COMMENTARY: The Pressure to Move On

c. 2004 Religion News Service (Rabbi Rudin, American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University.) (UNDATED) “It’s time to put it behind us and move on” is an overworked phrase in contemporary American life. Those words are increasingly being heard as we near the third anniversary of the Sept. […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin, American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University.)

(UNDATED) “It’s time to put it behind us and move on” is an overworked phrase in contemporary American life. Those words are increasingly being heard as we near the third anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.


Because Americans love to be optimistic, we constantly invoke that phrase as an escape clause whenever we face major calamities like Watergate, the Vietnam War, a presidential impeachment, or corporate scandals. The upcoming anniversary is the latest example.

But as Judaism has wisely learned, it is dangerous to hastily “move on” without properly mourning our losses, then fully analyzing the crisis and finally creating an appropriate way to remember the catastrophe we have endured. An unexamined crisis that is too quickly “put behind us” becomes a latent malignancy ready to erupt in the future.

U.S. Tennis Open officials recently announced that this year’s women’s final will, in fact, be played on Sept. 11. The tournament declared that since life moves on we cannot forever keep that painful date free of upbeat activities. Perhaps they are right, but simply “moving on” is not an adequate or acceptable response to the epochal destruction and mass murders visited upon this country three Septembers ago.

Many people, especially the victims’ families, feel Sept. 11 should be observed annually as a day of mourning, even as the Fourth of July is a celebration of American independence. Since the debate is sure to continue, Judaism’s response to tragic historic events is instructive as America grapples with the same issue: how to respectfully remember a disaster without making the present and the future permanent prisoners of the past.

Judaism set aside a single day to commemorate the catastrophes Jews have encountered in history. It is Tisha b’Av, the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, occurring this year on July 27. Special synagogue services are held, and some congregations place dark curtains on windows and kindle black candles _ all designed to recollect a bitter past.

The Talmud teaches that “disasters recurred again and again to the Jewish people” on Tisha B’Av. Because an extraordinary number of traumatic events took place on or about the ninth day of Av, the rabbis ascribed those calamities to a single date and made it into a collective day of mourning and fasting.

In 586 B.C. the Babylonians led by Nebuchadnezzar and in 70 A.D. the Romans under Titus demolished Judaism’s two sacred Temples. In three other eerie coincidences, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella issued their edict expelling Jews from Spain around Tisha b’Av in 1492. World War I began on the 9th of Av _ Aug. 1, 1914. And 10 years ago, the Buenos Aires headquarters of the Argentinean Jewish community was blown up by terrorists on July 18, the day after Tisha b’Av.


Because the ninth of Av is so fraught with tragedy, Jeremiah’s biblical book of Lamentations is read in synagogues on that date. Lamentations is a powerful cry of the heart vividly describing the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and its Holy Temple. Jeremiah foresaw his beloved Jerusalem’s destruction, but his lament is free of self-vindication and “I told you so.”

In many ways the prophet’s opening lines aptly describe the desolation of lower Manhattan that took place on Sept. 11, more than 2,500 years after Jerusalem’s destruction:

“Oh, how lonely she sits, the city once thronged with people, as if suddenly widowed. Though once great among the nations … the city passes her nights weeping; the tears run down her cheeks … mutely the people sit on the ground, the elders … have put dust on their heads and wrapped themselves in sackcloth … my eyes wasted away with weeping, my entrails shuddered, my liver spilled on the ground at the ruin of my people, as children, mere infants, fainted in the city squares.”

Because of Tisha b’Av and Jeremiah’s haunting lament, Jews have never put those terrible events “behind them and moved on.” There is profound religious and psychological wisdom in commemorating our darkest moments. The trick is not to wallow in pathos, but to recognize that evil exists in a world crying out to be redeemed. Once that goal is achieved, and an annual ritual of lamentation and remembrance best does it, we will then truly be able to “move on and put Sept. 11 behind us.”

DEA/MO/JL END RUDIN

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