Who is to blame for the destruction of Judea and the razing of the Temple? Every year during the three weeks, including the nine days and the ninth of Av, we blame ourselves. The land had been promised to Abraham and his children, and with fits and starts, that promise had been fulfilled and lasted a thousand years. Its collapse could be explained politically or militarily, but what the Jews made of the destruction theologically and morally is something very different. Instead of centering the blame squarely on the enemy or on God our prophets turned us inward and blamed the victim.
To be sure, the horrific viciousness of the Babylonians and later, the Romans, is not minimized. Their brutality is condemned by the prophets. But deflection is not a defense.
The prophets blame us for a host of sins, but mostly for failing morally, for ignoring the widow and the orphan, for being too sure of our power and so for misunderstanding the covenantal promise. Jeremiah says it clearly: Thus said GOD of Hosts, the God of Israel: Mend your ways and your actions, and I will let you dwell in this place. Don’t put your trust in illusions and say, “The Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, are these [buildings].” (Jeremiah 7:4)
The repetition of the phrase “the Temple of the Lord” expresses the blind confidence of Jeremiah’s contemporaries that the biblical promise and especially the physical presence of the Temple would protect them from calamity. Jeremiah marks their presumption of invincibility as a dangerous lie and warns them that Temple will not protect them. Their security rests on the righteousness of their behavior, on the justice of their courts. Their arrogant overreach will doom them.
However, there is pushback to this reading of Tisha B’Av. Increasingly, as the exile persisted, the sages came to feel that (despite the flirtation with heresy) God too must bear a portion of the blame. As the exile persisted the rabbis came to feel much more conflicted about God’s power and began to experience the destruction, not as evidence of God’s power, but as an expression of God’s powerlessness. They put into the mouths of Jeremiah and Daniel a protest or sorts. While Moses referred to God as the “great, mighty and awesome God” they each left out one descriptor.
Jeremiah cannot imagine how an awesome God lets strangers make a merry riot in his sanctuary. Daniel cannot imagine how a mighty God lets his children be led to Babylon in chains. Each drops one of the descriptors because, in the midst of prayer, while praising Him, they cannot lie. For them, God’s awesome power and might has failed them.
The rabbis re-read the Mosaic verse in a way to mark God’s restraint as a superpower. The fact that he resists punishing the wicked is a sign of his might; the survival of a remnant of the Jewish people despite the odds is his awesomeness. However, for Jeremiah and Daniel this just doesn’t ring true, and since God wants us to be truthful, they refuse to say things about him that are false. In the end, God does not want fawning supplicants who deny their experience. He wants the truth. A real relationship cannot mince words or pretend affection. They know that God hates lies and so they would not lie about their experience of divine failure in the destruction. “The Holy One, blessed be he, insists on truth, so they would not ascribe false [things] to him.”
Two opposing insights are apparent here. The first is that when calamity happens, moral agency requires that we take responsibility and ask what we could have done differently. This is what makes Tisha B’Av a day of national reckoning and a precursor to the more personal reckoning coming in Tishrei. The second insight is that God does not want our pious lies. He wants us to be real, to be in a relationship that is honest and open, loving and direct. As Orthodox LGBT+ Jews we know how precious these values are. We know that we must remain responsible even when we are hurting and that honest affirmation of one’s truth is a religious value that God cherishes, indeed, demands of us.
– Rabbi Steve Greenberg