By Avi Davis
July 29, 2001
Among my various travels in the 1980's, I found myself in Istanbul, Turkey on Tisha B'Av eve in August 1988. Fortunate to have the address of some friends, I was guided by them to a synagogue in the enclave of Nishantaj on the west bank of the Bosphorus. Access to the synagogue at that time proved difficult. Without my passport, (which I didn't think to bring to a synagogue) or any other form of identification, the guards, barricaded behind double paned bulletproof glass, at least three inches thick, would not allow me to pass. I pleaded, futilely, in broken French, until an elderly man, hearing the commotion, came to my rescue. He led me through two doors and then through two metal detectors and a body search before presenting me to the rabbi. The rabbi, a very old man gazed at me with watery eyes and then, in broken English, said in a frightened voice I will never forget" Why did you come here?"
The intense insecurity and fear had resulted from the most lethal attack on a European Jewish community in forty years. Two years before, on September 6, 1986 Arab gunmen had forced their way into another synagogue only five miles away and slaughtered 21 elderly Jews. The tiny Istanbul community had never recovered. As I walked back to my friend's home that night the quality of the rabbi's voice and the look in his eyes impressed itself on me because it was so deeply reminiscent of a prior experience. Yet my memory would not lock on the image. That was until 2:00 in the morning when I sat up in bed and remembered. I had experienced the same look and same question in Lodz, Poland. There I had also been traveling alone, a stranger to a country where three of my grandparents had been born. And yet here was another Jewish community scorched by the flame of memory, a decrepit remnant of one of Europe's proudest Jewish communities unable to free itself from the psychological scars of its past.
The coincidence of the same question in the same quavering voice unsettled me. Here we were after all, on the eve of the 21st Century with the anti-Semitic horrors of the first years of the century well behind us. Jews have been accepted into European society at almost every level and had achieved remarkable success. But we have forgotten that success cannot always be counted in currency or social status. Those old enough to remember, or who even have parents old enough, know that Europe is still very much a Jewish cemetery and many, if not most of its synagogues, exist as little more than shrines to a civilization that has vanished. Trauma, like a virus stain, has a way of surviving both social success and the passage of time.
Perhaps this explains why the most traumatic event in our history, the destruction of our Temple, reverberates for us 2,000 years after it occurred. A tragedy that did not affect just one community but shattered Jewish life with the force of an erupting volcano has echoed down the generations in the most tumultuous way, irreversibly affecting our form of prayer, our relations with the non-Jewish world and in a prevailing sense of impermanence. This too explains why today's Arab Intifada strikes such trepidation into the hearts of Jews. In its menace it is indistinguishable from the rampages of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Romans, Crusaders and Turks. There are very few in Israel today who do not recognize that the indiscriminate murder on Israel's roads and the destruction of antiquities on the Temple Mount are only precursors to what is planned for the entire Jewish community of Israel if Arab victory is achieved.
Many voices, of course, claim that Israel's vaunted military strength will never let such a destruction occur. But no one should mistake or underestimate the impact of the continual murder of Jews in their own land on the national psyche. The sense of impermanence, so much a feature of Jewish life elsewhere, is beginning to invade the minds of the first Jews in two thousand years to reclaim the Jewish homeland. The fear that the trauma of exile is seeping into the consciousness of Israelis is the most chilling sign of the loss of self-belief and an ominous signal for the future.
It is this condition more than any other that Israelis must struggle against with all their power. No military machine can replace unity, strength of purpose, the zeal of a Jewish mission or the belief in Jewish destiny as forms of security. No diplomatic process can supersede our commitments, in the face of the most depraved acts of inhumanity, to acts of loving kindness, charity and mercy. No words of friendship from outside nations can allow us to wallow in reliance on others and deflect us from our conviction that Israel and the Jewish people's true strength lies in their commitment to Jewish values, practices and belief in G-d.
Tisha B'Av is the opportunity to not just commemorate the destruction of the Temple but to also reflect deeply on the reasons for Jewish survival. Those us still mired in the trauma of exile must rely on the Jewish state to display a powerful national resolve; a resolve that no Jew will ever travel to the Jewish homeland and be confronted with the question that resonates with such unnerving despair elsewhere: " Why did you come here?"
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