Stepping into Tisha B’av
This week we walk directly from the closeness of Shabbat into the distance of Tisha B’av. We also begin Sefer Devarim, which consists of Moshe’s words to the generation that will enter Eretz Yisrael. On the one hand, it is ironic. Devarim opens the path for the nation into Eretz Yisrael just as we are grappling with our forced exit from the land. But Devarim is also the book that teaches us about transition, and we begin it this Shabbat as we prepare to transition into Tisha B’av, and hopefully from there into geulah.
How does Moshe, addressing the nation on the eve of entering the land, begin preparing the nation for the transition? A large part of the first chapter of Devarim consists of a retelling of the sin of the spies. The message seems to be that our ability to move forward depends on our ability to confront the past in an effective and meaningful way.
Rav Schorr explains that the sin of the spies contains within it the roots of our current exile. We are currently in our second national exile. The first began when the first Beit HaMikdash was destroyed, and the second when the second Beit HaMikdash was destroyed. Just as each Beit HaMikdash had a unique spiritual composition, each galut has its own spiritual process.
Our first galut was a reckoning with our desire for physical pleasure, our ta’avah. It was ta’avah that drove us to commit the sins that destroyed the first Beit HaMikdash. As King Menashe explained to Rav Ashi in a dream (Sanhedrin 102b) no one who was not living at the time could comprehend the compulsion to sin they experienced. This was not an intellectual sin, this was a physical compulsion. Spiritually, its roots lie in the sin of the Golden Calf, when the nation, even as they were surrounded by the clouds of glory, proceeded to worship an idol.
Galut puts us in a position where we are forced to face our failings externally, so that we can correct them. The first galut put us in the land of Persia, in the land of unrestrained pleasure, and allowed us to look at the results of that up close. It was not pretty. We got the message relatively quickly. Pleasure is physical, and therefore limited. When we indulge, our body becomes satiated. After that, pleasure is no longer pleasant. There is, therefore, a natural end to our physical desires, and so there was a natural end to the first galut. After 70 years we returned to our land.
The Second Beit HaMikdash, and the second galut, had an entirely different nature. In the second Beit HaMikdash, Hashem was much more hidden than the first. The aron hakodesh, the kruvim and the shechina that rested on the kruvim, were missing (Yoma 21b). Our avodah was to serve Hashem even when He was not completely revealed. This is the world of the Oral Torah, where the kedusha lies within ourselves. Because we carry this kedusha within ourselves, our baseless hatred of each other removed this kedusha from our world.
The roots of the destruction of the Second Beit HaMikdash were planted with the sin of the spies. Rav Schorr explains that Bnei Yisrael, traveling in the desert with Moshe, should have recognized that they were living in a supernatural space. They should have known that Hashem would fight their battles for them. Instead of relying on Hashem, they decided to send spies and to live in natural order. This stemmed from a desire to take matters into their own hands. Essentially, this was a sin of Ga’avah, of ego. We separated from Hashem, distanced ourselves from Him, to make more room for ourselves. Later, in the time of the Second Temple we would focus on ourselves to the exclusion of the people around us. We pushed Hashem out of our world by expanding our ego to fill up all the space.
Ego has a very different nature than the desire for physical pleasure. There is no natural end to a person’s ego. Rav Dessler explains that this is why there is no clear end to this second exile we are living through. We are stuck in a world of ever-expanding ego. How can we possibly move forward? The only way to shake someone out of ga’avah, out of a place of expanding ego, is to remove his stability and shake him up. This is what has happened to us in the course of modern history. Hashem is slowly but surely destabilizing all the things we use to give us security and the illusion that we are in charge.
There was a time, not that long ago, when people believed in things like kings, and elected leaders, and the infallibility of science and technology. Now, we question all sources of information. We assume most leaders and politicians are corrupt. And a tiny virus has brought our entire modern world to a screeching halt. The process of geulah, of redemption, is the process of confronting our ego, and recognizing that we are living in Hashem’s world.
Rav Schorr adds an additional level of understanding by looking at the description the Torah gives us of the thoughts of Am Yisrael as they digested the report of the spies. “Because of Hashem’s hatred for us did He take us out of the land of Egypt, to deliver us into the hand of the Amorite to destroy us. (Devarim 1:27)” These are astonishing words coming from a nation that was living in the embrace of Hashem’s clouds of glory. Seforno, unable to understand these words at face value, explains that the nation was really thinking, “Hashem is upset with us because we worshipped avodah zarah in Mitzrayim. So even though he could destroy the Emori, he won’t because he’s punishing us.”
There are many of us who could relate to these thoughts. Staring out at a scary and uncomfortable transition, the way forward is to take the leap side by side with Hashem. But Rav Dessler explains that the Yetzer Hara preys on us, specifically on our ga’avah, our ego, the side that says that we can and should do it alone. And so, we make up excuses as to why Hashem will not be by our side and clothe those excuses in words of teshuva.
This year we get to walk into Tisha B’av directly from the closeness of Shabbat. We are lucky. Shabbat gives us the strength to hold that closeness near to us through the sadness of Tisha B’av, and might even give us the strength to move the day from a day of mourning to a day of the birth of geulah.
May we be zoche to see the world change before our eyes, and Tisha B’av be transformed into the chag it is supposed to be.