הרב פינחס ווינסטון Rabbi Pinchas Winston

We won’t see that level of Torah again until Yemos HaMoshiach. Eighty days later Moshe Rabbeinu returned with a second, less holy set of tablets. That is the level of Torah we now have, and so far it has not been successful in putting mankind on the right track. THAT 17th of Tammuz was a REAL history-changer, leading to the sin of the spies, the eventual destruction of both Temples, and Tisha B’Av for all generations.

Later, it was the day during the First Temple Period on which the Korban Tamid ceased to be brought. That was the sacrifice that twice daily atoned for the entire Jewish nation—the morning one for sins done the night before and the afternoon one for sins committed during that day. No atonement means divine retribution.

During the Second Temple Period, it was the day when the Romans finally penetrated the wall of Jerusalem on their way to destroy the Temple. They had already taken control of Eretz Yisroel, but they allowed the Temple to remain the center of Jewish life. When it was destroyed, all hope of religious independence ended, deepening the fourth and final exile.

It was also on the 17th day of Tammuz that the Roman military leader Apostomus burned a Torah. The act alone was a sacrilege, but it was GOD Who allowed it to happen. It was a stark statement that showed how far God had allowed the Jewish people to drift from Him. This became even more pronounced when an idol was set up in the Temple itself.

These are the only terrible events we know about. How many other catastrophes have rocked the Jewish people that we DON’T know about, especially as the Diaspora expanded? We’re extremely fortunate that we don’t have a disaster in our own times to speak of, which is why the 17th of Tammuz, for many, is just another fast day in the Jewish year.

TISHA B’AV IS usually identified with the destruction of both temples, which it obviously is. But the talmudic origin of Tisha B’Av occurred long before the Jewish people entered Eretz Yisroel—it occurred just after the spies delivered their damaging report about the Land:

And all the congregation lifted up its voice and cried, and the people wept that night (Bamidbar 14:1). Rabbah said that Rebi Yochanan said: “That night was the night of the Ninth of Av. The Holy One, Blessed Is He, told them: ‘Since you wept needlessly that night, I will establish for you a true tragedy over which there will be weeping in future generations.’” (Ta’anis 29a)

The SPIES were the source of Tisha B’Av. They spoke loshon hara about Eretz Yisroel and intimidated the nation. The people got cold feet about taking the Land, and cried all night in fear of what lay ahead of them. This bothered God so much that He turned THEIR mistake into OUR mistake until Moshiach comes.

How many horrific tragedies have occurred on Tisha B’Av? The people of Beitar were massacred on that day during Roman times, and a year later the Romans razed the Bais HaMikdosh. In 1290, the Jews were expelled from England, and the same thing happened to the Jews in Spain 202 years later, in 1492.

World War I was declared on Tisha B’Av in 1914, resulting in the death of 37,000,000 people. Only World War II surpassed that number, by A LOT—doubling it at least—and many historians claim that that war was really the conclusion of the first one.

The truth is that as terrible a sin as it was to reject the gift of Eretz Yisroel—and it really WAS and IS a sin—it is still hard to fathom how it could lead to so much death and destruction over the course of thousands of years. Why should GENERATIONS of Jews have reasons to cry because their ancestors cried without one? The only time Heaven usually punishes children for ancestral sins is when they continue the sins.

Certainly, many of the generations which suffered fulfillment of the curse of the spies didn’t always do that. They had plenty of their own sins to atone for, but rejecting the Land of Israel was not necessarily one of them.

This begs the question: Was the sin of the spies really the CAUSE of bigger problems or the RESULT of them? If the latter, then the question is more compelling: Why victimize the descendants of ancestral victims?

God hasn’t.

God’s statement about causing future generations of crying was not a curse. It was a projection of history post-rejection of Eretz Yisroel. God said, “Do you want to know how far-reaching the consequences of your sin will be? It will ripple throughout history with disastrous results.”

“You didn’t just reject Eretz Yisroel,” God told that generation. “You rejected the MESSIANIC ERA, and have therefore doomed your descendants to live out history without Moshiach. You can’t begin to imagine how dangerous that is!”

But why?

God runs history. He can make it go in whatever direction He wants. He can steer mankind away from destruction just as easily as He steers it toward destruction. Why didn’t He just punish the spies and their followers, and leave future generations to create their own causes for divine retribution?

The answer to that question is, of course, kabbalistic. It is kabbalistic because every other source we know only discusses what has happened historically AFTER God made the world. Only KABBALAH rewinds the Creation story to PRIOR to Tikun Ma’aseh Bereishis, the RECTIFICATION of Creation. And if Creation were a divine fix, we have to know what was broken in the first place.

THE ZOHAR SAYS that the first two verses of the Torah are really in reverse order. The first verse should really be the second verse, and vice-versa. And although this is by divine design, it doesn’t change the fact that, chronologically speaking, the second verse is really the first.

Writing it the correct way, however, would just confuse most people. After all, if God didn’t make land until the second verse, then what land was “null and void” in the first verse? It’s the old cart-before-the-horse syndrome, which is why the Torah is written the way it is.

Fine. But that still doesn’t answer the question. According to the Zohar, the cart DID come before the horse. The land WAS null and void before it was apparently created. The questions is how that could possibly be. And why?

Here is the short answer: the Torah is talking about two different lands. The long answer consumes volumes of kabbalistic works, some of which we have to know if we truly want to understand the dynamics of history, especially JEWISH HISTORY.

One of the most perplexing questions of all time has been that of where we come from. Once upon a time, people thought that Creation was infinite, with no beginning and no end. In 1929 the astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding, which suggested that it had a beginning and that it will most likely have an end—although the opening statement of the Torah had already explicitly stated this for thousands of years.

The truth is that the first “scientists,” the Greeks, had also accepted this idea of a beginning for Creation as a matter of FAITH. Lacking the means in their time to determine that the universe was expanding, they couldn’t prove it scientifically. They could only accept or reject the notion on faith.

But what BEGAN the whole process?

In this world, something always seems to have come from something else. So whatever made Creation also needed something to make it, which would have needed something else to make it, ad infinitum.

Therefore, the Greeks accepted the Jewish idea of “something from nothing,” Creation ex nihilo. They didn’t have much of a clue as to what that “nothing” was or how it worked, since it was NOTHING with so much potential to create so much SOMETHING. A future generation of scientists would be required to work out those details.

Thousands of years passed and probably just as many scientists before the conclusion was reached that everything began with a big bang. Given the composition of the universe and the way it seems work, to scientists this seemed to be the best explanation for the origin of Creation, the beginning of it ALL.

Skeptics, however, were not certain how that answered ALL the questions, because it seemed that even the Big Bang needed something to precede it in order to make it happen. Indeed, even the proponents of the Big Bang Theory, who argued that it was truly the beginning of ALL existence, were forced to concede over time that the Big Bang was also just part of the process, and not the origin of it.

So now, after thousands of years, modern scientists have concluded through science what their earliest predecessors had decided through faith: EVERYTHING came from NOTHING.

WHICH nothing?

For science, that part is still elusive.

Not for Kabbalah, though. It never has been and never will be. It all comes down to understanding nothing, which is something that has to be taught as a matter of kabbalistic tradition. In fact, according to Kabbalah, THIS version of NO-THING is the most SOMETHING anything can be.

This is because it isn’t really nothing. It just seems that way compared to everything it created. If you put something EXTREMELY spiritual next to something quite physical, it’s going to seem as if it doesn’t exist. Look how hard our souls have to fight just to make their presence known!

The name of this extremely spiritual reality is Ayin, which translates as “nothing.” But it is also the name of the HIGHEST level of embodiment of God’s infinite light—Ohr Ain Sof—corresponding to the top sefirah called Keser.

What’s a sefirah?

One of the most important elements of Creation, and therefore, central to Kabbalah. It is also front and center to the discussion about why the Temples were destroyed on the ninth day of Av, the spies failed their mission in Eretz Yisroel, and so many other calamities befell the Jewish people on this day.

The heart of the issue is FREE WILL. We take free will for granted as an automatic part of being born human, but we shouldn’t. A lot of work went into making free will possible, and appreciating that is the first step to using it correctly.

What work?

Well, to begin with, evil had to be created. Creating evil for us is really quite simple, and people do it all the time. Indeed, just doing the less “good” thing is itself an evil. But that is only because the potential for evil already exists, created long before man ever walked the face of the earth.

What’s the big deal?

The big deal is that God is INFINITE, which means that anything that exists, although it is FINITE, is a part of Him. God, we understand, is all GOOD, without the slightest trace of evil. Theoretically, that should make EVERYTHING in Creation good too. So where is there space for evil to exist? The answer is deeply philosophical, but it can be summed up simply in the statement that “All that God does, He does for the good”…although WE may perceive as evil. Even the worst evil, as far as we’re concerned, has to lead to some ultimate good, as far God is concerned.

But philosophy aside, how is evil, even just the perceived kind, technically possible in an infinitely good world?

The answer to THAT question is the REAL and ORIGINAL reason for TISHA B’AV.

THE KABBALISTS CALL it “Sheviras HaKeilim,” the Breaking of the Vessels. But make no mistake—there was nothing PHYSICAL about it. It’s just that whatever occurred was similar to what would happen if it WERE physical.

Take a glass vase for example. If someone were to fill it up with water, the vase would remain intact. But, if pressure were somehow added to the water inside the vase, at some point the vase would crack into many pieces.

If the person then took those fragments and painstakingly glued them back together again, the vase would be basically the same as before, with one important difference. Cracks would remain all over the vase, significantly decreasing its strength. Water alone could cause the vase to break all over again.

Something similar happened a year PRIOR to Creation. The material with which God planned to use to make Creation came out, and the vessels were “broken.”

Broken.

Dead.

They are the same thing kabbalistically. The vessels were intentionally created to be vulnerable. They were deliberately given more light than they could hold. Thus by design they were made to blow up—into smithereens—with pieces falling everywhere, spiritually, by divine intention.

The “earth” that was null and void? That was the Sheviras HaKeilim. It was not the earth that we now walk on. That wasn’t actually created yet—it was there only in potential. This reality of tohu was completely SPIRITUAL, but it had the potential for all of PHYSICAL history in it, including Moshiach:

The earth was null and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep. (Bereishis 1:2)

“Null” alludes to the Babylonian Exile; “void” alludes to the Median exile; “darkness” alludes to the Greek exile, and “the face of the deep” refers to the exile of Rome. (Bereishis Rabbah 2:4)

Furthermore, although God later reassembled the broken pieces back into vessels—called sefiros—even adding to and strengthening them, their inherent potential for tohu—the cracks—remained:

Resh Lakish asked: “Why is it written, ‘And it was evening and it was morning—yom HAshishi—THE sixth day’? What is the purpose of the extra Heh? It teaches that the Holy One, Blessed Is He, made a condition with Creation, saying, ‘If the Jewish people accept the Torah [in 2,448 years at Mt. Sinai], then you can continue to exist. If not, I will return you back to null and void.” (Shabbos 88a)

On a simple level, this midrash seems to say that if mankind ceases to justify its existence, God will punish it with extinction. Or at least bring it to the brink of extinction, which has happened a few times in history, and people now fear this more than ever.

Kabbalistically, the Talmud is explaining that it is something more profound. Creation is wired to revert back to tohu, on whatever level it does, when the actions of mankind—and the Jewish people specifically—cause it to. Tohu is not so much a punishment as an effect of a cause that we create, as we were warned about in Parashas Bechukosai and later in Parashas Ki Savo.

It’s those pre-Creation cracks that make us so vulnerable spiritually, and therefore physically as well. We tend to look at Creation as well built, and being in a state to handle just about anything. The truth is that until it is perfected, it is quite vulnerable and in need of protection.

We came ever so close to fixing all that at Mt. Sinai, when we finally DID accept Torah. But then the Erev Rav built and worshipped the golden calf, and the Jewish people didn’t stop them. When Moshe Rabbeinu, carrying the Torah of the Messianic Era in his hands, saw this, he threw down the first set of tablets and “broke the vessels” all over again. Since then history has been in varying degrees of tohu.

Not only is the world vulnerable to tohu, but it is particularly susceptible during the time period in which all this happened in the year BEFORE Creation. It was a process that actually took place over the course of 63 days, but it was during the last THREE WEEKS, beginning with the 17th day of Tammuz, that tohu became reality.

The actual breaking of the vessels, pre-Creation, began on what would later become Rosh Chodesh Av. It would be at its most intense on what would later, AFTER Creation, be the 9th day of Av, or TISHA B’AV. THIS is the ORIGIN of the tragedies of Three Weeks and Tisha B’Av, not the spies.

The building of the calf and the sin of the spies were not the cause but rather functions of the cause. Creation is inherently vulnerable to tohu during the Three Weeks, so it is a time for us to lay low, to avoid triggering calamity, as the spies did. They may have left the camp on the 29th day of Iyar, but they spied out the land during the Three Weeks, and gave their evil report Erev Tisha B’Av.

This means that Tisha B’Av is not so much a punishment as it is a built-in destructive reality. Spying out the land was not a bad idea. Yehoshua did it in his time as well. But spying out the land—a spiritual challenge to be sure—during the Three Weeks was a HUGE, unnecessary risk, a self-imposed test that had more potential to break us than to make us.

God made the world this way to give us a chance to permanently fix it. He gave us Torah to help with this. There have been ups and downs, construction and destruction. But until the work is complete, the world remains as it has been, spiritually and physically vulnerable, particularly during the Three Weeks.

It is still too early to celebrate, and if we do, we open ourselves up to a return of tohu as never before experienced by mankind.

Not so bad?

Are you kidding?