As I began the intensive preparations for Tisha B’av this year, marked by the start of the Nine Days, I was reminded of a Tisha B’av I spent twenty years ago in Jerusalem with twelve queer clergy. I had organized this trip to engage queer religious leaders with our shared Abrahamic roots, and open dialogue on the history and contemporary reality of the Jewish State.
Overlooking the destroyed and rebuilt city from Talpiot Park Jerusalem, we discussed the role of failure in religion. What happens when religious leaders get it wrong? How do we admit that despite our best efforts, using our richest textual and spiritual resources, we can still miss the mark? As leaders and representatives of our faith, we have a heavy responsibility, and our mistakes have the potential to cause profound harm.
Even with all the best intentions, religiously inspired leaders can get it wrong! We studied how Rabbi Akiva’s calamitous support of the failed Bar Kochba rebellion led to the death of thousands of his students. One of the most impressive rabbinic minds of all time failed to read the moment correctly. Despite our best efforts we and our spiritual leaders can still miss the mark.
The destruction on Tisha B’av was a horrific calamity, but it was not the end. The sages transformed a devastating historical moment into a yearly paradigm. Tisha B’Av became a cautionary tale, a demand for self-reflection and humility and paradoxically, a resource for hope. The ability to admit the depth of loss, to suffer failure and then to get up and find the strength to continue is key to survival and continuity. Others suffer defeat and vanish from history. Our ability to face failure and then to rise up afterwards is what makes the Jewish people eternal.
The queer interfaith pilgrimage that I organized twenty years ago was made possible by an incredible woman I met early in my rabbinic career, Dr. Mathilde Krim. To me, she exemplified this ability to transform failure into responsibility, and loss into the strength to carry on.
As a teenager in Switzerland, watching the newsreel of liberation after the war, she was appalled not only by the Nazi brutality, but by the passive inaction of the Europeans who vaguely knew what was happening to the Jews and didn’t nothing.
After the war, she attended medical school in Geneva where she met, and fell in love with an Israeli medical student, David Danon. While still in school, she and her husband secretly arranged for the transport of World War II armaments to the young State of Israel. The couple moved to Israel in 1953 and joined the Weizmann institute. The marriage ended a few years later, but Mathilde stayed in Israel and contributed to pioneering research at the Institute that laid the foundations for amniocentesis.
In 1957 she met and married Arthur Krim, an entertainment lawyer and a wealthy donor to
Weizmann after which she and her daughter were swept into his lavish life in Manhattan. In the early 1980s, while researching cancer treatments at Sloan Kettering, she learned of a strange virus that had recently surfaced in Los Angeles and then New York. Mathilde was among the first research scientists to call for a national response to AIDS. Gay men were dying daily in greater and greater numbers and no one seemed to care. Mathilde was reminded of Europe’s indifference during the war to the death of millions of Jews and she decided to use her influence, both as a research scientist and as a host to the stars through Arthur, to create AMFAR, the foundation for AIDS research.
Dr. Mathilde Krim gained this strength to save millions of gay men after witnessing the social apathy and anti-semitism of ordinary Europeans. Her journey led her to identify with the Jewish people, to endanger her life running guns for the nascent Jewish state, and later to resist bigotry and indifference by mobilizing America scientists, politicians, artists and philanthropists to stand up for the men dying of AIDS.
Mathilde loved the idea of bringing queer Jewish and Christian clergy together in Israel. She encouraged the trip and met with some of us in New York when we returned. We shared with her a number of our experiences, including Tisha B’Av Eve overlooking the city. She spoke with us then about the power of resilience in the face of calamity.
The rituals of Tisha B’Av are designed to help us face moments of destruction and hopelessness, which feel like the end. The wisdom of our tradition is found in the final verses of Eicha, where Jeremiah ends his long lament with a prayer for renewal. Tisha B’av readies us to find hope in darkness, to continue living with the most painful losses, and to find the strength and conviction to begin the next chapter.
Rabbi Steve Greenberg