Noam: Hey everyone, welcome to Wondering Jews with Mijal and Noam.
Mijal: I’m Mijal.
Noam: And I’m Noam and this podcast is our way of trying to figure out the Jewish world. We don’t have it all figured out, but we’re gonna try to figure out some big items together.
Mijal: We really love hearing from you, so please we encourage you to email us at wonderingjews@jewishunpacked.com or call us at 833-WON-JEWS.
Noam: So Mijal, just to get us started before we go into a pretty intense episode, an intense episode that deserves to be intense because it’s about the ninth of Av, which is the national day of mourning for the Jewish people. But before we do that, I want to know what did your family eat to break your fast? And I want to know if it was at all similar to what we did.
Mijal: Noam, just curious, are you a good faster? What kind of faster? You’re a terrible faster?
Noam: Terrible. Yeah, why, how’d you know to ask that question?
Mijal: I don’t know, because you’re thinking so much about the end of the fast. So how do you get through a fast?
Noam: I get through a fast, it’s hard. And Yom Kippur, the way I get through the fast is, I actually like Yom Kippur. And I’m not a good faster. My mother-in-law likes to make fun of me because she’s like, you’re not a bad faster, you’re just hungry.
Mijal: That’s funny. Yeah, my secret is I just swallow caffeine pills and I don’t have water, but that’s just me being craving my coffee.
So yeah, and the fast day. So it ended really late. So I feel like I didn’t want a massively heavy thing. I had, we, my husband and I, had like coconut water and toast and salad and some cookies and things like that. How’s that?
Noam: I almost fell asleep listening to that.
Mijal: Okay, Noam, how did you break your fast?
Noam: Well, I mean, I ate a lot. I ate a lot. We had bagels, all different types of cream cheeses, tuna, egg salads, lox, pizzas, salad. And then for dessert, we had a very underrated babka. People don’t talk about this babka enough. A babka is like this very European Jewish pastry. There’s actually a great guy in TikTok who was talking about, he’s like, Jewish community, what’s your deal? You’ve been holding out this babka thing for so long and not telling anyone about it. It’s amazing. So we had a different babka, vanilla babka, and people like chocolate or cinnamon. I think vanilla is very underrated. That’s my take. So we had that too. How’s that compared to yours? Quite different, I’d say.
Mijal: I was happy with mine. Thought mine was great. I don’t need a bagel after a fast. I can eat a bagel if I need to, but it’s not my thing.
So tell me why is it that you, I mean, it sounds like a silly question, but why is it that Tisha B’Av is so, you said it’s like your least favorite day?
Noam: Yeah, it’s like Yom Kippur is a happy day. It’s a serious day, but it’s a happy day.
Mijal: Well, let’s remind everyone why we have, so these are the two, these are the only two fast days that are like kind of, they’re 25 hours basically, Yom Kippur and Tisha B’Av, but they have very different sources and very different meanings.
Noam: Yeah, let’s go through them.
Mijal: So just very quickly on one foot, Yom Kippur has biblical roots and Yom Kippur is a fast day which we’re commanded upon in the Bible and it’s all about forgiveness and repair. It’s basically a day in which we get to atone for anything that we might have done wrong and we get we are told that if we do Yom Kippur the right way there’s almost like you know like an extra ability for us to be forgiven so that’s Yom Kippur.
Tisha B’Av totally different it’s a post biblical holiday. It’s not actually a holiday that’s, you know, it’s a day in which we mourn national catastrophes that happened to the Jewish people. The rabbis in the Mishnah mentioned five things that they claim happened on Tisha B’Av. And basically it’s supposed to be almost like a day in which we remember all of the bad things that befell us, in which we have different rituals around it. We’re mourning, we are remembering, we are introspecting, things like that. That’s Tisha
Noam: Okay, great. That’s great. It’s a Mishnah in Taanit, which is one of the tractates and it goes through five different things that I like the word that you use that the rabbis claim took place on this day, which is interesting verb choice on your part.
But it was that it was the two temples were destroyed. The first temple in like the sixth century BCE, the second temple in the first century CE, and then but before that it was the spies. It was decided even biblically that they were not going to be allowed into the land of Israel. And then what else? Beitar was destroyed right in 50 years after the second temple was destroyed and then it was plowed over. Those are the five things.
Mijal: Well, no, think Jerusalem was plowed over. Yeah, just to, Beitar was like the last stronghold, like major, major, major stronghold of like the rebels under Bar Kochva, trying to fight against the Romans to achieve Jewish sovereignty. And then the plowing of the city of Jerusalem was like a symbol of national humiliation. Not only did the Romans conquer Jerusalem, destroy the temple, and exiled so many of its people. They also plow the city as a way of basically saying like, will never be your capital city again. We’re going to erase every single memory you have from this day.
So all of these are like, they’re not just tragedies. They are national calamities that I would say describe the DNA of exile, of what it is about the Jewish story that we don’t have a land, we don’t have sovereignty, and we’ve experienced so much suffering, persecution.
So, Noam, there’s a concept by a historian, Salo Whitmire Baron, let’s just use that one. He had an essay wrote in 1928 in which he discussed something called the lachrymose conception of Jewish history. Lacrimos, to me that word is easy because in Spanish, lagrimas is tears. So lachrymose is all about like sad tears. It’s basically looking at Jewish history and looking at all the low points, all of the sufferings, the persecutions. Jewish history as one, as persecution after another. And I think that Tisha B’Av is almost the day in which we think about the lacrimal conception of Jewish history and we mourn
Noam: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And that’s why you like it?
Mijal: I’ve always really identified with Tisha B’Av mostly because it felt to me like a day of intense solidarity with the Jewish people. There’s an aspect of the day for me, which is literally we sit down on the floor.
Noam: We sit down on the floor because it’s a sign of mourning.
Mijal: Sign of Mourning, yes. And we are reading Eicha, the Book of Lamentations about the destruction of the first temple. We are reading Kinnot, what is it in English?
Noam: Dirges.
Mijal: Dirges, yeah, like about different things that happened in history. And for me personally, a big part of it is just, it’s almost like showing love to all the Jews in history that were felt so hated by the world. And there’s something there that feels really sacred to me.
Like, I don’t know if you have this, Noam, sometimes when I look at pictures from the Shoah, from the Holocaust, and you see there, like Jews who being humiliated or suffering or just in so much pain. Part, one of my reactions is I want to reach to the photograph and just like, like hug them and tell them you are loved, you are, even though you’re experiencing so much hatred and suffering in a world that is so indifferent to your life, I am here as a Jew who loves you endlessly.
So that to me, there’s a part of Tisha B’Av that like feels really like it’s a way for me to express my deep, deep love and connection to Jews across history who suffering so much.
Noam: So you’re pastoral even to people who died years ago.
Mijal:This is not pastoral. is solidarity.
Noam: Meaning you feel sympathy, you feel a connection to, you feel like a love for the Jewish people who came before you.
So I’ll tell you why I’m struggling with it, at least this year, and I want to get your take on it, okay? You said something that was interesting. You said, when you were describing the ninth of Av, you said that we’re mourning basically the lack of sovereignty, the ending of Jewish sovereignty in different ways and what others did to make it the case that the Jewish state doesn’t exist and Jewish people don’t have their own autonomy and sovereignty and the like.
So I’m going to tell you a story. I do the scholar in residence residence at this sleepaway camp. And last year in 2023, it was the summer of what we thought was the most intense, difficult fighting between the Jewish people.
And there was a group of what’s called the Mishlachat, meaning the delegates, I don’t know how you say that. The people that go from Israel to the United States of America and they go into the camp. I’m having this conversation with the Israelis who came from Israel to go to the United States of America about the judicial reforms. Should it be more independent, less independent? Okay, there was a debate. But it wasn’t just a debate. It was a debate that was causing massive division. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people protesting. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people counter protesting.
And then Hassan Nasrallah, who is the leader of Hezbollah, gets up and he says, Israel is at its weakest that it’s ever been. The Jewish people are so weak right now, so weak right now. And I heard Nasrallah say that, and I spoke to the Israelis about this, and I said to them, guys, I, I’m not as passionate one way the other about the judicial reforms. I’m sorry. But do you see what’s happening in Israel? Are you able to see that the enemies of Israel are utilizing this moment to say you are at your weakest, you’re at your most vulnerable?
And Mijal, you know what they said back to me? They said, you kidding me? He’s bumbling, he just says whatever is on his mind. Israel’s so strong. Israel can never get hurt by someone like Hezbollah, or like Hamas. He’s just being himself. Ignore, ignore, ignore him.
I was amazed because I am obsessed with Jewish and Israeli history, as you know. I was amazed that we the Jewish people couldn’t access our history and allow it to help us think about what the future will entail. Now I had no idea the 7th of October would happen after that. I mean I didn’t know that no one knew that but I was really scared, I think that’s right word, by what people call the conceptzia, which is another term for basically the arrogance, the thinking that the Jewish people are just going to thrive, go forward, figure it all out, and everyone will be just fine, and everything’s just fine. There’s so much division amongst the Jewish people. And so I want to ask you, how did we not see this coming?
That is what’s bothering me when I learned the story of Tisha B’Av and the story of Tisha B’Av is all about the story of the hatred amongst the Jewish people during the Second Temple that led the divisions, that led to the Romans having the ability to do what they did. And it’s not even like a theological statement, it’s a historical statement. And how do we possibly not learn from that history and see that it’s the division amongst the Jewish people that leads to this moment?
And that’s why Tisha B’Av this year for me is like, come on, we’re talking about our enemies, we’re talking about the external folks, who cares about our external folks? Look at what’s happening internally. How do we not see this coming?
Mijal: So Noam, you’re saying two things here and I want to respond to them separately. The first thing that you’re saying is you’re reminding us that Tiosha B’Av is not only focusing on external enemies, whether it’s the Babylonians, the Romans, the Spanish, the Germans, but that actually the way the rabbis constructed the day and its liturgy, it’s supposed to be a lot of thinking about what we did, our own agency, our own internal problems, especially the destruction of the second temple. The rabbis say that it was internal strife, like really war between different factions of the Jewish people that led to the Romans being able to come in and destroy the temple and take the people into exile. So that’s like one thing you’re noting.
And I think you’re bringing up questions there about what does it mean to have a day in which mourn our own the way that I said it love our own talk about our enemies, but also do this internal introspection.
The second thing you’re bringing up is we had tremendous division right before October 7th. How do we think about this?
But the only thing I want to take issue with with what you said, Noam, is that I think the experience that you had with those people in camp, I’m not sure it’s a representative experience. Like over Shabbat, actually, I picked up a book that had 75 essays about the future of Israel. And this was a book that was published right before October 7th. So it was really just reflecting on those fights within Israel. And essay after essay after essay after essay was just focusing on the machloket, on the strife, and saying, we have to get it together because we know that this is weakening us and we know that terrible catastrophe can happen if we don’t have some measure of unity. I do think there were people who were noticing this. I don’t think anybody could imagine the terrible, terrible catastrophe of October 7th and the way it evolved. But I do think that that was the beginning of a conversation that was already happening in Israel.
So, Noam, let me go back with this in mind. Is your question like, we bring October 7th upon Earth? Like what is your question?
Noam: The question is, what are we really mourning and commemorating? It feels like an exercise in futility, or it feels like a show of an artificial game when we know what the issue is and we have either a refusal to deal with the issue, or a lack of skill set. Is that what it is? I don’t want to talk about the calamities that brought the other people brought upon ourselves, I want to talk about what we’re doing internally.
Like, I like the story of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza, which is the story in the Talmud that goes through the internal strife. You know the story right and the wrong person got the invitation and he shows up to the party and the host of the party, he’s like, I don’t want you here. What are you doing here? And he’s like I got the invitation I don’t know what to tell you and the host of the party’s like well get out of here. He’s like, I’ll pay for your party, I’ll do whatever you need, just like let me be here. Let me not be like embarrassed, or, let me just be here. And then there are a bunch of rabbis who are at this party and they don’t do anything about it. So he gets super duper offended by the whole thing.
And he goes to the Roman authorities and basically he’s like, yeah, the Jewish people have a real issue with you. And the Roman authorities then lead to the destruction of the second temple. And that’s how the rabbis choose to tell the story of what led to the destruction of the temple.
I love that they look internally and say this is what led to the destruction of the temple and I think Tisha B’Av should be a time that we spend time being like, this is what’s going on today. This is what’s happening now. And let’s figure out how to be a better people now. That’s my lament about this day of lamentation.
Mijal: Yeah, but Noam, I don’t understand why you think we have to choose one over the other. Tisha B’Av is supposed to contain everything, but part of the reason it contains everything is so we can learn from it. So even right now, when you were speaking about the destruction of the second temple, to me, part of what I do every year is I learn about the history of how the Romans conquered the Jews and eventually exiled them and destroyed the temple. And part of what you learn there is not only this moving rabbinic story, but you even read there like Josephus, who was a previous Jewish general, eventually became a historian for the Romans. But you read Josephus describing the Roman generals basically telling each other, let’s hold off a little bit, let them fight each other more, weaken themselves internally, and then we’ll come in.
But that’s actually really important, Noam, because we need that view of history to understand what came before us, and we also need to understand the relationship between our own internal state and the capacity of our enemies to destroy us in order to move forward. So I’m not sure why you think these are in tension with each other.
Noam: It’s not that I think they’re in tension with each other, Mijal. I’m saying this doesn’t seem that com-, well, maybe it is complicated.
Mijal: You don’t think it’s complicated to figure out how to have a well-functioning Jewish society, in which we don’t like, in which we have a certain amount of cohesiveness and unity so that we can take on the crazy amount of threats that are facing us? I think it’s so hard.
Noam: Why is it hard?
Mijal: Because even take something like the judicial reforms. I had pretty strong feelings about it. And I could still understand why people would disagree with me. And I could still have questions about the best ways to carry something out. Sometimes when we have huge social issues, there’s, like it’s not simple at all. I have, I don’t know. I don’t feel so confident that I know how to solve everything.
Noam: I’m not at all suggesting I feel confident that I know how to solve everything in the slightest. That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that the result cannot be internal hatred for the other’s opinion, and thinking that you have the whole truth and you need to beat the other into submission.
Mijal: I agree with you, yeah.
Noam: That’s, but that’s what I’m saying is not that complicated to figure out what happens when the Jewish people go and start acting like they could just start behaving like any other nation. There are 15 million Jewish people in the world. There’s one Jewish state. There’s seven million Jews in that Jewish state. There are nine million people in that Jewish state called Israel. Like you don’t have the luxury with people in the North, people in the South, people in the East who want to and the West is the Mediterranean Sea. Like you don’t have that luxury. And it’s like, whoa, can we work on, you and I disagree strongly on an issue, why don’t we work on how to not hate each other because we disagree on an issue? Like, that to me is a major part of it, a major part of this whole thing. Like let’s work on that. Let’s include that in our prayer experience.
Mijal: Yeah, so two quick reactions to that, Noam. First of all, I think that a big issue for me that I think a lot about is leadership. And even when you think about like the sin of the spies, that’s one of the sins and consequences that we think about in Tisha B’Av, it starts with bad leadership. And then you have like social contagion, basically, of the leadership convincing the people to reject the promised land. So I guess I’m saying I have less impatience with the people. I have more impatience with the leadership personally.
Second thing, Noam, this conversation is reminding me of the following. There is a concept in, in, in rabbinic tradition in which different prophets are categorized differently. So prophets are supposed to really look at the world and think about the gap between the way the world is and the way the world could be, and prophets mostly worked with the people of Israel.
And you have three types of prophets. One type of prophets are those that are described as toveah kvod ha’ben, I’ll describe it in a second, one are toveah kvod ha’av, and one do both. So some prophets are the ones who look at the Jewish people and they are very impatient and angry on behalf of God in this case because of how bad the Jewish people behave.
So it’s almost like looking at Jewish history and saying, come on guys, like we should really get this together. Why aren’t we behaving the way that God wants us to behave? Then there’s a different kind of prophet, which looks at the Jewish people and looks at what’s happening to them. And this prophet turns to God and says, hey God, these are your children. What have you done? Like what’s happening to them? And then you have the very unusual prophet who does both.
who’s able to say, hey Jewish people, you should do better. And hey God, please look at your children, what is going on here right now? And I’m hearing in your words an impulse of looking at the Jewish people saying, come on guys. I know for me Tisha B’Av, I struggle with that because I am much more inclined emotionally to be like, hey God, look at your people. And I think Tisha B’Av asked us to do both. I don’t know if this resonates at all, Noam, I’m what I’m saying.
Noam: Yeah, yeah, it does. It does resonate. Yeah, I’m at a point that I feel terribly for our people, kind of like what you’re describing, really over this past year and beyond. Also, you called it impatience, I’m going to call it internal frustration, with what I’m seeing amongst the people. I mean, the purpose of learning history is in order to learn from the history, in order to ensure that what we did in the past that was bad, don’t repeat that, and what was good, repeat that. And my sadness over the past year is now being expressed in terms of frustration. And when I think of the 9th of Av, that’s maybe my frustration’s coming out this year in a different way.
Mijal: So Noam, let me ask you, can you maybe tell us from the Tisha B’Avs you’ve experienced, what are moments that you learned from that you think we could take with us this year about what it means to do Tisha B’Av in a way that you know, that allows us to do this hard introspection this year?
Noam: I think, maybe one idea just spitballing here, but maybe one idea for us to be doing this year is to be working on, with groups of people, things that we strongly disagree with each other on, and hear each other out and work on the opposite of Sinat Chinam, which is translated as baseless hatred. But really great rabbis have described it as hatred that comes out of jealousy, out of anger, things like that. And replace it with Ahavat Chinam which is what Rabbi Kook spoke about, who was one of the great chief rabbis of Israel. The first one, well, before the state of Israel was created, he died in 1935 but he would speak about baseless love. Tisha B’Av should be a day in which we create experiences that could garner baseless love and create experiences that can help people who have strong disagreements with each other work on those strong disagreements with each other. That to me would be a day that I’d be like, okay, this is a great new utilization of Tisha B’Av.
Mijal: I think since October 7th, I have felt the push and pull to both extend our hands, but also the obligation to almost say, there’s going to be boundaries and people that we are, we’re not able to work with in this way of ours. Like I’m just saying, even as I agree with you about the need to collaborate and work and all of that, but I also think that there’s some elements that are so destructive or so dangerous that to me end up being, that something to think about or you think we are so far away from even doing this work that we shouldn’t even think about those questions yet?
Noam: No, well, yeah. There are definitely the fringes that don’t need to be part of the conversation. I’m with you on that. But I think there should be a broad tent, as broad of a tent as possible, with people who have, broadly speaking, some of the same principles with the same goals in mind—now, I didn’t say any political position there. I didn’t say, you support Kamala Harris? Do you support Donald Trump? I didn’t talk about that at all in there. You could be a Trump supporter. You could be a Kamala Harris supporter. I don’t care. You could be pro -Bibi, anti -Bibi. I don’t care. But I want to know that people can talk these things through without hating each other.
By the way, I hear myself right now and I hear that I’m coming off in a sanctimonious way as though like, I’m good at this. I’m not saying I’m good at this, but I’m saying this is the work that needs to be done. And I’m saying that we need to spend a hell of a lot more time, heck of a lot more time, figuring this stuff out together. Because my blood starts rushing to my heart. I feel it. Like my blood pressure goes up when people say things that are antagonistic towards the way I view whatever the topic is and I’m like come on slow down bro like slow your roll and it we’re so quick to that.
I don’t know, that’s the way I view that. But, but, Mijal, just listening to myself wondering throughout, in some ways I feel like I’ve been unfair and unkind to the Jewish people when and given God too much of a pass. And sometimes there’s a danger to the theological concept of blaming ourselves for traumas that unfold. What do you think of that?
Mijal: Tisha B’Av has always felt to me like a moment of loving my people and being really… like all of my theological questions, you know, the pain point of them is Tisha B’Av because my biggest… like my biggest struggles as a person of faith have to do with, I’ll say it like almost simplistically, the tension that I feel between my love for the Jewish people and between what I see sometimes as the way that our faith throughout Jewish history, a faith that I believe is in some ways guided by God. I would say like this, Noam, the rabbis wrote at a time in which the entire world believed in quote unquote, victim blaming, that part of what happens to you reflects your actions. So they had a totally different sensibility. Having said that, I do believe that we can double down hard on both love for our people and also introspection. I don’t think that we have to choose one over the other. And we can do introspection without victim blaming.
Again, I want to recommend, just for Tisha Be I really just recommend studying as much as possible the days before the destruction of the second temple. I’m trying to figure out if there’s any particular book I can recommend. There is one amazing film, in Hebrew, it’s called Aggadot HaChurban. We’ll see later if it’s in English we can put in the show notes.
Noam: Legends of the destruction?
Mijal: Yeah, and it’s just like a very, very powerful invitation to understand it’s not baseless hatred, like people weren’t like nice to each other, you know? It’s like the kind of the reality in those days of the Second Temple were a such that there were literally people murdering other factions as the Romans were outside the walls of Jerusalem or like lighting on fire, you know, stock, know, stocks of food to force the people to fight in a more desperate way.
Noam: Mijal, there are people right now that I’ve spoken to in Israel that believe that those were the real heroes of the second temple period, meaning what’s called the zealots or the Siccari, where–
Mijal: Very few people think that.
Noam: Like very few people, very few people. But I met with people that did. And I was, I’m telling you, I was surprised. I was like, thought, I was always like, I thought those were the evil people, the enemies, like, what? No, that’s just the way the rabbis tell the story. They were the heroes.
Mijal: Yeah, I get that. I get you. Part of what I say is that we need to build broad coalitions that can stand up to this way of thinking. But it’s really hard.
Well, I want to say the following. I do think that Tisha B’Av, I think that there has to be a mixture of critical thinking and constructive thinking, and also just plain warning. I actually believe it’s really, really important to allow ourselves to sit on the floor and cry and to sing the new keynote dirges that we have from October 7th.
And to like, there is an act of just sitting down and crying that is so important. For me, by the way, Noam, I learned this from my sabba, my mother’s father of blessed memory, Sabba David. And I had the privilege of seeing him one Tisha B’Av, that I spent near his home in Israel. I just remember walking into his living room and seeing him sitting on the floor. He was an older man at that point already. He was reading just lamentations about Jews from different parts of Jewish history. There was no audience there. He wasn’t performing for anybody. And there were tears and tears streaming down his face and just so much absolute love and pain for our people. And I think we need to hold both, especially this year. I think that there is a real, real need to cry, to mourn, to allow ourselves to face the ugliness of everything we’ve seen, also to face the fact that we’re back in Jewish history, that maybe we never left, that there is real, real Jew hatred out there that shapes who we are. And to do this while also doing introspection, it’s not easy. We are supposed to somehow do it all. So this is not really a way to uplift any of us. But I do think, maybe I’ll just say, I do think we need to prepare for Tisha B’Av.
Going, I know for me it’s a little bit quote unquote easier because I happen to run services. So I think a lot about what I want it to look like, what I want the mood to look like, what are we gonna read this year, you know? But I wanna encourage everyone here, anyone who’s listening, like prepare for Tisha B’Av. Figure out how do we connect to both the mourning and the introspection of the day.
Noam: Amazing. All right. I’m on it. Thanks so much, Mijal.
Mijal: Okay, all right Noam, we’ll speak soon.
Noam: Speak soon.
Mijal: Bye.
Noam: Bye.