RABBI TSIPORA GABAI

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Connecting and Mourning

The Fast of the 10th of Teveth

On a cold winter's day, the 10th of the Hebrew month Teveth in the year 588 B.C.E., King Nebuchadnezzar II of the Neo-Babylonian Empire laid siege to Jerusalem, capitol of the Kingdom of Judah.

This was his second siege on the belligerent Kingdom. Nine years earlier, then-King Jehoiachin of Judah had rebelled — and lost. Nebuchadnezzar then placed Zedekiah on the throne, assuming this king would now be "his man". But lo and behold, this King too had risen up against Babylon. So now Nebuchadnezzar would teach these Judeans — said to be a stiff-necked people — who was in charge and what punishment was all about!

What Nebuchadnezzar could not know was that the siege would last a year and a half (some experts date the siege as beginning a year earlier, thus lasting two and a half years!) What the people inside the besieged Jerusalem could not know, but could most likely feel over the long months, in their very empty, very miserable guts, was that this would not end well.

Empathy

Conditions in Jerusalem went from horrible to nightmarish. To get some idea of the situation, one can read the Scroll of Lamentations (read during the Tisha B'Av fast, commemorating the eventual fall of the Kingdom of Judah and the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple). This Scroll is one of the most emotionally difficult sections of the Bible to read and grasp, in both its unimaginable horror and its unfathomable anguish.

And when you realize that we were the people inside the besieged Jerusalem, we, our ancestors; and when you understand that the Scroll of Lamentations is talking about us, about our families so many years ago — then, if you are a person capable of true feeling and sensitivity, you can connect to these events and understand them on a real and personal level.

A story is told about a Jewish friend of Napoleon Bonaparte, who took the General to the synagogue on the eve of Tisha B'Av. When they came to the synagogue Napoleon stared in shock at the people, sitting on the floor or on overturned benches, some in sackcloth and bare feet, crying and wailing in their prayers. He turned to his friend and worriedly asked what was wrong, why were the people so obviously distressed? His friend answered: "They are mourning the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple." "But when did this happen? And why was I not informed at once?!" asked the General. His friend explained that this event occurred over 1700 years ago. Napoleon silently looked at the scene before him for a few moments, then turned to his Jewish friend and said: "A people that can mourn with such immediacy, even after so many years, will surely see its return and rebirth!"

Rememberance

Napoleon was right, of course. Our sovereignty and our independence were wholly re-established. And he cited the right, inevitable reason for this: our vivid, true and personal memory of, and identification with, our past. For if not for this, what on earth would make a whole people believe, act upon and insist that something so impossible as our nation's rebirth in its homeland could still happen, even during almost two thousand years of wandering and merciless exile! And that's two thousand years only after the second destruction, in 70 C.E. Go back another 600 years to Nebuchadnezzar's siege of the 10th of Teveth 588 B.C.E.

The date of this siege (10th of Teveth), together with the date of the breaching of the walls of Jerusalem (17th Tammuz 586 B.C.E.) and, three weeks later, Tisha B'Av (9th of Av 586 B.C.E.), the date the Temple was set on fire and destroyed, all three days are days of fasting, mourning and commemoration.

Honor

As we know, Tisha B'Av commemorates not only the destruction of that first Temple, built by King Solomon, but the second Temple's decimation as well (in 70 C.E.). It has also become a day of commemoration for other tragedies that befell us over our long history.

The 10th of Teveth carries additional events around it as well. The 8th and 9th of Teveth were also considered dark days which included fasting. But these two days soon became incorporated in the fast of the 10th of Teveth.

The 8th of Teveth (3rd century B.C.E.) was the date of the completion of the translation of the Torah into Greek. This translation is called the Septuagint (Seventy, in Latin), for the 72 Rabbis who were commanded by King Ptolemy II of Egypt to translate the Torah. The ordering of this translation was seen by the Jews as the preparation of a potential weapon for persecution. But more importantly, it was seen as a translation that would lose all but the most basic, rudimentary part of itself in the process of translating. As one modern-day scholar put it: it was like taking a cell-phone and photographing the milky-way and saying: "Here it is, here is the milky-way!" This is because in the Torah so much is dependent on the original language, the words, the phrasing, even the letters used in a particular word. No translation could possibly capture this, let alone a translation whose motivation and goal were not exactly pure.

While each of the 72 translators was put in a separate room, with no contact between them, an unusual phenomenon occurred: all 72 translations came out exactly alike! Moreover, each of the 72 had, unbeknownst to the others, taken upon himself to make changes in the text in fifteen specific verses that could be misinterpreted if translated literally. And all 72 made the exact same changes! How's that for a miracle and how interesting (and coincidental?...) that the last few days of Chanukah, the holiday that celebrates miracles, fall on the first few days of the month of Teveth! (Talk about sharing the miracles…)

The 9th of Teveth is also considered a day of sadness and mourning, since it is the date of the passing of both Ezra and Nehemiah, who were the dominant figures in the return to Jerusalem from the Babylonian exile (6th century B.C.E.). Nehemiah dealt with the political aspects and Ezra was in charge of the spiritual aspects and the reconstituting of the Jews in their land and in their capitol, including the rebuilding of the Temple. It is said of Ezra, who was at times called a second Moses, that he not only brought the exiled Jews back to their home, he brought the Torah and Judaism back to their hearts. He also made certain that each and every Jew — man, woman and child — would have the ability and the opportunity to hear and know the Torah, setting up the reading aloud of the Torah every Monday and Thursday in the marketplace. To this day, over 2500 years later, we still read the Torah on Shabbat and on each and every Monday and Thursday of the week. So that if only we want to, it is right there for us to hear and to know.

Connection

The newest event to be added to the 10th of Teveth day of mourning came in 1950. The Chief Rabbinate of the newly reconstituted State of Israel declared this date to be The Day of The Universal Kaddish. This is the day of lighting a candle and saying Kaddish for those of our people who were murdered in the Holocaust and whose date of death — and often even whose name — is unknown. What an amazing and fitting connection to make. When one comes to comfort mourners, one says: "may God comfort you within all who mourn over Zion and Jerusalem". And this very special mourning and remembering of nameless, faceless, dateless victims of the Holocaust could be in no other place but connected to the date that begins the mourning for Zion and Jerusalem…

It is interesting to note that the Chief Rabbinate made a similar connection when setting the day of mourning and Kaddish for soldiers killed in action, whose place of burial is unknown. They set the date as the 7th of the month of Adar. This is the same date as the birth and death of Moses, whose place of burial is also unknown.

And thus our past is always and ever connected to our present and carries us on into our future. Napoleon knew it: a people that so strongly identifies with its ancestors and its history and with an immediacy born of the command that "in each and every generation one is obligated to see oneself as having personally come out of Egypt", such a people must surely be eternal!

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