"Painful Concessions and the Ninth of Av"

We have been told by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that Israel must make "painful concessions" if Jews and Arabs are to live in peace in the Land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. In saying this, Mr. Sharon has in mind the establishment of an Arab state in Israel's heartland, Judea and Samaria. There can be hardly any doubt that included in those "painful concessions"-indeed, the most significant-would be the loss of eastern Jerusalem and unequivocal Jewish sovereignty over Israel's holist site, the Temple Mount.

Would these "concessions" be painful only to the Jews? Would they not also be painful to countless people whose hearts resonate with these words of Isaiah (33:17-22)?

Does thine eye seek the king in his beauty when it looks yearningly to the distant land?

Thine heart muses sadly:
Where is the treasurer?
Where is he that weighed, where is he that counted our towers?
O, long not for the mighty state, for the state of deep diplomatic speech,
for tongues which purposely stammer and speak unintelligibly.
Look upon Zion, the city of our future.
Let thine eyes see Jerusalem, a home of peace, a tent
that shall never more be removed, the stakes whereof shall never more be plucked up,
neither shall any of the cords thereof be broken.
For when the Lord shall be there with us in majesty,
there in a place of broad rivers and
streams no ship of war shall cruise,
no vessel pass by.
But God, our Judge, God our Lawgiver,
God our King, He it is Who will help us.

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch asks, "Why does the Jew mourn the Ninth of Av?" and answers:

"On the tenth of Tebeth the land was lost and the capital was threatened; but the Jew does not mourn for his lost land. On the seventeenth of Tammuz the capital was lost; but the Jew does not mourn for his lost city. On the ninth of Av the Temple went up in flames; and for that, for the lost sanctuary of the Torah, for the lost home of the majesty of God, for that the Jew mourns."

In the sequel, Rabbi Hirsch quotes the Elegy "Ode to Zion" of R. Yehuda Halevi (end of the eleventh century):

For thee, for the house of God my heart mourneth,
There where God's majesty is near to thee …
Where my Maker opened thy gates
To face the gates of heaven,
Where God's glory alone was thy light,
Nor sun nor moon nor stars,
… Where the spirit of God was outpoured upon thy youths,
Where God's majesty, where His royal throne stood …
Where God was revealed unto thy seers and messengers.
Would I had wings to fly thither,
Thither where the treasures of my heart
Rest beneath thy ruins! ...
The life of souls is the air of thy land,
Like fragrant myrrh is the dust of thy earth,
Like honey from the comb flow thy rivers.
I would fain wander barefoot on thy ruins
Where once the word of God had its dwelling,
Where once stood the Ark of God,
And the Cherubim spread their wings …
Zion, in the sheen of thy beauty
Awaken longing, awaken love.
The souls of thy children are for ever bound to thee.
They still rejoice in they well-being,
They still mourn they desolation,
They still weep for thy downfall…
Towards thy gates they still bow in prayer from afar.
They are the flocks of they people in exile,
And scattered on hills and mountains
Have not forgotten they fold.
They cling to thy skirts,
They would fain rise and clamber up
To the summits of they palm-branches,
The greatness of Shinar, the greatness of Pathros,
Shall they compare them with to thy greatness,
Shall they esteem their vanities
Like thy Thummim and Urim?
Whom could they find like thy anointed ones,
Like thy prophets,
Like thy Levites and singers?
The realm of idols will vanish and pass away.
But thy realm remains for ever.
God has chosen thee for His abode.
Happy the mortal who cherishes a longing for thy courts,
Happy he who waits and hopes and lives to behold
The rising of thy light, the breaking of they dawn,
The welfare of thy chosen ones, the ecstasy of thy joy,
When thou returneth
To the springtide of thy youth!

With the words of Isaiah and Yehuda Halevi before us, how are we to regard one who speaks of "painful concessions" that Israel must make for peace to prevail between Jews and Arabs?

What is the basic prerequisite of the peace sought by Prime Minister Sharon? He avows it was outlined in a speech by President George W. Bush on June 24, 2002. There we are told that democracy is the key to peace in the Middle East. I ask: Is there peace in democratic America, even in the nation's capital, where violence and crime are rampant?

Rabbi Hirsch's commentary to Numbers 25:12 (on Pinchas) presents a very different view of what is required to achieve true peace-true peace. Peace is a state of the most complete harmony, not only between man and man, but between man and God. Peace therefore requires the sanctification of God's Name and dutiful observance of His law.

However, instead of acting in manner conducive to true peace, mankind conceals its duty to God under the cloak of a "love of peace." Because the "love of peace" has replaced duty to God, those mindful of their duty to God are now called "enemies of peace." But in truth, those who parade as lovers of peace are the enemies of peace, for they are mindless of their duty to God.

Yes, they crave peace, but this peace is nothing more than secure and commodious living, not a peace illumined and sustained by the sanctification of God's Name.

What has democracy to do with the sanctification of God's Name? Nothing! What has democracy to do with man's duty to God? Nothing! In what democracy do we find a state of the complete harmony between man and man, let alone between man and God? None!

President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic deplored the increase of crime and violence that has taken place since his country's "Velvet Revolution" replaced Communism with democracy: "The return of freedom into a society of moral decay [has] brought about ... a dazzlingly visible explosion of all kinds of bad human qualities."

But we were speaking of the "painful concessions" Israel must make-above all, the loss of Jewish sovereignty over the Temple Mount-if Jews are to attain peace. Which means Zion must cease to be all that Zion means, and not only for the deliverance of the Jewish people.

Ponder these words of Rabbi Hirsch. "Does Israel alone scan the future for a sorely needed deliverance? Does only the Jewish salvation depend on the revival of Zion? Ask the nations … if they feel themselves already in possession of the magical charm which will preserve for ever the welfare and joy and peace of Paradise on earth? Ask them how much consolation they are able to bring to their hovels, how much joy to their poor, how much comfort to their downcast, how much sorrow and misery, how much crime and vice they can banish from their cottages and their palaces, how much strength they can being to their weak, how much love to their strong, how much humility to their proud, how much self-respect to their lowly, how much curse they can scare away from this earth which God has meant to be blessed? Ask them if they know the first letters of a political system which will unite justice and love and sanctification with joy on earth?"

Rabbi Hirsch says in the sequel: "The persecuted, despised, misrepresented Jewish people is not the most unfortunate on earth, the one most in need of deliverance on earth. The whole earth is thirsting for deliverance…. It is not the Jewish salvation alone which depends on the resurrection of Zion. The confident hope of deliverance is not the poorest gift which the Jew brings with him into the society of nations.

"Once before the world has thirsted for deliverance; it was the time when Zion fell. The heathen world was falling into decay. The gods heard their death-knell, sadness dwelt in the hearts of men. Innocence and human worth were laughed at; bestial indulgence and shameless lust took the prize, folly and weakness ascended the throne. Tyrants and slaves enjoyed themselves on earth-but men groaned and starved. Humanity had lost its divinity, men sighed for a new God.

"If only Zion had stood then, Zion in its thousand-year-old freshness, in its thousand-year-old blissfulness, in its perpetual youth, and if then already 'the peoples had gone to the home of Jacob and had said, "Come, let us walk with you in your light!... But, soft, it was not so. Zion fell.

"But before Zion fell, a spark from Zion's holy lamp had been carried forth by feeble hands into the despairing heathen world. And even this single isolated Jewish spark seemed to those who bore it almost too radiant for the heathen world…. They had compassion on their doomed fellow-men … In pity they shaded the bright light of the Jewish spark and lowered it to flicker suited to the heathen breast.

"And then what happened? This lonely Jewish spark which had fallen from the full flame of Zion, though in heathen hands it lost much or even all of its pristine brightness, yet even in this state became the healing medicine of the world …

"The whole history since that time is nothing but the struggle of this spark which has fallen into the … heathen environment which dims its light, even against the heathen pedestal on which it has been set. They wished to save the spirits and the hearts of men, and in their despair they abandoned the world of man's body to 'perdition.' They had produced a new faith for mankind, but through lack of courage they said nothing of the new law-and yet is only the law which brings full deliverance.

"… [But now the] veils fall off, the supports break; a new agony convulses the world… It is not faith, even the purest, that can consummate the deliverance of the world. The deliverance of the world lies in law. Faith can illumine the mind and comfort the heart. But to wed upon earth justice and love, sanctity with joy, life with peace, to bring Paradise back to earth and make men blessed already here below, this can be accomplished only by law.

"One day men will yearn for this law, and then to fulfill this yearning they will turn to Zion. Then,

The mountain of the Lord's house shall be established on the top of the mountains, and it shall be exalted above the hills, and peoples shall flow unto it. And many nations shall go and say, Come ye and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and He will teach us of His ways and we will walk in His paths. For out of Zion shall go forth the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And he shall judge between many nations and shall decide concerning mighty nations afar off, and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning-hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig-tree and none shall make them afraid, for the mouth of the Lord of hosts hath spoken (Micah 4:1-4).

But until then:

Mourn Zion, mourn ye cities
Like a woman in her travail,
Like a bride girt with sackcloth
For the bridegroom of her youth.
(From the dirges of the Ninth of Av.)

Therefore, with heart and soul oppose a Palestinian state, lest it extinguish the light of Zion.