Radical Rav
The observance of tish ba'av brings us back, on a yearly basis, to a deep sense of loss. We mourn the destruction of the temple and have correspondingly gloomy thoughts about the beginning of the diaspora. Some of us even fast, although to be honest, most feel that yom kippur affords more than enough opportunity for that.
Over the years, the festival’s focus has been diluted somewhat by the lumping in of various other jewish disasters and massacres, of which there is of course no short supply, but curiously, Rav went much further to distract our attention from the temple.
He decided abolish the day all together. This outlandish comment is contained in Talmud Bavli 5a-b, where Judah the Prince, a huge figure in rabbinic thought who is credited with compiling the Mishnah, tells us that the day of for the temple should no longer be kept.
Not mourn the loss of the temple? Ignoring the forced exile of the jewish people from their homeland? Surely a heretical step too far. The reasoning of a rabbi out of control…
But Rav has his reasons. Rather then a didsaster to be mourned, he sees the end of the bet hamikdash as a necessary and crucial step, leading people beyond a notion of God inhabiting a specific holy place or land and towards a theology of finding the divine through machloket – where 'the word of the living God' is only heard when ideas are plural, when there are 'these and 'these'
All of which brings us to a crucial crossroad - is the Rabbinic enterprise, where Judaism became a religion of text and argument rather than land and sacrifice a desirable step, or one purely born of historic and regrettable accident; as the Romans destroyed the temple and wiped out the priestly caste? Wider still, this rubbishes the extreme zionist position which tells us that the whole of the exilic/diaspora experience is a disastrous anomaly and only with a return to land/political power/temple can we grow and become 'a nation like all the other nations'.
So eat you fill on tish ba’av and celebrate the diaspora.
