Daniel Pomerantz..
Honest Reporting..
31 July '17..
Remembering catastrophe.
It’s known as the “saddest day on the Jewish calendar.” Many Jews will fast and some will even observe traditional mourning rituals. This is because Tuesday is Tisha B’Av: a holiday that commemorates a number of tragedies throughout Jewish history.
One of those many tragedies strikes me as especially meaningful today: the destruction of the “Second Temple,” and of the entire Jewish nation-state, some 2,000 years ago. This destruction continues to impact us today: in fact it gives meaning to the entire concept of modern Zionism.
Think about what this means.
The simple existence of the holiday of Tisha B’Av implies something extraordinary:
The Jewish people were living in the Land of Israel long before Christianity even existed, before Islam, before the current nations of Europe came to be, and not only before America was formed but even before the known Native American tribes had formed.
Jews are indigenous people. One of the oldest we know.
In a saga common to many indigenous peoples, Jews were massacred, exiled, enslaved and oppressed. Yet the Jewish people survived and endured, until a startling turn of events, a “mere” 1,878 years later, when Jews became one of the rare indigenous peoples to actually return to their native land, and re-build an independent nation.
It is a story called “Zionism.”
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