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One of the most popular traditions of Jewish weddings is the smashing of the glass at the end of the ceremony to commemorate the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.

 

The custom introduces a moment of sombre reflection at a time of incredible happiness to remind us that our simcha, our joy, cannot quite be complete until the Temple is rebuilt. The destroyed Temple, is, in some metaphysical way, the source of tragedy in the world and that our broken world can never truly be fixed until the arrival of Mashiach.

 

We will be reflecting on this next week as we mark Tisha B'Av, the date on which both Temples in Jerusalem were destroyed (see: What is Tisha B'Av? for more).

 

Join us in particular next Wednesday evening and Thursday (29 and 30 July) for a variety of thought-provoking talks, services and programmes, all available to watch live or on-demand via our new TV station, TheUS.tv. You can read the whole programme here and do check out your local community for more great content next week.

The world feels particularly broken right now watching the shocking reports about the treatment of the Uyghurs in China. Hearing about human beings being rounded up and forced on to trains, sent to concentration camps where their hair is roughly cut cannot help but conjure up dark images of the Holocaust.

 

How should we react to this? Please do read the following challenging and thoughtful pieces by our President, Michael Goldstein ("Hair taken from Uyghurs shows eerie echoes of the past") and by New West End Synagogue’s Rabbi Dr Moshe Freedman ("‘Never again’ means for everyone").

 

 

Shabbat shalom,

 

Richard Verber

Communications Director, United Synagogue

Most people reading this will never have met their great-grandparents. We may not even recall their names. Nevertheless, they were – it goes without saying – incredibly important to us: they were our parents’ grandparents and without them we wouldn’t be alive today. And yet, would you be able to mourn them on their yartzeit?

 

I was thinking about this challenge this week ahead of Tisha B’Av. If we would struggle to mourn the loss of our grandparents’ parents, how much more difficult is the challenging of mourning for the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem, the second being destroyed nearly two thousand years ago? How can we connect with a space we never knew, and however much we read about it, can never truly understand the importance of?

 

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903-1993, of Yeshiva University in New York) acknowledges this problem. He suggests that it is precisely because the challenge is so great, that our tradition has prescribed a very specific way to observe Tisha B’Av. We don’t eat or drink. We don’t bathe. We sit on low chairs. We turn lights off or down low. Many people have the custom to sleep on the floor, or to remove their pillow to make their night’s sleep a little uncomfortable.

 

Why? Rabbi Soloveitchik suggests that this is the approach of the Jewish people to all of our history: we try to relive it. Every festival, every special day brings with it unique customs to imbue with a sense of the holiday. On Pesach we re-enact the Exodus with words, with props and with foods to take us back to Ancient Egypt. On Chanukah we light a Chanukiah to take us back to the Temple and recall the miracle of the oil. On Succot we take our lives outside for seven days to remember what it was like to live in the temporary shelters of the desert.

 

So too on Tisha B’Av. Nobody can expect you to mourn for something you never knew. But we create an atmosphere of mourning around us to heighten our senses and allow us the opportunity to connect with our people’s tragic history.

 

This is what so impressed the French ruler Napoleon Bonaparte - so the story goes - when he looked in on a synagogue in Paris on Tisha B'Av and saw Jews sitting on the floor chanting lamentations and shedding tears. After inquiring about the cause for their mourning and hearing that it was the destruction of their Holy Temple in Jerusalem he expressed astonishment that he had heard nothing about this tragedy from his reliable intelligence sources. When it was explained that this event took place close to 1,800 years earlier he reportedly declared that a people who can still mourn for their Temple and their homeland after so many years have a real hope of regaining them.

 

May this be the last year we observe Tisha B’Av in this manner.

 

Richard Verber is the Communications Director of the United Synagogue

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