says, but because she was cut off from all but her immediate family on her mother’s side, and from everybody on her father’s, she can’t trace it back very far. But they’ll keep looking.

There’s something profound in that connection too. It’s generations back, unearthed through the new technology of DNA testing, and the middle-aged technology of newspapers. (The Forward’s printing details about families lost to each other through the Shoah is a clear example of that use.) We’re all connected; if we’re born Jewish, that connection can be traced. If we’ve converted, Jewish folklore tells us that our souls were all at Sinai together, even if DNA tests can’t prove it.

This Tisha B’Av, let us hope that connection overcomes exile and destruction, and that when the day is over and we once again sing songs of hope, that they reach the heavens.

—JP

Opinion

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