Sermon by Rabbi Andrea 4th July / 19th Tammuz 5786

From Rupture to Repair

People do not send telegrams anymore, which is a pity. So perhaps only people of a certain age can fully appreciate the joke about the Jewish telegram.

Do you know the joke about the Jewish telegram?

The Jewish telegram works like this: “Start worrying. Details to follow.”

All right, it is a joke, but it also captures something wonderfully Jewish. Much has been said about Jews and anxiety, not least by Jewish psychoanalysts, who made quite a profession out of it. But surely some of this anxiety is rooted in our calendar.

We always seem to be preparing for the next event. No sooner have we finished one festival than someone is already asking about the next fast, the next holiday, or the next set of customs. The Jewish calendar does not simply tell us what day it is; it also prepares us for what is coming. It leads us gently from one occasion to the next.

And we are in the midst of it. We are making our way towards Tisha B’Av, the saddest day in the Jewish year, when we remember the destruction of both Temples and so many other tragedies in Jewish history. Instead of arriving there without preparation, our tradition gives us a three-week journey, to enter the mood of the day.

Those Three Weeks began on the Seventeenth of Tammuz, which was last Thursday. That fast commemorates a series of calamities which, according to our tradition, all occurred on that date.

First of all, the breach of the walls of Jerusalem by the Romans in the year 70 CE, an event that led directly to the destruction of the Second Temple and to the end of Jewish political autonomy in Jerusalem. But our tradition also associates the Seventeenth of Tammuz with other moments of rupture: Moses shattered the first tablets of the covenant after the sin of the Golden Calf; the daily Temple offering, the Tamid, ceased during the siege of Jerusalem; a Torah scroll was publicly burned by a Roman official; and an idol was placed in the Temple, desecrating its sanctity.

The commemoration of those events marks the beginning of the long descent that culminates on Tisha B’Av.

What do all these events have in common? They are all, in one way or another, about rupture.

The breaking of the tablets is not simply the breaking of two pieces of stone. It is the breaking of the covenant between God and Israel at the very moment when that relationship was meant to be sealed. The breach in the walls of Jerusalem is not merely a military fact; it is the moment when the protected space of the city is opened, violated. The end of the daily offering in the Temple is the breaking of continuity, the interruption of the regular rhythm that connected the people to God every single day.

So, the Three Weeks are not only a countdown to destruction. They are a journey through fractures: broken tablets, broken walls, broken trust. Broken holiness.

When we arrive at Tisha B’Av, the rupture becomes complete. The Rabbis teach that the Second Temple was destroyed because of sinat chinam, baseless hatred within the Jewish people.  Of course, the Romans destroyed the building. 

But our Sages ask a deeper question: what had already been damaged inside the Jewish people before the stones of the Temple began to fall?  And the answer is sinat chinam: baseless hatred, gratuitous hatred, hatred without moral foundation.

OK, so let me make a controversial statement:

Hate is not the problem. The problem lies in the reasons for hate.  We are not naïve about human emotion.  We know that anger exists, that conflict exists, that sometimes there are real wounds and real reasons for pain.  But sinat chinam is different. It is hatred that feeds on itself; hatred that survives even when the original reason has disappeared.  That kind of hatred, our Sages teach, leads to the tragedy we commemorate on Tisha B’Av. Before the Shoah, it was the greatest tragedy in Jewish history.

To prepare ourselves for this commemoration, Tisha B’Av, our tradition gives us these Three Weeks.  What does this mean in practice, you may ask?  OK, here’s the rabbinic answer: it is complicated.

Many Ashkenazi Jews avoid weddings throughout the entire Three Weeks. Sephardi communities, however, generally follow a more gradual approach. During the first part of the period, life continues much as usual, while the more visible restrictions begin only from Rosh Chodesh Av, when “we diminish our joy” — mi-she-nikhnas Av mema’atin be-simchah.

Sara and I were married on Rosh Chodesh Av, and the wedding was officiated by a Chabad rabbi. Chabad allows simchas and music on Rosh Chodesh Av, for weddings, bar mitzvahs, and so on.  Had I belonged to a United Synagogue, with an Orthodox rabbi, our wedding would probably have had to be postponed.  According to my Sephardi tradition, however, it was perfectly acceptable. Another point for the Sephardim. Plus, the food, and the wine, and the pronunciation of Hebrew, etcetera. OK, not the chazanut! I agree that Ashkenazi chazans are great — welcome, Warren!

Anyway, back to the Three Weeks. Other customs include avoiding haircuts or shaving, avoiding live music and dancing, not buying new clothes that would require Shehecheyanu, and, in the stricter days before Tisha B’Av, avoiding meat and wine except on Shabbat.  Some communities also avoid sweets or other unnecessary pleasures.  The details vary from community to community, but the movement is the same: joy is gradually diminished, so that we can enter Tisha B’Av in the appropriate mood.

In that sense, these Three Weeks are almost like tracing the painful path of a couple moving towards separation or divorce.  Rarely does a relationship collapse in a single moment. First there is a small crack, then a silence, then a loss of trust, then the inability to hear each other, and finally the moment when the walls come down.  By the time the formal separation happens, something precious may already have been broken for a long time.

That is a powerful way of understanding this season. Tisha B’Av is not only about a building destroyed two thousand years ago. It is about what happens when a people can no longer hold itself together.  The greatest lesson of the Three Weeks is not about avoiding music, postponing celebrations, or refraining from haircuts. Those customs are only signposts.

The real task is to become vigilant against sinat chinam — baseless hatred — and to recognise its first symptoms and warning signs.  Because the greatest dangers facing the Jewish people have often come not only from powerful enemies outside, but from within.  That lesson deserves our attention today. We live at a time when disagreement within the Jewish world can quickly become contempt.  And we see this happening before our eyes.

This year, the Seventeenth of Tammuz marked the thousandth day since the terrible events of the seventh of October.  Since that day, we have lived through a rupture of our own.  First there was the horror itself: the massacre, the hostages, and everything that followed.  Then, almost immediately, before the dead had even been buried, a wave of antisemitism began across the world. We found ourselves threatened. Jews have been murdered all over the world. In this country, on the holiest of days.  I do not need to dwell on this at length, because we already know it.

But there is another important point, one that has added pain to pain: the resurgence among us of sinat chinam, hatred without moral foundation.

Some sectors within the Jewish world have chosen not merely to criticise Israel, but to do so in a way that offers no responsibility, no alternative, and no solidarity with those under attack.  That kind of criticism of Israel is sinat chinam, baseless hatred, because it severs solidarity. While Israel was trying to defend itself, we heard in this city shameful slogans such as “not in my name”, as though the main moral task at such a moment were to separate oneself from the rest of the Jewish people.

We also saw some Jews seeking approval from antisemitic movements: Jews begging the anti-Semites not to demonstrate, while knowing perfectly well that their humiliation would be flagged by the anti-Semites as a sign of victory. Of course, remember, they held their antisemitic demonstration, celebrating victory over the Jews in Israel and here.

One has to ask why. Why does a Jew, often calling himself a Jewish leader, humiliate himself in this way? Why is the approval of those anti-Semites so important?  The answer, I fear, is sinat chinam, baseless hatred. Hatred directed not towards our enemies, but towards our own brothers and sisters in Israel, fighting for their lives. That is one of the ruptures which, during the Three Weeks, our tradition demands that we recognise for what it is.

If Tisha B’Av teaches anything, it is that a people can survive enemies from outside only if it refuses to destroy itself from within.  This period in which we are living, with attacks from outside and growing tensions within, inevitably reminds us of the final years of Jerusalem before the destruction that we commemorate on Tisha B’Av.

And yet Judaism differs from some forms of ancient Greek thought in one crucial respect: we do not believe that history is condemned simply to repeat itself in endless cycles.

We remember the past not because we are trapped by it, but because we are called to learn from it. The Three Weeks, the period of time that we are living in, with the restrictions and afflictions, are not a prophecy of inevitable destruction.  They are a warning, and therefore also an opportunity.  The Jewish people today are not the Jewish people of the first century. The State of Israel is here to stay.  Jewish life, despite everything, is not disappearing. In fact, something remarkable has happened since the seventh of October. Many Jews who were once distant from Jewish life or uncertain about Israel have begun to rediscover a connection.

Some have come back to synagogue. Some have started learning. Some have found themselves defending Israel. I suspect that each of us could name one or two people like this: Jews who, in this painful time, have come out of the woodwork; Jews who have said, perhaps with some surprise, “These are my people. This is my story too.”

That is something we must not miss.  Jewish institutions, and first and foremost synagogues like ours, have a duty to welcome these Jews. We have the duty to encourage them on their journey, to move beyond past disagreements and misunderstandings, and, let me be blunt, to encourage them to come to shul, to meet other Jews, and to support each other in this difficult time.

If Tisha B’Av teaches us the danger of rupture, then our task is to become places of repair. We cannot control every attack from outside, and we cannot heal every division at once.  But we can make this community a place where Jewish belonging is strengthened.

And may this be how we begin to rebuild.