From destruction to rebith

"On a day of destruction we're working on restoration"

ביום חורבן עסקנו בתקומה

With these words today's volunteer group leader bid us farewell after a morning's work helping a farmer hard hit by the Hamas assault on Israel in October 2023. To this day there are still some huge pieces of Hamas rockets lying in the yard, remnants of the massive Hamas onslaught which caused such terrible damage to this large farm which grows so many vital staples. Since the war began about 60% of the farm work is done by volunteers.

Today was 17th Tammuz, a fast day of mourning for the destruction of ancient Jerusalem first by Babylon in 586 BCE and then again by Rome in 70 CE.

Symbolically the group I joined today was mostly coming from Jerusalem, the modern thriving rebuilt city representing the return of so many Jews from centuries of exile.

It's not easy to work in agriculture on a fast day, not only for the volunteers, but for the farmer and his family who as traditionally observant Jews were also fasting. We focused on indoor packing and sorting work, out of the searing summer sun.

Almost everywhere I volunteer I meet people from so many different places and backgrounds, there is no one rubric to define the people that go out to help on Israel's farm, no one defining characteristic other than a deep desire to help and a love of Israel.

Today I sorted and packed chili peppers, cherry tomatoes and cucumbers with:

a retired early reading specialist teacher from Jerusalem

a couple of kibbutznikim from a Dead Sea area kibbutz

a retired Jerusalem agronomist who still lectures at Israel's top universities

a nurse from Ashdod

a social worker and a retired post office worker

an elderly gentleman born and bred in Netanya who possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of Israeli archaeological sites

a professor of mathematics born and raised in St Petersburg (then Leningrad) who emigrated to Chicago after the fall of the USSR and regularly visits Israel to volunteer in agriculture

a tour guide from Abu Ghosh

a bus driver from Jerusalem

a receptionist from a Jerusalem area clinic

a young father working in hi tech and his adolescent son

a couple of teachers and a retire nursery school aide

Secular, religious, traditional, left, centre and right. Strangers brought together in common cause to do good.

We have a tradition that one of the causes of the fall of the Second Temple period Jewish kingdom to Rome was due to baseless hatred, internal Jewish feuds and rivalries which weakened the society and made it vulnerable.

Jewish culture centres around discussion and debate, the Talmud is full of people disagreeing with each other, creative thought is ingrained, two Jews three opinions. The question is how we understand this cultural inheritance, do we argue to understand each other or do we disagree on principle and shut ourselves off from hearing people who think differently. Have we learnt the lessons of the disasterous societal divisions that paved the way for the calamity that befell us at the hand of Titus' Rome?

In modern times a tradition has developed focusing on the three weeks of mourning between the fast of 17th Tammuz and the fast of 9th Av to reflect inwards, to encourage dialogue between different communities and ideas, to pay more attention to those we disagree with, to try to really hear.

Over hours of chili peppers and cherry tomatoes, cucumbers and cabbages we talked and got to know one another. It's work that's conducive to conversation, groups of us gathered around long tables facing each other, cooperating on sorting the produce, comparing what was good and what needed to be discarded, organising the packing crates, the stronger insisting that they would do any heavy lifting, the more eagle eyed doing quality control to ensure we were truly helping the farm get the job done to the highest level.

In the year and a half I've been out on farms almost every week with so many volunteers I've seen this dynamic repeat itself so often. It isn't guaranteed. Sometimes you're in a big open field where the work is more individual, less conducive to conversation, in more difficult conditions. But more often than not the task at hand requires team work, helping each other learn a skill, divisions of labour that play to a diverse skill set of the more fit and the less fit, the taller and the shorter, the more observant and the less so.

And that builds communication and dialogue and ice that by mid-morning break down has been thoroughly broken. Strangers looking out for each other, that someone shouldn't lift a heavy crate alone, to watch out for sharp thorns or a particularly rocky field, to make sure to keep drinking lots of water in the heat of the greenhouse or sun scorched field.

By the end of the workday we part as old friends, we who were strangers to one another as we boarded the bus at the break of dawn that very same day.

It is the antithesis of sinat hinam, baseless hatred, the tragedy which led to the Roman destruction of ancient Judea and Jerusalem.

On this 17th Tammuz we remembered the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the horrors that befell our people, but we also actively did something construction to bring about the redemption and renaissance of our people from our painful history and present.

ביום חורבן עסקנו בתקומה

Tammuz 17th

 These days if you are an Israeli or a Jew you have it thrust in your face many times a day from ignorant and hateful people around the world that Jews "have no connection to the Middle East", that our people are colonisers, interlopers, thieves and charlatans.

As a Jew who prays three times a day facing Jerusalem and the ruins of its ancient Jewish Temple, who's annual calendar revolves around the rainy cycle of the Land of Israel an who to this day mourns the destruction of our homeland thousands of years ago, this canard is nothing short of ridiculous, a topsy turvy mirror universe accusation that denies the very meaning of Jewish ethnic, cultural and religious identity through the ages.

Today for example was the fast of the 17th of Tammuz, the day the walls of Jerusalem were breached during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem in 586 BCE and centuries later, again, during the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Both sieges were two of the most cataclysmic tragedies to befall the Jewish people, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem, the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Judah (Judea), the killing of many and the exile of much of the Jewish people from our ancestral homeland, first to the Babylonian empire and Egypt, later also to Rome and elsewhere in Europe, the start of many centuries of constant persecution, pogroms, expulsions, spurious blood libels and scapegoating and worst of all the Holocaust.

Millenia later the fast of the 17th Tammuz marks the start of a Jewish period of mourning leading up to the 9th of Av, the date on which the ancient Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, in 586 BCE by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnetzer and in 70 CE by the Romans under Titus. The assault on the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem was an attack on Jewish sovereignty and civilisation, not an accident of the siege of Jerusalem, but a prime target in the attempt of first Babylon and later Rome, to subjugate the Jews, humiliate them and punish them for challenging the might of the region's great empires.

That's right, here and now in the 21st century Jews in Israel and around the world are fasting and mourning the destruction of our ancient capital Jerusalem and its sacred Temple. It is flesh of our flesh, a wound that still bleeds as down the ages the terrible consequences of that terrible day continued to ripple down our agonising history.

On 9th of Av we will sit on the floor as a sign of mourning and read the painfully graphic descriptions in the biblical book of Lamentations, Eikhah, detailing the suffering of our people during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem. We read Lamentations in its original Hebrew, the language clear and accessible to speakers of modern Hebrew today. The descriptions are not for the faint of heart, our ancestors agony our agony.

So painful is that memory that even in modern Jerusalem, today rebuilt and developed on a scale our biblical ancestors could not have imagined, we still feel those scars from the assaults by Babylon and Rome, not only as an almost genetic memory but physically in the heart of our ancient capital, where you can still see blackened, singed, huge blocks of stone where they fell from the ancient walls during the Roman sacking of the city two millennia ago.

It feels ridiculous to have to say these things which are so obvious, such a core part of the culture I grew up with, my parents grew up with, my grandparents grew up with, facts ingrained in our ancient Hebrew prayers, our calendar and our very consciousness. An unbroken chain that binds each generation to the one before in common memory.

And yet today I'm finding I have to explain this over and over and over, even to people who I once thought of as friends, who question why my country, my people, have any right to exist.

Yet another reason to fast and mourn this year.