The Groan of Redemption

Thoughts on Tisha B’Av from Jerusalem

Dr. David Friedman, UMJC rabbi

Director, Bet Midrash Lev Zion

Tisha B’Av is upon us—the ninth day of the month of Av, commemorating the destruction of the Holy Temple. While I don’t relish a day of pain and sadness, performing a good cleansing tshuvah (repentance) is always in order. Being honest, however, the prevailing emotion I experience on Tisha B’Av is indeed one of pain. 

I hurt for my nation. I hurt that we as a nation turn to God on a couple days of the year like Tisha B’Av, but find it difficult to do so on many of the others. We sit in humbleness on Tisha B’Av when we recite the Book of Lamentations. But as abortion, hatred, slander, our international enemies, and now disease harass our very existence as a country, we do not call upon God as a nation to help us. How strange! How sad. We have our box that we put him in; he goes in there on Tisha B’Av. We call on him on that day, but then. . . . I hurt when half of our population views God as far removed from us, and does not consider him as any part of their lives. His people, his covenant people, adrift in a sea of relativity, of humanism, and of factions that are among us.

I hurt when many of our people who do want to keep Torah and be faithful to God, keep Torah in such a way as to alienate other Jews; there is sometimes a harshness, a nastiness, and a hardness among such persons.   

On Tisha B’Av, I can only imagine how the Almighty himself must feel about all of us in his beloved land. Heartbroken? Yes, and yet full of the most incredible hope, because he knows the future. So Tisha B’Av is about failure, but it also encompasses hope. And in the words of a famous prophet, we Jews are “prisoners of hope” (Zechariah 9:12).  

Rabbi David Geffen of modern-day Israel wrote: “Tisha B’Av is always about loss and hope.” Regarding this year, Tisha B’Av 5780, he added: “This year there is an emotion never felt before. Our deep mourning on Tisha B’Av in the soil of suffering is the prelude to our hopes for a better world.” 

When I immigrated here some 40 years ago, we knew all the others who believed in Messiah like we did. There weren’t many of us; we could all meet in one facility at the same time. Today? Today I constantly hear of new congregations or home groups; I constantly hear of new individual Messianic Jews. Something has been afoot here that carries the mark of God’s work over these years. And that is encouraging. He will do what he will do in spite of us, who can only see through a smudged up mirror:  

Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely. (1 Cor 13:12 NLT)

Maybe these feelings that I have this Tisha B’Av are part of the pains that Rav Shaul mentions in Romans 8:22: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” 

I groan on Tisha B’Av. I groan for the nation of Israel to be what we were created to be. And we will get there. I groan on Tisha B’Av for the nation of Israel to be the society that we have been called to be: full of love, justice, in pursuit of truth, and shining God’s light to the world. And we will get there, too. I groan while I stand at the banks of the Jordan River, waiting to enter the Land of Promise and to live as our holy Torah instructs us to live (to use images from our parasha of this past week).

Tisha B’Av this year feels like one big groan. But it’s a redemptive groan. It comes from the kishkes (Yiddish for “gut level”). Perhaps it’s as the prophet Zechariah pictures. Everyone in Jerusalem is standing at Messiah’s future appearance in the Holy City:

Then I will pour on the House of David and on the residents of Jerusalem the spirit of favor and of comforting mercy. So they will look on me, the one whom they stabbed through, and mourn for him, according to the mourning rites for individuals, with bitterness concerning him like bitterness over a first born. (12:10, my translation)

Zechariah envisions us all crying, groaning, weeping, wailing, as we do on Tisha B’Av. But this time the cries will be different, as they will directly precede the most redemptive period in the history of Israel, may that day come soon. This series of lamentations will lead to our national destiny. 

Living in Israel is an exercise in patience, in endurance, and in bearing a certain amount of Tisha B’Av-like pain every day. When I board a bus here, which I often do, I look at every person who boards. I cannot help but to offer a prayer on each one’s behalf, that they would come to know Messiah, that they would be spared the pain and death that so many people would like us to experience again, Tisha B’Av style. That’s not easy to do: the bus moves fast and people get on and off. On the other hand, it’s nice that people can and do pray openly in buses in Israel, so I can do this and not look like a crazy man.

When some people talk about future events in Israel, they talk about how many dead Jews there will be; they talk about the coming partial destruction that awaits Jerusalem and modern-day Israel. To such persons, we are numbers in their theology. My neighbor with five children, my friend down the street, my former student, my former player (I was a   coach here for over 20 years), my son’s friends, my son’s classmates, my grandchildren’s friends and playmates . . . we are Israel.  

We are those who get assigned the task of dying and suffering in the previously mentioned theology; we are the numbers that get thrown around (not to worry, I don’t necessarily hold to any such theology, but that’s another discussion for another time). Hearing such talk pains me. And the reality of our future suffering, be it mild or harsh, be it long or short in duration, makes me groan, too. 

Tisha B’Av can spark our minds about our future redemption. Otherwise, it is about mourning events and dates that we cannot ever change or improve upon; it goes nowhere. “Return to your fortress, you prisoners of hope; even now I announce that I will restore twice as much to you” (Zech 9:12). 

That hope captures us, indeed; the hope that all Israel will see our true identity as a people, understand who our God really is, and who our Messiah is. And that hope, “does not make us ashamed” (Rom 5:5). Zechariah pictures the Ninth of Av in the future as a day when Israel will rejoice! “So declares Adonai of the Heavenly Armies, ‘the fast of the fourth (month), fifth (month), and the seventh (month) and tenth (month), will be for rejoicing and joy’” (Zech 8:19, my translation). 

Medieval commentator Rashi identifies the fast of the fifth month as Tisha B’Av. In the future, when Israel takes her rightful role as God’s priestly nation and his holy people, as his international servants and emissaries, when Messiah rules from Jerusalem, we will experience Tisha B’Av like never before . . . with smiles on our faces. There will be happiness in our hearts. And I will not ever have to pray for the safety of my fellow bus travelers again.