Yesterday was Tisha B'Av, the Jewish fast day commemorating the destruction of both the First Temple and Second Temples. According to Jewish tradition, both Temples were destroyed on the the ninth day (Tisha) of the month of Av in the Hebrew calendar.
Tisha B'Av went down in ignominy in my little square of the world when, a few years ago, I wished one of my best friends, who happens to be a very devout Conservative Jew, a "Happy Tisha B'Av day."
Of course, my effort at showing off my knowledge and ecumenism backfired, because Tisha B'Av is the saddest day in the Jewish calendar. My friend gently explained it would be like him wishing me a "Happy Ash Wednesday." Only maybe worse. Oops.
Lived it down, I have not.
All of which is a lead up to a link to an essay on Tisha B'Av by my friend and UCLA law colleague Jonathan Zasloff. His provocative thesis is that:
The time has come for us to acknowledge the dirty little secret of Tisha B’Av: the destruction of the Temple was one of the best things ever to happen to the Jewish people.
At first blush, that struck me as being akin to saying "the death of Christ was the best thing that ever happened to Christians." But I then paused to consider that the death of Christ was the best thing that ever happened to Christians (and, I would claim, humanity). As the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s Declaration "Dominus Iesus" on the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church explains:
There is only one salvific economy of the One and Triune God, realized in the mystery of the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Son of God, actualized with the cooperation of the Holy Spirit, and extended in its salvific value to all humanity and to the entire universe....
Hence, as paragraph 599 of the Catechism teaches, we Catholics believe that "Jesus' violent death was not the result of chance in an unfortunate coincidence of circumstances, but is part of the mystery of God's plan, as St. Peter explains to the Jews of Jerusalem in his first sermon on Pentecost: 'This Jesus [was] delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God.'" Good thus may indeed come out of an event of great evil meriting profound sorrow>
The remainder of Jonathan's deeply moving essay is a meditation on the good that came out of the destruction of the Temple.
The core of Jonathan's claim is that the "survival of the Temple would have deprived us of the extraordinary achievement of rabbinic Judaism—a religion vastly superior to the Priestly cult that preceded it."
Judah Ha-Nasi only decided to compile the Mishnah when it became clear that the Temple would never be rebuilt. So had the Temple survived, there would have been no Mishnah. No great tradition of scholarship and learning. No Pirkei Avot. No Tosefta. No Talmud. No Rashi. No Maimonides. No Ramban. Only a lot of dead, bleeding animals.
Rabbinic Judaism, and the texts, institutions, philosophies, and traditions accompanying it, constitute not only one of the greatest achievements in the history of human civilization, but also one of the greatest paths for connecting with God. The triumph of the rabbis represented nothing less than the divine spirit entering the minds, hearts, and souls of the Jewish people. In this light, mourning the Temple’s destruction is entirely misplaced: the event represents the Jewish people’s maturation into a closer, more adult relationship with the Holy One. It is not a tragedy, but more akin to our people’s Bar Mitzvah.
It's a fascinating take on the way God works in history.
