"On the Ninth of Av, it was decreed upon our ancestors that they would not enter the Land, and the Temple was destroyed the first time, and the second time, and Beitar was captured, and the city was plowed over."
— Mishnah, Tractate Taanit, Chapter 4, Mishnah 6
We are a nation accustomed to losing homes. Tisha B'Av reminds us of the two Temples, and in fact, the two national homes that were destroyed on this day. It is also a warning sign flying above every home we build—it is hard to build, and easier to destroy. What was built over decades can be destroyed in a few short years, or even less. But we have always, always known how to rise, rebuild and recover, to build and be built, and this time too we must stick to this faith in our strength. "Behold, days are coming..."
============
Our history is a repeating cycle of losing homes. Jews carry within them, in their DNA, the memory of the homes they or their ancestors left behind—after all, we all began with "Go forth... and from your father's house,"; those who left Egypt remembered the garlic and the onions, the exiles of Babylon sang "as we remembered Zion" and "If I forget you, O Jerusalem," and for hundreds of generations we have wept on this day, "How lonely sits the city that was full of people! How like a widow has she become" (Lamentations 1:1); Yehuda Halevi weeps for "YEFE NOF” - “Beautiful in elevation, the joy of the whole earth / the city of the great king"; we went through pogroms and migration, Mendele Mokher Sforim lovingly mocks the Shtetles of "Idletown” and “Foolstown”; Agnon remembers Buczacz, and Kazablan sings "There is a distant place beyond the sea." And the Holocaust, and the Disengagement - HITNATKUT of 2005 - and October Seventh, and everything that is happening now.
And sometimes the physical home remains, but the feeling that it is yours is lost. What, actually, is a sense of home? Natan Yonatan once wrote, in the wonderful song “Distant Cassette Sounds” sung by Ronit Ofir: “Home is a place where, if you must return to it,
a door is always open for you.”
Home is a place to feel wanted, loved, belonging, seen, heard, felt.
We must admit—the current, terrible Israeli government, like many before it, provided an answer for millions of Israelis seeking a sense of home. Just as Channel 14 gave a voice to those who felt unheard, whose faces went unseen. For whom liberalism was too liberal. Who felt that the judicial system was embracing new, Western values - feminism, higher education, personal and gender freedom, equality before the law, freedom of religion and freedom from religion - at the expense of tradition, conservatism, and sometimes at the expense of an implicit glorification of power, money, and honor. The shift in values and ethos is far slower than a change of government, and only in recent years has it gained momentum. And those who long held a coalition majority, yet felt for years that they were still bound by the old conventions, have now released all restraints and, regretfully, chosen vengeance. “Now we are the masters of the house," they said to themselves and to us, "and now we'll show them”. At times it seems to me that half the country sees an idol in the Temple, while the other half sees themselves as the Hasmoneans purifying it. Whose home is this anyway?
And the past four years have been a stubborn war over the sense of being at home, of being part of it, over the right to hold the Israeli flag. It was not for nothing that we took to the streets with it, shouting "De-mo-cra-cy!", struggling not only against the destruction of liberalism and the principles of the modern state, but also against those who deny and dismantle them out of revenge, out of a desire to poke a finger in the eye of the other half of the country.
Many of us feel as though we've been kicked out of our home, betrayed by a government that crudely turns against us, stripping away one by one—sometimes in days or hours—the structural and legal achievements fought for and won over decades: Women's military service, a free press, progressive education, minority rights, checks and balances, a fair distribution of resources, and more.
Many of our struggles in “Rabbis for Human Rights” are struggles over the image of this home, over the character of Judaism and the Jewish state. With meager forces but firm determination, we fight for a Judaism of justice, welfare, and aid to the weak, a peace-seeking Judaism, a Judaism that remembers "you shall love the stranger." And alongside us, many Israelis are beginning to speak of another home in another place, out of a feeling that their life's work is going down the drain, that the Sicarii have decided, metaphorically, to burn down the house.
And of course, homes were physically burned down as well. I have no way of imagining what someone whose home burned down feels, let alone someone whose home burned down around them. But all of us, all of us heard how homes were penetrated and borders breached; all of us saw the images of homes burned and destroyed in the Gaza envelope, homes shelled in the North, missile-damaged houses, burned streets. After all, to feel at home means to feel protected, guarded, safe. Feeling at home in a country means knowing that Magen David Adom will arrive, that the army will come, that the police will protect, that justice will prevail. Not all is lost, thank God, but the fear that home no longer provides the sense of security and protection it is supposed to give surrounds more Israeli men and women than ever before. We lock the door we once left unlocked, add a deadbolt, build a safe room (MAMAD). Sleep in underground parking garages. Realize that the army cannot—or doesn't always want to. That the police force is politically tainted. As the prophet Amos says (Chapter 5:19): “As if a man fled from a lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house and leaned his hand against the wall, and a serpent bit him”.
On Tisha B'Av this year, perhaps more than in any other year, the sense of threat to our home is acute—the feeling that once again, the destruction of the home is possible. That not all of us are wanted. Israelis—myself included—whose work has taken them outside the country's borders, are organizing like Ma'apilim (clandestine immigrants) facing the Mandate government, which is organizing to prevent Israelis from coming home to vote; distancing polling stations from nursing homes; preparing the arms of governance—the Knesset, police,
Shin Bet, legal counsel—for the possibility that it will not accept election results, just as it does not accept the Attorney General's directives and High Court rulings.
But we have always, always known how to rise, rebuild, and recover. And it will happen for us this time too. As that same Amos tells us at the end of his book (Amos 9:11): “On that day I will raise up the fallen booth of David, and repair its breaches and raise up its ruins and rebuild it as in the days of old.”
And the continuation of his prophecy of consolation became an 'anthem' sung during my childhood in the agricultural settlement movement, set to music by David Zehavi from Na'an—(ibid., verses 13–15, with the ending truncated...):
“Behold, the days are coming,
[says the Lord - this part he didn't set to music...]
when the plowman shall overtake the reaper,
and the treader of grapes him who sows the seed;
the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt.
I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel,
and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine,
and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit.
I will plant them upon their land,
and they shall never again be uprooted out of their land.”
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rabbi Amnon Ribak: After serving at ‘Ma’alot Tivon’, a Reform congregation in Kiryat Tivon near Haifa, he now serves as the congregational rabbi of United Hebrew Congregation in Singapore. Ordained by the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, this is Amnon’s third career, after years of living on a Kibbutz, and 26 years as a computer scientist at IBM Research.
When in Israel, Rabbi Amnon volunteers with Rabbi for Human Rights and with Road to Recovery, which drives Palestinian patients to Israeli hospitals. Married to Tirza, he is a father of three and grandfather of two.
— Mishnah, Tractate Taanit, Chapter 4, Mishnah 6
We are a nation accustomed to losing homes. Tisha B'Av reminds us of the two Temples, and in fact, the two national homes that were destroyed on this day. It is also a warning sign flying above every home we build—it is hard to build, and easier to destroy. What was built over decades can be destroyed in a few short years, or even less. But we have always, always known how to rise, rebuild and recover, to build and be built, and this time too we must stick to this faith in our strength. "Behold, days are coming..."
============
Our history is a repeating cycle of losing homes. Jews carry within them, in their DNA, the memory of the homes they or their ancestors left behind—after all, we all began with "Go forth... and from your father's house,"; those who left Egypt remembered the garlic and the onions, the exiles of Babylon sang "as we remembered Zion" and "If I forget you, O Jerusalem," and for hundreds of generations we have wept on this day, "How lonely sits the city that was full of people! How like a widow has she become" (Lamentations 1:1); Yehuda Halevi weeps for "YEFE NOF” - “Beautiful in elevation, the joy of the whole earth / the city of the great king"; we went through pogroms and migration, Mendele Mokher Sforim lovingly mocks the Shtetles of "Idletown” and “Foolstown”; Agnon remembers Buczacz, and Kazablan sings "There is a distant place beyond the sea." And the Holocaust, and the Disengagement - HITNATKUT of 2005 - and October Seventh, and everything that is happening now.
And sometimes the physical home remains, but the feeling that it is yours is lost. What, actually, is a sense of home? Natan Yonatan once wrote, in the wonderful song “Distant Cassette Sounds” sung by Ronit Ofir: “Home is a place where, if you must return to it,
a door is always open for you.”
Home is a place to feel wanted, loved, belonging, seen, heard, felt.
We must admit—the current, terrible Israeli government, like many before it, provided an answer for millions of Israelis seeking a sense of home. Just as Channel 14 gave a voice to those who felt unheard, whose faces went unseen. For whom liberalism was too liberal. Who felt that the judicial system was embracing new, Western values - feminism, higher education, personal and gender freedom, equality before the law, freedom of religion and freedom from religion - at the expense of tradition, conservatism, and sometimes at the expense of an implicit glorification of power, money, and honor. The shift in values and ethos is far slower than a change of government, and only in recent years has it gained momentum. And those who long held a coalition majority, yet felt for years that they were still bound by the old conventions, have now released all restraints and, regretfully, chosen vengeance. “Now we are the masters of the house," they said to themselves and to us, "and now we'll show them”. At times it seems to me that half the country sees an idol in the Temple, while the other half sees themselves as the Hasmoneans purifying it. Whose home is this anyway?
And the past four years have been a stubborn war over the sense of being at home, of being part of it, over the right to hold the Israeli flag. It was not for nothing that we took to the streets with it, shouting "De-mo-cra-cy!", struggling not only against the destruction of liberalism and the principles of the modern state, but also against those who deny and dismantle them out of revenge, out of a desire to poke a finger in the eye of the other half of the country.
Many of us feel as though we've been kicked out of our home, betrayed by a government that crudely turns against us, stripping away one by one—sometimes in days or hours—the structural and legal achievements fought for and won over decades: Women's military service, a free press, progressive education, minority rights, checks and balances, a fair distribution of resources, and more.
Many of our struggles in “Rabbis for Human Rights” are struggles over the image of this home, over the character of Judaism and the Jewish state. With meager forces but firm determination, we fight for a Judaism of justice, welfare, and aid to the weak, a peace-seeking Judaism, a Judaism that remembers "you shall love the stranger." And alongside us, many Israelis are beginning to speak of another home in another place, out of a feeling that their life's work is going down the drain, that the Sicarii have decided, metaphorically, to burn down the house.
And of course, homes were physically burned down as well. I have no way of imagining what someone whose home burned down feels, let alone someone whose home burned down around them. But all of us, all of us heard how homes were penetrated and borders breached; all of us saw the images of homes burned and destroyed in the Gaza envelope, homes shelled in the North, missile-damaged houses, burned streets. After all, to feel at home means to feel protected, guarded, safe. Feeling at home in a country means knowing that Magen David Adom will arrive, that the army will come, that the police will protect, that justice will prevail. Not all is lost, thank God, but the fear that home no longer provides the sense of security and protection it is supposed to give surrounds more Israeli men and women than ever before. We lock the door we once left unlocked, add a deadbolt, build a safe room (MAMAD). Sleep in underground parking garages. Realize that the army cannot—or doesn't always want to. That the police force is politically tainted. As the prophet Amos says (Chapter 5:19): “As if a man fled from a lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house and leaned his hand against the wall, and a serpent bit him”.
On Tisha B'Av this year, perhaps more than in any other year, the sense of threat to our home is acute—the feeling that once again, the destruction of the home is possible. That not all of us are wanted. Israelis—myself included—whose work has taken them outside the country's borders, are organizing like Ma'apilim (clandestine immigrants) facing the Mandate government, which is organizing to prevent Israelis from coming home to vote; distancing polling stations from nursing homes; preparing the arms of governance—the Knesset, police,
Shin Bet, legal counsel—for the possibility that it will not accept election results, just as it does not accept the Attorney General's directives and High Court rulings.
But we have always, always known how to rise, rebuild, and recover. And it will happen for us this time too. As that same Amos tells us at the end of his book (Amos 9:11): “On that day I will raise up the fallen booth of David, and repair its breaches and raise up its ruins and rebuild it as in the days of old.”
And the continuation of his prophecy of consolation became an 'anthem' sung during my childhood in the agricultural settlement movement, set to music by David Zehavi from Na'an—(ibid., verses 13–15, with the ending truncated...):
“Behold, the days are coming,
[says the Lord - this part he didn't set to music...]
when the plowman shall overtake the reaper,
and the treader of grapes him who sows the seed;
the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt.
I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel,
and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine,
and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit.
I will plant them upon their land,
and they shall never again be uprooted out of their land.”
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rabbi Amnon Ribak: After serving at ‘Ma’alot Tivon’, a Reform congregation in Kiryat Tivon near Haifa, he now serves as the congregational rabbi of United Hebrew Congregation in Singapore. Ordained by the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, this is Amnon’s third career, after years of living on a Kibbutz, and 26 years as a computer scientist at IBM Research.
When in Israel, Rabbi Amnon volunteers with Rabbi for Human Rights and with Road to Recovery, which drives Palestinian patients to Israeli hospitals. Married to Tirza, he is a father of three and grandfather of two.