Tisha B'Av and Baseless Hatred

Tisha b'Av has never been my favorite holiday. Though I currently consider myself to be more religiously heterodox, for several years I--despite whether or not others accepted this appellation--considered myself an Orthodox Jew, studied on a full-time basis at a yeshiva (place for intensive, Jewish learning), and thought often about becoming a rabbi. Yet, even then, I didn't like the holiday.

It's not the fast with which I struggle; though abstaining from drinking has never been easy for me, it was a religious experience during my first Yom Kippur that acted as the main experiential impetus for my undertaking a formal conversion to Judaism. Rather, there is something about coerced sadness that doesn't strike a chord with me. Of course, all holidays in general and Jewish holidays in particular are opportunities to force ourselves to feel a certain way: "When Adar enters, we fill with joy"; and as Jews we are constantly forced to remember something, historical, mythical, or other. But forcing oneself to feel dejected in a world where that seems all too easy just doesn't appeal to me, a person whose disposition tends to be nothing if not melancholic.

It certainly does not seem like a constructive, religious practice, and I believe that religion must be simultaneously constructive and destructive (of illusions) or it isn't worth anything. This seems ever more true considering that the pretext for our sadness during Tisha b'Av is the destruction of the Temples--stone idols which bear Abraham's mallet and overlook the other temples that they may or may not have destroyed.

Strangely though, this year in the aftermath of the shooting at the third installment of the Batman movie in Colorado, I feel uniquely attached to this dark holiday. I can feel the terror and horror of those poor people who were massacred for no reason, and it destroys me. I wish there were some way to comfort them; I wish I could hug them all and stop the tremendous pain that the victims must have felt and which their families still do.

The Talmud in Masechet Yoma famously lists sinat chinam or "baseless hatred" as a probable reason for G-d's allowing the destruction of the Second Temple. This can be and is often extrapolated as a reason for which we mourn on Tisha b'Av. I find this reading ever compelling as a reason for observing both this day, and the Three Weeks. As long as we see separateness and not wholeness, and as long as we so objectify the other that we render it acceptable to attempt to destroy that other, then Jews should mourn; sentient beings should mourn. On this holiday, we should cultivate those practices that allow us to truly see the self in the other, and the self of the other, and perhaps this could be the profoundest revelation of the year, the month, or the moment. Perhaps through an authentic experience of baseless hatred we will ultimately be able to embrace what Rav Kook saw as its only remedy, baseless love.