Miriam Herman responds to Benny Lau on Tisha B’Av after October 7

Reading Rabbi Benny Lau’s essay “The First Tisha B’Av Since October 7” (Summer 2024) in advance of Tisha B’Av this year has given me language to contrast the difficulty of mourning after the 1967 victory in Jerusalem with the experience of the past two years, when it has felt impossible to do anything but mourn.

I was not alive for the first moment. I did not stand in Jerusalem after the Six-Day War, when Jewish return made exile seem, if not over, transformed. But I am living through the second moment, when the old fears of exile have returned inside the very sovereignty that once seemed to overcome it.

But the essay fails to consider a tension in the verses it quotes. Rabbi Lau invokes Deuteronomy’s language of terror and displacement as evidence of the return of the Covenant of Fate. Yet in Deuteronomy, those terrors are not merely a description of ongoing Jewish vulnerability. They are consequences of our breaking the Covenant. 

I do not presume from this that October 7 was divine punishment. Of course we cannot read God’s judgment so simply. But Rabbi Lau invokes the language of the covenantal punishment while describing a shift of the covenant from Fate toward Destiny, and now, painfully back toward Fate. But this skirts the content of the covenantal message. That omission is critical, because a covenant is not a mood in Jewish history. It is the source of Jewish history itself, a promise and an obligation for all time. If Jewish sovereignty marked a movement toward Destiny, what does that shift require of us? And if we are noticing the covenantal curses within our Jewish sovereignty, what should we be examining about our commitment to that Destiny? 

Rabbi Lau writes of the widening divide between Jews since the Yom Kippur War. But division, too, is not new. In fact, Judaism’s oldest legal traditions demonstrate that not only is disagreement healthy, it is critical to the rabbinic model of Jewish survival.

In the generations before the destruction of the Temple, Jewish society was not ruled by a single sage, but through a leadership of pairs: one Nasi and one Av Beit Din. Critically, these pairs consistently disagreed with each other. When Menahem and Hillel broke that pattern and agreed on an issue that all previous pairs had disagreed on, Menahem stepped down, and Shammai took his place. Hillel and Shammai eventually became the paradigm of Jewish argument for the sake of the Good. 

That is the kind of argument a sovereign Jewish people now needs, because our tradition is clear: We will not find the right path for our society through agreement alone. Yet, at the founding of the State of Israel, the disagreements surrounding Torah felt too big to bridge, and rather than argue together about what Torah required of Jewish sovereignty, we largely placed that question outside of the shared political framework. Israel proceeded without a completed constitution, and nearly eight decades later, we still lack a common language in which to define the obligations of Jewish power. 

And that brings us back to Tisha B’Av. In a sovereign age, what are we mourning? Not only that a building fell. Not only that Jews once suffered in exile. Not only that October 7 returned us to the old terror of Jewish vulnerability. We mourn because the Covenant of Destiny has not yet been fulfilled. We have returned to Jerusalem, but not yet to a redeemed Jerusalem.

The vision our people have passed down of a redeemed Jerusalem is not merely of a Jewish capital. The prophets describe a place so manifestly filled with Divinity that all the nations of the world will stream there with joy, asking God to judge between them. Says Isaiah, God will radiate so clearly that wars will cease and people around the world will beat their swords into plowshares. That is the promise of the rebuilt Temple that we mourn.

The shift in the Covenant that Rabbi Lau identifies toward Destiny must be asking us for something. Because before the nations can stream toward the Mountain, the House of Jacob has to be able to walk there together. If religious and secular, Right and Left, those who serve and those who study, cannot find truth and justice together inside our shared covenant, then we cannot yet offer its promise to the world. 

Rabbi Lau is right that after October 7 we carry a lot. The terror of Fate has returned. But the burden of Destiny remains. Jewish sovereignty is miraculous. Jewish power is necessary. But power is not covenant. Our covenant is with God. Until the whole people is back in the room learning what Torah demands of us, and integrating it into our lives, we have not yet answered what our Destiny demands.