You don’t have to be an Orthodox Jew to mark Tisha B’Av. Traditional practice means all day (from sundown today to sundown tomorrow, on this year’s calendar) fasting and lamenting historical tragedies, centering on the destructions of the First and Second Temples. Even for the ultra-observant, it’s not a fun holiday. It focuses on sadness, defeat, and exile. It doesn’t have the communal consolations of Yom Kippur, as most of Tisha B’Av is about you alone contemplating your heritage, history, and heart. Which is why it deserves more attention than it usually gets — not only by non-Orthodox Jews, or by non-observant Jews, but also by people of many faiths open to the life-enriching lessons that diverse religious traditions have to offer.
A Talmudic teaching central to Tisha B’Av (Yoma 9b) maintains that the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed due to the sin of sinat hinam, baseless hatred. It’s a mise-en-scene we can all relate to: a party with a mistakenly invited but unwelcome guest who was treated in an uncourteous instead of generous manner. The guest wanted to stay, to avoid embarrassment, and the host wanted to throw him out (which he eventually did). Other guests did nothing. Things happened; things were said; things escalated. Rather like the ‘for want of a horseshoe nail’ parable, the uncomfortable dinner party spiraled into enmity-fueled revenge that led to false accusations, sabotage of peace-keeping efforts, and ultimately the Temple’s ruin and the fall of Jerusalem . . . and, subsequently, millennia of Jewish exile and persecution. The most important point, however, according to the Talmud and reams of subsequent commentary, is the horrifying and very human power of sinat hinam.
“Baseless hatred” is something an individual feels and acts upon, a ‘something’ that exceeds logic and common sense. As far as I understand Hebrew (which is not very far, alas), the translation of ‘hinam’ as ‘baseless’ is not quite adequate. ‘Hinam' means disproportionate, perhaps wildly so — the point being that hatred can be legitimately based, but when it bursts the boundaries of just dealings can become a destructive ruling passion unanchored to facts or fellow feeling or potential consequences. It also shares roots with Hebrew words for ‘free,’ suggesting that this sort of hatred is unmoored from reality, and for ‘graciousness,’ suggesting that this sort of hatred stems from allowing our duties toward other people to be eclipsed by self-righteous fury.
It is relatively easy to detect sinat hinam in others. Indeed, modern observances of Tisha B’Av often aggregate signal tragedies in Jewish history: various expulsions and pogroms and, of course, the Holocaust. It is harder to detect it in ourselves, be it the festering grudge or the blanket condemnation of those with beliefs radically opposed to our own. Indwelling sinat hinam exiles us spiritually to a parched place of rage and resentment, persecuted by demons we have conjured ourselves.
A medieval depiction of a desert monk suffering from acedia
The ninth of the month of Av falls during the summer, a time of (increasingly oppressive) heat in the Northern hemisphere and of dryness (plus heat) in the Middle East. Sinat hinam may be a trans-religious complement to the Christian deadly sin of acedia (‘sloth’), the ‘spiritual dryness’ — apathetic inability to perform one’s sacred and secular duties — that the desert fathers feared as the ‘noonday demon.’ Heat, from the burning sun or from raging anger, desiccates the soul.
Thinking about Tisha B’Av in these ways is certainly applicable to secular Jews and even to non-Jews like me. The official observance for 2015 starts about now and lasts all of tomorrow. Even if one is not fasting or reading the book of Lamentations, one can find time to contemplate the fiery dangers of sinat hinam (and, for that matter, of its listless companion acedia) and attempt to restore emotional, mental, and spiritual balance if such balance is off-kilter. It's worth a try.
[Note about the image that heads this essay: it’s a detail (‘The Fall of Jerusalem’) from the ‘Warner murals’ (painted in the 1929 by Hugo Ballin, designed by Rabbi Edgar Magnin, and financed by the movie mogul Warner brothers) that embellish the Wiltshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles. Magnin believed that incorporating murals in the Sanctuary was a way for his modern American Reform Temple, in the capital of the movie industry, to embrace the spirit of hiddur mitzvah ("Beautifying the Commandment") as well as to embrace the visual culture so important to his congregation, which included many Hollywood titans, artists, and actors.]
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