Why do you tremble each time they ride by?

Justin Vendette
Steely Dan's Your Gold Teeth II

Who are these children
Who scheme and run wild
Who speak with their wings
And the way that they smile
What are the secrets
They trace in the sky
And why do you tremble
Each time they ride by


Throw out your gold teeth
And see how they roll
The answer they reveal
Life is unreal

Who are these strangers
Who pass through the door
Who cover your action
And go you one more
If you're feeling lucky
You best not refuse
It's your game the rules
Are your own win or lose


"Tisha B'Av through the Generations"

by Rabbi Nosson Scherman


Tisha B'Av is the Jewish national day of mourning, marked by fasting, and chanting of the Biblical book of Lamentations. In Biblical times, it was on this day that the 12 spies returned with a bad report about the Land of Israel, causing a decree of 40 years of wandering in the desert. About 500 years later, the Holy Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed on Tisha B'Av. And about 500 years later - on the same calendar day - the Second Temple was destroyed as well.

The harshness of Tisha B'Av has continued throughout the generations. In the following essay, InnerNet examines two of the greatest Jewish tragedies of the past millennium - the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and the Holocaust.

This year, Tisha B'Av goes from Saturday evening till Sunday evening - August 9-10, 2008.

* * *

SPAIN

On Tisha B'Av, 1492, one of history's most infamous deadlines arrived. It was on that day that the Jews of Spain had to convert or leave the country - or face torture and the auto-da-fe. One Jew was spared from the decree - Don Yitzhak Abarbanel, the famous Torah commentator and statesman who, as finance minister of Spain, had saved profligate Ferdinand and Isabella from bankruptcy. He was too valuable to be confronted with a choice that would have forced him to leave the country.

But Abarbanel spurned the 'generosity' of his monarchs. He tried to induce them to withdraw the decree. Failing, he led as many as 75,000 of his fellow Jews in a march that reached the Spanish border and crossed it on Tisha B'Av. The rabbis of the time permitted Jewish citizens to play music during the trek, despite the laws forbidding such merriment during the three weeks leading up to Tisha B'Av. They ruled that it was a mitzvah to raise the spirits and celebrate the bravery of Jews who were ready to give up everything and to face a hostile world in hunger, disease, and poverty - [in order] to sanctify the Name of God.

Ferdinand and Isabella, with their advisor and mentor the fiendish Torquemada, thought they had broken Jewish spirits by forcing them out of the country that had given them 'golden eras' of Torah, wealth, and influence. They thought that they had proved to the wandering Jews that the Guardian of Israel was asleep and slumbering. They were wrong. Abarbanel and his followers knew the lesson of the calendar. It was Tisha B'Av...

EUROPE

World War One began on Tisha B'Av. To contemporary people, the tragedy of our century is the Holocaust of World War Two - indeed, the words have still not been invented to describe the extent of its loss and suffering. But we Jews have a different measuring rod. The Holy Temple was burned to the ground on the Tenth of Av, but we commemorate the Ninth because it was then that the fires were set. It is impossible to minimize the events of World War Two, but viewing this tortured century in its historic sweep, we must conclude that the fires began to rage during World War One - and it was a pivotal event in shaping the trends of Jewish experience that are still unfolding.

The German sweep into Eastern Europe beginning in 1914 uprooted Jewish communities and demolished a laboriously built tradition that took centuries to shape. Enlightenment, Bolshevism, Socialism, Nationalism, and all the other movements that characterized rebellion against Torah demands and authority, surged through the breach in the wall of tradition. Virtually all of the major rabbis in the wide swath cut by the Germans were exiled for several years. Rabbi Chaim Soloveichik, the Chofetz Chaim, and Rabbi Chaim Ozer Grodzensky were only a few of the many who were forced to leave their flocks leaderless for years at a time. Cities were devastated and tens of thousands of Jews became homeless refugees.

Small wonder that the devastation of the war was no less spiritual than material. The diminished stature of the rabbinate, the extreme poverty afflicting communities and yeshivas, the Bolshevik revolution and the clamping of an Iron Curtain around the three million Jews of Russia, the decay of German political and economic life and the emergence of an evil genius named Hitler - all these and more were legacies of World War One.

In a deeper sense, just as World War Two was a legacy of World War One, World War One was a legacy of earlier times - because World War One broke out on Tisha B'Av, the day that was designated for punishment. The heartbreak and tribulation of this century, too, are manifestations of the historic Tisha B'Av.

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Reprinted with permission from "EICHAH - LAMENTATIONS." Published by ArtScroll-Mesorah Publications - http://www.artscroll.com


Related: Read this mornings thread for all our discussion of what is happening this day of Tisha B'Av, in Georgia and elsewhere, with many excellent related links & comments