WHAT MESSIAH?

The mourning after: A look at the upcoming festival of Tishah B'av. (Rabbi David Zauderer, July 31, 2003, Jewsweek.com)

This coming Thursday is a very sad day for the Jewish people. It is known as Tishah B'av, and on this day it is customary to fast and, in general, to act as a mourner who has lost a very dear relative. You see, the Jewish people once had a special place where they could go to experience the divine presence of Hashem. That place was the holy Temple in the holy city of Jerusalem. Three times a year the Jews would make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to witness for themselves God's place of dwelling here on earth. There they would pray to God and unite with one another. Then they would come home, bringing with them enough of a spiritual high to take them through to the next festival, when they would once again visit the Temple. It must have been an amazing experience, but, alas, in the year 70 C.E. all that was taken away from us when the Romans destroyed the Temple and exiled our ancestors to the four corners of the earth. Now, all that remains from that beautiful place is one wall -- the Western Wall.

To bring home the feeling of what we once had and what we subsequently lost, on Tishah B'av we read the book of Eichah (Lamentations), which was written by the prophet Jeremiah upon witnessing the destruction of the First Temple, almost five hundreds years earlier.

In the last two verses of the book of Eichah (5:21-22), Jeremiah beseeches the Almighty, "Bring us back to you, O Lord, and we shall return; renew our days as once before. For if you have rejected us entirely, your wrath has been exceedingly great upon us." [...]

Sometimes, God hits us and we don't like it. But we should try to remember the words of the prophet Jeremiah. And as the children of our Father in heaven, we should try to appreciate that it's better to hear that the answer is "no," than not to hear any answer at all.

May we all merit to see the time when Tishah B'av shall be changed from the saddest day of the year into the happiest day of the year, with the coming of Messiah. May this come speedily and in our day, amen.

To a mostly outside observer, one of the strangest things that has happened to modern Judaism, at least its suburban America iteration, is the way it has abandoned any talk of a Messiah and even of Heaven. One wonders whether this is a function of a kind of demystification of the religion, almost a secularization, with the most anti-rational elements excised or whether there's some deeper and perhaps subconscious something going on, a need to downplay the expectation that a Messiah is coming in order to be able to say not just that Christ was not the Messiah but that there is none, that a specific messianic figure was not rejected, but messianism itself? Posted by Orrin Judd at August 7, 2003 12:46 PM