By Rabbi Abraham Unger, Ph.D.
Executive Director
This Week’s Torah Portion
Rebuke and Promise
This Shabbat’s Haftorah sets the tone for the upcoming mournful fast of Tisha B’Av next week. We are reminded that actions have consequences. As our ethics and unity declined, we became ripe for invasion. Our Temples were destroyed because we became weakened from within. What was the precise source of our decline? How did we reach the precipice of destruction?
The Haftorah that the prophet Isaiah recites desperately exclaims that G-d is disdainful of all the “choicest of meaty animals” offered as sacrifices in the Temple. They are “worthless” – if we are not doing the right thing: to “seek justice” for the orphan and the widow. It does not matter that we cross our t’s and dot our i’s in our formal behavior. Our integrity is what truly matters.
The Mitzvot are not the ceiling of refined conduct. They are the floor. They provide the foundation needed to give us a glimpse of what we can be. For example, the Sabbath is not just about lighting candles and making Kiddush. Those are beautiful ceremonies, but they are there to inspire us to something greater. They are there to remind us how beautiful is Creation, and how deep our own humanity runs.
As we approach Tisha B’Av and think of loss and redemption, we recall it begins this Shabbat with rebuke, and ends next week with the promise of repair and resolve to be better, earning the opportunity to realize a holier world.
Weekly Parenting Message from the Parsha
The Meaning of Memory
We live in a time of minute-by-minute news cycles. Each headline overwhelms what came a few seconds before. It is hard to digest the volume of happenings and events we glimpse daily. How can anything be retained when the whole world and its goings-on are literally at our fingertips?
Judaism understands that, as my father once told me, history is a screening process. What is most important is what ultimately shapes the narrative. This week we recall one of the most significant events in Jewish history, one that has framed all subsequent Jewish life.
In the year 70 of the Common Era, the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. Jews effectively lost their sovereignty. They were scattered as slaves. While remaining in the land of Israel as an impoverished, decimated community with some degree of autonomy under foreign empires, their cultural development largely shifted to Europe and Middle Eastern lands.
This coming Wednesday night through Thursday night we remember this catastrophic event during the fast of Tisha B’Av, the 9th of the Hebrew month of Av. We sit on the floor instead of chairs in the synagogue Wednesday night to read some of the saddest dirges from Biblical literature. We turn the lights down low. We internalize the sadness of exile.
Memory matters. Every event has its place in our hearts and minds. We instill our people’s history in our children through the experiential learning of the events that shaped our forbears, and in turn we are formed as well.