9 Av: Tears, Stars, Love of G-d and Israel
The Atoms of Democritus / and Newton’s particles of light / are sand along the Red Sea Shore / Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.
This quatrain by William Blake (1757-1827) celebrates the spitirual dimension of life in the context of Israel’s liberation from Egypt. How does Blake’s eccentric appropriation of Jewish principles intersect the redemptive grieving of Tisha B’Av and typify the knotty relationship of the West to Israel?
By the Jewish calendar we are in the midst of the three week period called bein ha’metzarim, “within the straits,” “within tight, painful constrictions.” This period runs from 17 Tammuz, when the walls of Jerusalem were breached until 9 Av when the Temples were destroyed by the Babylonians and Romans. It is a challenging and thus a perfect time to examine several sources that offer perspective on the unique wisdom and love that the Creator established and intends to establish eternally by planting the Jewish people in the Land of Israel to emanate Hashem’s love and light throughout the world. 
Our way into this multifaceted discussion begins on the night of 9 Av about 3318 years ago. It has been sixteen months since Israel left Egypt and four months since they completed and consecrated the tabernacle (Exodus 39; Numbers 1-8). The tribes have brought their offerings, been ordered into four corps and marched from Sinai toward Israel. Moshe sends twelve men, a leader from each tribe to scout the land and report on its qualities and fortifications. Ten of the twelve, all except Joshua and Caleb brought back a fearful report of the size of the inhabitants, “offspring of the giant” they said, and their massive fortifications (Numbers 13:21-14:9). “We cannot ascend” [to conquer it] they insisted which raised bitter weeping and “murmuring in the tents” of the people that night (cf. Psalm 106: 23-8).
It is very like the perennial regime in Israel since June 1967… Jews cannot ascend to worship or even pray on the Temple Mount, much less rebuild the Temple. And so the grief is compounded and the world continues to spiral in power-lust to chaos.
“You should not fear the people of the land…Hashem is with us; do not fear them” said the two but were threatened and unheeded. It was for “despising the desirable land” (ibid) that the Eternal One arranged that rather than a miraculous entry in the season after consecrating the Mishkan, a full period of completion, forty years would elapse, events so like those from 1967-2007. Even then, 3318 years ago, the breach of faith was so great that repairing it was stretched out for millennia over subsequent griefs, mainly the destruction of the Temples so the people could bear, — and atone for – it.
This formative event of human fears, doubt and pain informs the prophecies of Jeremiah. For example, the sages of the Talmud explain the verse from Lamentations “she weeps by night” (in Hebrew, bakho tivkeh, lit. “she [Jerusalem] weeps His weeping”) refers, by the plural to “two weepings, one for the first Temple and one for the second Temple” (Sanhedrin 104b on Lamentations 1:2).* And why did Jeremiah say, “in the night,” the sages ask. Because “the entire assembly raised up their voices and the people wept on that night” after hearing the ten leaders say, “we were like grasshoppers in our eyes, and so we were in their eyes” (Numbers 13:3).
This defeatist message (‘there is no military solution,’ ‘victory is far away’) is the message of the West’s client elites in Israel. No longer representatives of 5/6ths of the people, they have become are a small minority that wants nothing to do with a Jewish Israel and have the media, financing and diplomatic support to enforce their alienation. The sin is increasingly being atoned: the minority shrinks, becoming more sterile and anti-Jewish; the contractions of Israel continue, – carnage, the wall, expulsions of Jews, and arrests for those seeking to defend themselves. The defeatist, Hellenistic minority gets more and more shrill, requiring more and more amounts of foreign reinforcement for the task of “scattering His people and dividing His land…” (Joel 3). “All her friends have betrayed her, they have become her enemies” (Lamentations 1:2); as then, so now.
I’ve cited these sources many times but here turn to other texts. First the Talmud elaborates on the weeping cited above: “And Rabbah said, ‘that date was the ninth of Av. The Holy One blessed be He said, ‘you wept a weeping without cause. Therefore I shall establish this day as a weeping for generations.” This commentary is often noted. Less so are the following words on Numbers 14:1. “In the night, for when one weeps at night his voice is heard [more readily in the relative silence] (Sanhedrin 104b). The spectrum of references tied to this insight all have to do with the mercy of the Eternal One in turning “to the prayer of the brokenhearted,” specifically, to Israel in exile, “like the just man, poor and parched. This is the seed of Jacob. “And because the evening prayer “typifies the night of captivity” when Israel is separated from its Land and perfect intimacy with the Creator, “it is single, without a husband poor and parched like a widow” (Zohar 23a-25b on Torah portion Bereishis and psalm 102); a people that “has eaten ashes like bread and mixed [its] drink with tears” has its prayers lovingly heard, especially at night. For such prayers, states the Zohar, the angel Nuriel comes down like an eagle to receive them in Chessed (“kindness”) and Uriel to gather them with Gevurah (“power “).
And the Talmudic sages added, perhaps having in mind, “when one weeps at night, the stars and constellations weep along with him.”
The sages found this perspective fruitful for they elaborate, “in the night, for when one weeps at night, whoever hears his voice weeps along with him.” And further, in comments that inspired those in Zohar “like a woman who cries over the husband of her youth” (ibid). This comment by Rava in the name of Rav Yochanan discerns the arc of mercy in the horrific events of 9 Av by alluding to the famous verses when the Creator refers to Israel as the bride whose failures will always be forgiven for He remembers the love of her youth, “when you followed Me through the wilderness, through a land unsown.” And it attests to Israel’s eternal love for the Eternal One, Hashem (the Name that denotes the four-letter anagram of “He Who Was, Who Is, and Who Will Be”); “the One Who shows you mercy, Hashem.” “For the mountains may shift, and the hills may falter but My kindness will never be removed from you…”
We will speak more of this love and the light of wisdom it brings in a moment by way of the writings of Rav Yehuda ha Levi (1040-1104). But first I wish to note other major comments on 9 Av that help explicate famous verses by a Romantic poet, eccentric spiritualist William Blake and indicate his use of many sources beyond Tanach and Zohar to whose study he was inspired by Swedenborg and other spiritual seekers.
In his poem, “The Tyger” (1794) Blake asks a series of rhetorical questions meant to rouse awe, and doubts about the Creator Whom he wishes to re-define. He writes inter alia, “When the stars threw down their spears and watered heaven with their tears, Did He smile His work to see?” [Emphasis added]. When I was in graduate school, these verses were considered epitomes of Blake’s mind-teasing and mind-expanding parables. Yet we see that he was paraphrasing the sages of the Mishna and Midrashim and also, as indicated below, later great commentators that his own eclectic sources borrowed.
Rav Yehuda Lev ben Betzalel, the Maharal of Prague (1524-1612) explicates the comments about weeping at night as follows: “the darkness of night sets the mood for one who is grieving and the stars further this mood and are said to ‘weep along,’ and “they seem to weep along with him.” Rashi (1040-1105), the Ramban (1190-1268) and the Maharsha (Morenu HaRav Shlomo Aidels of Poland, 16th century) have similar comments. Rashi notes further that as with Jacob’s grieving for Joseph, the unbounded nature of the grief indicates that the bond has not been broken though it may seem to be: that is, that the Almighty and the Jewish people are still together in love just as “Joseph still lives!” Thus the sages of the Zohar comment that “the prayer of the afflicted man [Israel] when he faints and pours forth his supplications before Hashem” (psalm 102) “is the prayer that comes to the presence of G-d before all others” (op cit). His grief is as fresh as the faith in G-d attested by the prayer.
And so the grief of Tisha B’Av testifies to the enduring bond between the Eternal One and Israel and between both and the Land of Israel; it is faith, remembrance and love amidst the darkness of grief, atonement, and pain. “When the stars throw down their spears and water heaven with their tears” thus refers, however obliquely to the exile of Israel and its eventual return to armed and loving might (chessed and Gevurah), as R’ Yitzhak Ginsberg notes, “hitgabrut haChessed.”
William Blake, who posited that the imagination was the creator and redeemer of man’s alienated consciousness, that the “Poetic Genius” was the Creator, who transvalued Scriptural values so that sensual “energy is eternal delight” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell plates 3-4, 13) was appropriating Jewish Oral Law (mishnaot) as well as Torah, Talmud, Kabbala and lgreat commentators in pursuing his Romantic revision of the Bible and propounding a “progressive” faith for man, a path that became psychotherapy via the power of positive thinking. Man integrates himself through “a firm persuasion” in is “Poetic Genius” applied at “the moment of desire” (Visions of the Daughters of Albion).
But the saucily audacious view that “Good is the passive that obeys Reason; Evil is the active, springing from Energy. Good is Heaven; Evil is Hell” that unifies Blake’s philosophy is not ‘creation from nothing’ but another Western corruption and conflation with the above-noted sources and the writings, among others of Rav Yehuda ha Levi of Spain in his Kuzari (1070’s; English translation by Kalman Steinberg, 2000).
When Blake writes that “the Father…sends the comforter, Desire so that Reason may have ideas to build upon” (Marriage plates 5-6) he re-forms the new testament passion story and celebration of love; he also plays with the basic aspect of the Creator’s relationship with the Children of Israel (supra and many other sources, e.g. “Israel is My first-born son. Send out My son that he may serve Me!” Exodus 4:22-3) and the role of Moshe who interceded so often for Israel. He also reduces Israel to reason and law as opposed to love and desire. Blake’s allegory opposes Reason and Desire in a dialectic that suits Romantic purposes – that “all deities reside in the human breast” (MHH plate 11) — but had been treated for centuries by Jewish commentators, like Ha Levi who elaborates extensively on it in the Sage’s dialog with the King of the Khazars inter alia, in Kuzari Essay 4:15-27 which embraces wonder in piety, celebrates love as essential to prophecy, and emphasizes that attempts to make human beings like G-d are self-deluding acts that block light and truth.
Throughout this scintillating work, a far more a genuine dialog than anything Plato wrote, Ha Levi explains that human wisdom comes from following the revelation of Divine wisdom in the Torah rather than by exalting reason as the Greek philosophers and their followers do. “You shall observe and practice” the Torah mitzvot not because they are accessible to reason, as they sometimes are, but because of love for the Creator. “This is your wisdom and understanding in the eyes of the nations” the sage quotes approvingly (3:39); “the laws of nature reveal that G-d is Sovereign over all” and that “the whole world is filled with His glory” (4:4 quoting Psalm 103:19 and Isaiah 6:6). Blake and the Romantics, indeed the entire Modern ideology of which they were the avatars is the antithesis to the reasoned judgments, rooted in tradition by which the three courts of the Sanhedrin kept Moshe’s teachings of G-d’s law alive and embodied in human events.
When juxtaposed with Jewish teachings, the Romantic claim to have discovered and deified imagination and sensual love is seen as derivative and twisted from foundational Jewish celebration of Eternal love. Thus Ha Levi repeatedly discusses the “penetrant light” in the NAME, Hashem: “a full name called over a full world” at the conclusion of the Creation (Genesis 1). Exceptional individuals who perceive that the world is more than rational, that it is an act of love are filled with this light like a gem. Ha Levi states that the term, “the God of the Hebrews…is an allusion to the Patriarchs” for Abraham was called “HaIvri” (Genesis 14, passim). Whereas Pharaoh acknowledged G-d (Elohim, Genesis 41:28, 33, the G-d of judgment and natural law Who speaks the creation), his successor denied Hashem (“I do not know Hashem,” Exodus 5:2). Thus Egypt inherited the plague of darkness while “Israel had light in all its dwellings.”
Ha Levi emphasizes that the logic of the Almighty’s creation is apprehensible to the philosophers who yet have derision for the commandments since they do not believe that G-d is cognizant of human actions” (Kuzari 4:15-17). For all his provocative inversions of “heaven and hell,” and “energy and reason” Blake is following Judaism, partly in that the essence of the Name, Hashem, signifying the mercy, love and ultimate good purpose of history “cannot be grasped solely on the basis of intellectual deductions but only by prophecy, the “generous spirit’ that “refers to the Spirit of Holiness” (ibid, citing Psalm 51:14). It is precisely this love, light, generosity and holiness the G-d of Israel from the god of Aristotle, Ha Levi writes (4:16).
Blake often asserts very similar views. His famous short lyric, “Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau, mock on, mock on ‘tis all in vain” is a biting critique of claims to establish goodness and wisdom by reason, a critique that concludes with a celebration of the light in Israel’s ‘tents’ while the philosophes are blinded by the grit of their analytical reason that is, as for Aristotle, their god. Indeed, Blake liked to quote Psalm 139, “I am wondrously awesomely fashioned” while detaching it from the piety and gratitude to the Creator “whose wisdom is profound and beyond comprehension” (Kuzari 4:11, citing Devarim 32:4). “The Rock whose ways are perfect” is reduced by Blake and many after him to a paranoid oppressor of joy, a sterile “Nobodaddy” (nobody’s Daddy” rather than the Compassionate and generative Father of Judaism). His Nobodaddy (called Urizen, ‘your reason’ in many of his works) is the prototype of all the Darth Vader’s of the modern era and the assault on fathers and fatherhood by which the modern west destroys itself through “father dearth.”
This is not the only way that Blake caricatures and degrades the Father preparing Him to be absorbed by His sensual and imaginative son, the tormented rebel Los who becomes the Giant Albion. While Blake proceeds to set the tone for the Modern and Post-modern eras by denigrating G-d and identifying the traditional Father as Satan, “the idiot questioner” who makes reason a spectral crippler of human goodness, Ha Levi stresses that the Eternal embodies reason within the framework of the “flow of light” and love and has it direct and channel this light via the Oral teachings and the Sanhedrin when established in Jerusalem. From this understanding, from this synthesis of reason and love, of mercy and justice, Ha Levi derives the distinctive Jewish trait of self-sacrifice, of readiness to die for “the One Whom he has perceived by emotional identification and spiritual pleasure, as it says: ‘taste and see that G-d is good’” (Psalm 34:9). Demonstrably, Blake built on the Jewish understanding as elaborated by Ha Levi whose Sage states that Abraham’s “prophetic perception” of G-d meant subordinating his rational study to astronomy to faith and service (4:17). It was this commitment that elicited the covenant of the Land (Genesis 15, ff) and established the special connection between G-d and the Children of Israel in their land; this melding of tradition, explication, love and faith, the unifying thread of Ha Levi’s work is what establishes the uniqueness of Judaism and Israel, the people and the Land. “He is called the G-d of the Land of Israel by virtue of the special power that this land has in its air, land and in its heavens which, combined with the performance of the commandments promote the success of this species, the Jewish nations” because it is by this synthesis that they follow “the visions of the prophets” and, by following the Divine Law, are assisted “in attaining the Divine Flow” of light and energy (ibid; see Deuteronomy 13 on the practical means for distinguishing true from false prophets).
Against all the Western devaluations of fathers, from pagan Greece and Egypt to post-Modernism Torah emphasizes the teaching of the sons by fathers and emphasizes, “in a place where there are no men, try to be a man” (Pirke Avot 2:6), an urging increasingly important as Hellenistic culture devolves, clashing with its antitype, Islam. Neither Edom or Ishmael comprehend Av HaRachaman Who is intrinsic to Judaism and its model for fatherhood…
To the degree that Jews persist in adherence to the Law of Moshe during the abasement of exile, seeded by the doubt of the ten and its affect on the assembly 3318 years ago, in enduring exile (outside and within a non-sovereign Israel) for G-d’s sake, continuing to cry out to Him and not “free themselves from scorn and slavery by becoming apostates,” the Jews “are superior to the Kings of the Davidic dynasty” (4:22-3). The Torah, Ha Levi emphasizes, is the root of this faith and of the light and love it releases into the world. Indeed, “if the doors of perception were cleansed, we would see everything as it is, infinite” (MHH 14). Blake adapts this basic Jewish teaching but his methods and new value system preempt it, establishing in its place a world of mirrors, selfhood and systems such as he himself decries.
For all that he relied on appropriated Jewish sources, Blake and others who made the modern paradigm followed the Greek idea that “man is the measure of all things,” the creed resurgent since the Renaissance. This was the age of Machiavelli whose teaching that truth is nothing but perception and that power and truth can be created by managing perception and people has become the de facto religion of the past five centuries, to our cost. It is eating out the Jewish heart and pulling out the Jewish root of the West such that ‘traditional’ colleges don’t teach Jewish texts at all in studying the “origins of western civilization.” Blake was within this stream of self-creation and arrogance so it was predictable that he demanded of Jews that they “pick up the cross and follow Jesus.” That Jews need be told by anyone to “pick up the cross” is obnoxious and ignorant. That someone steeped in and drawing extensively on Jewish sources and ideas should demand that the Jews drop their teachings is arrogant, crude and self-destructive; it is very western. How ironically apt that Blake made this call in the preface to Part III of his epic poem, Jerusalem, or, the Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804) whose very title indicates the inversion of history and ideological imperialism that distinguishes the West: Jerusalem is the weeping bride and emanation of the confused Albion whom he must re-absorb, an amazing prevision of the nightmare of the British Mandate and of Anglo-American policy to this day. The Ariosophists claimed that the Scriptures were given in Germany to ancient Aryans; a century before them, Blake claimed that divine gnosis was given to the English in England (“and did those feet in ancient times walk on England’s valleys green…”). As the West thus follows Machiavelli and the Romantics and slides into paganism’s will to power, exaltation of the senses and radical revision of history the State encourages every individual to develop their own creed with the result that all get lost in virtual reality and bewildering terrors, social, economic, individual, geopolitical; then the State, “the march of god through history” as Hegel wrote, moves in to pick up the broken pieces.
But every attack, ideological, military, diplomatic or economic on the Jews and Judaism’s different way, “every grain becomes a gem reflected in the beams Divine… and still in Israel’s tents they shine.” While the West preaches progress and exalts the future and the new, denying and burying its roots “Israel has established the principle of tradition, [divine revelation witnessed and] transmitted by a large reliable community generation after generation back to Moshe” (3:24). As much as modern artists, political and social scientists and the States that use them think that they can fashion a new man and woman, “the combination of substances that is needed for creating a human being is solely in the hands of the Creator” (3:23).
Just so, with every passing Tisha B’Av commemorated by the Jewish people the process of rebuilding of the Temple and bringing the light of Torah to the world comes closer: the Jewish people are rebuilding the world. The sequence for this repair was codified by Rambam in Mishneh Torah: when Jews return to the Land, “appoint a king; destroy Amalek; build the Temple” (Laws of Kings and of their Battles, 1:1 passim). For only with Torah and Temple Service can the third pillar of the world, deeds of loving kindness go forth as models from Jerusalem (Pirke Avot 1:2).
Talmud Bavli, Sanhedrin III (NY, Mesorah 2002) with notes by Rabbis Elias, Katz and Dicker. Note: in Hebrew it is characteristic to double a verb for emphasis so that a verb doubled in its a participle and noun form indicates intensity or absolute certainty. The above phrase is generally translated “she weeps bitterly,” or “she weeps sorely.”