A Look Back at Tisha B’Av

A friend of mine, Michael, sent out this touching note on Tisha B’Av, and I asked for permission to share it with all of you.  While we are about a week and a half after Tisha B’Av, this is still a very relevant letter.

Friends and Family, there is a serious problem facing the Jewish Nation, and I wanted to put my own 2 cents on the situation.

Today is Tisha B’Av. The day the Jewish people remember all the tragedies that have happened to the Jewish people, and ask why? Every country, every religion, has holidays and remember all the good that has happened to their people. How many of them, take a day off, look at the bad, and ask why? It is important as a people to have times of joy, and the Jewish calendar is full of them, but we also must take an accounting for what has gone very wrong for our people, and how can we fix it.

Tisha B’Av or the 9th of the Hebrew month of Av has seen many tragedies take place on this very date. The 1st temple destroyed(568 BCE), the 2nd temple destroyed(70 CE), Spanish Inquisition culminates with expulsion of Jews (1492 CE), World War 1 starts (1914), Mass Jewish transportation to from Warsaw to Treblinka (1942) all this on one day. Holocausts, Inquisitions, pogroms, exiles every 100 years or so the Jewish people are woken up by such horrors. What is the message we are supposed to get from this?

Before we can ask this question, we should ask, how are we not disturbed and saddened by these horrors, why are we not crying? Even today we are faced with similar problems both physical and spiritual. Physically, Israel is surrounded by enemies at all borders with her future and security threatened, Radical Islam tells us day after day we are at war and want us dead, Iran is building a nuclear weapon with little doubt for their purpose and we choose to not take these issues seriously. When Adolph Hitler and the Nazis were gaining power, no one believed they were serious even though they said the intentions out front. After the Holocaust we preached “Never Again”. I ask, what do these words mean now?

Spiritually we are facing a bigger Holocaust. More Jewish lives are being lost generation to generation because of intermarriage, organizations such as Jews for Jesus, and just not caring to keep it going. Statistics show that after 4 generations Conservative, Reform and secular Jews out of 100 people only 29, 10 and 7 will remain respectively. These are our grandchildren who will never be able to continue the tradition that 100 generations before us, our grandchildren who will never light a menorah or have a bar mitzvah. Millions of Jews lost. Is this not something that we can cry over?

I was told many times as a child, “marry Jewish”, without understanding why it is important, rather than just being told to keep the line going, I didn’t understand why I should change my life for such ideals that I don’t believe in. This is the major problem with the Jewish Nation today. We don’t understand why it is important to keep these ideals alive.

Two important quotes, that I think exemplify the day.

“If one man can kill 6 million Jews, one man can save 6 million” -Rav Shach

“Can we, become as serious and motivated in our mission as those Germans were about their message?” -Rabbi Noach Weinberg

I think in the spirit of Tisha B’Av we should use 15 minutes of today and reflect about these tragedies and why we are not being woken up.