The Fast the State of Israel Can't Explain

A Tisha B'Av companion to the series on Zionism, Judaism, and why the difference matters.

Wednesday night, in synagogues across the world, the lights will go down. Jews will take off their leather shoes, sit on the floor or on low stools in the posture of mourners, and chant the Book of Lamentations — the Bible's funeral dirge for Jerusalem — by dim light. Then they will fast for twenty-five hours. The day is called Tisha B'Av, the Ninth of the month of Av, and it mourns the destruction of the Temple: the first one, burned by Babylon twenty-five centuries ago, and the second, burned by Rome in the year 70. It is the saddest day of the Jewish year, and Jews have kept it, without interruption, for as long as there have been Jews in exile.

Here is the detail worth thinking about. Tomorrow night this scene will also unfold in Jerusalem — within sight of the Temple Mount, in a city under "Jewish sovereignty," guarded by a "Jewish army," in the capital of a "Jewish state." Men and women who could easily walk to the Temple Mount in ten minutes will sit on the floor and weep for Jerusalem as exiles.

On the story the world has been told, this makes no sense. If the Jewish catastrophe was homelessness and the remedy was statehood, then the mourning should have ended in 1948, or at the latest in 1967. Voices in the Zionist world drew exactly that conclusion — arguing, once the state existed, that the old fast had lost its reason and should be softened, repurposed, or retired.

Torah Jews responded by ignoring them. Jews fast tomorrow as they have fasted for two millennia, even — and perhaps most poignantly — in Jerusalem itself.

That refusal may be the clearest window this series has offered into the difference between Judaism and the Zionist movement that claims its name.

What the mourning is actually for

The fast makes no sense to the nationalist mind because the nationalist mind assumes the exile was geographic: a people lost its territory, wandered, suffered, and finally got the territory back — case closed. But that was never what Judaism meant by the word "exile." The liturgy says plainly what happened and why: because of our sins we were exiled from our land. Exile, in the Torah tradition's understanding, is a spiritual condition decreed by God — the withdrawal of His presence from a Temple that no longer stands, from a world not yet repaired. Its end is described by the prophets in terms no government can meet: a rebuilt Temple, a mended world, a redemption arriving from Heaven and not from a parliament.

So an airline ticket to Tel Aviv does not end exile, and neither does a flag over Jerusalem. The Jew on the low stool tomorrow night, weeping in the earthly city for the fallen sanctuary above it, is making an eighteen-century-old declaration in the state's own capital: this is not the Redemption, and no state can be. The mourning continues because the thing being mourned was never merely land — and so the state, which supplied land, answered a question Judaism was not asking.

What the day teaches about the sword

There is a second layer, and readers of the previous article will recognize it. Tisha B'Av does not only mourn what Rome did; the tradition spends remarkably little of blaming Rome at all. The Talmud's verdict is that Jerusalem fell due to baseless hatred among Jews — and its account of the siege reserves special grief for the armed zealots inside the walls, who burned the city's own storehouses to force a war the Sages opposed. The tradition's hero of the catastrophe is not a fighter. It is Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, the sage who was smuggled out of the doomed city and asked its conqueror not for a fortress but for a school — the academy of Yavneh, which enabled Judaism to survive. So the men of the sword lost Jerusalem; the man of the book saved the Jewish people.

One more detail closes the circle. The Mishnah lists five calamities for the Ninth of Av, and the last of them is the fall of Betar — the fortress where Bar Kochba's revolt against Rome ended in the year 135, along with, the tradition says, a slaughter almost beyond describing. For eighteen hundred years, Betar has been a name Jews weep over on this day.

Jabotinsky named his militarist youth movement Betar. Officially the name was an acronym honoring a fallen Zionist fighter, but the echo was the point, and the movement celebrated Bar Kochba's revolt as its model. The fortress whose fall the fast has mourned for eighteen centuries became the banner of the new warrior culture. It would be hard to design a purer emblem of everything this series has described: the same history, read by two different religions, Judaism and Zionism — one sitting on the floor weeping over Betar, the other marching under its name.

The witness on the low stool

None of this requires a reader to accept Jewish theology. It only requires noticing what the fast proves about the people keeping it. Every year, publicly, in Jerusalem itself, the Torah community testifies that its exile has not ended, that no army ended it, that Redemption is not within any state's ability to declare. That testimony was being given before Zionism existed, it was given through the state's proudest hours, and it will be given tomorrow night. Whatever the flags say, the oldest Jewish voice in the world still says exiles — and a movement that cannot explain why its own "returned" people sit mourning in its capital has told you, more clearly than any argument, that the people and the movement are not the same thing.