Future Reflections for Tisha B'Av

I'm leaning heavily into the "first and second draft thoughts" of this blog here. This has been an idea percolating in my head for several weeks now. I am grateful for this holiday as motivation to get these reflections on paper.

One of the more compelling analyses of the destruction of the Second Temple comes from Rabbi Benay Lappe’s powerful concept of “crash theory,” seen here in a talk Lappe gave in 2014. Lappe, the founder of SVARA, “a traditionally radical yeshiva,” uses crash theory to outline an ancestral and archetypal pattern to how people respond when the prominent story or paradigm of their culture inevitably “crashes,” or collapses due to external and internal forces. Lappe says that, when these crashes take place, people often react in one of three ways:

1. Deny the crash took place and hold even more tightly to the existing narrative, sealing yourself off from anything that might threaten it.

   
   

2. Reject and throw away the old narrative entirely and move on to a completely new overarching paradigm…which itself will inevitably crash in the future. This, according to Lappe, is a bit of a “baby with the bathwater” kind of situation.

1. Accept and embrace the crash, understand what still works and what is possible, and lean into creativity and decomposition to create something new out of transformed and reworked elements of the old.

Most often, people will choose option 1 or 2. Lappe wants us to see what could happen if we choose the third option. To take what works, transform what doesn’t, and chart new experimental courses and curiosities for the generations of Jewish communities to come. Often, when I encounter references to the destruction of the Second Temple and the birth of rabbinic Judaism as a source of innovation and opportunity amidst grief, the engagement with Lappe’s wisdom stops here. But in doing so, we miss an important piece of the story.

You see, it’s not like the Second Temple was destroyed on a Monday and then BOOM we magically have rabbinic Judaism on a Tuesday. Or Wednesday, for that matter. By the time the Temple was destroyed, the stirrings of rabbinic Judaism had already begun. Lappe shares that Temple Judaism already wasn’t working for the rabbis: “It had long since crashed for them, even while the Temple was still standing.” And it wasn’t just rabbinic Judaism. There were many “option 3s” that were emerging before and emerged after the Temple’s destruction: the Essenes, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, another particularly revolutionary group of Jews, the Jews that converted to Christianity, and of course, those Jews that belonged to different iterations of Judaism entirely, but, because of lack of numbers or historical documentation, their identities are lost to us. 

It would be easy to gaze back almost two thousand years and regard rabbinic Judaism as some kind of magical solution to the unfathomable violence and loss when the Second Temple fell. It would be reasonable, neat even, to tell this story as if Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai approached his negotiations with the Roman general to preserve the city of Yavneh (which would ultimately become one of if not the prominent site of rabbinic Judaism) as if he knew exactly what would ensure the future of his community. And maybe he did. Who am I to question the prophetic wisdom of our sages? (I jest. I am constantly questioning this.) 

But I’d like to think he wasn’t entirely sure. That when the Second Temple fell to the Roman armies, no one really knew which of the many emerging “option 3” Judaisms would be the one that would enable Jewish communities to navigate through this crash moment and beyond. I am drawn to the work of futurism, in part, because there is something deeply democratizing about the fact that despite in-depth research, data analysis and trend-spotting, none of us can perfectly predict the future (Maimonides would tell us not to even try, but that’s a blog post for another day). At its core, futurism helps us to navigate communal uncertainty with resilience, creativity, and curiosity. Resilience because we need clarity around what elements of our traditions and stories still serve us in this moment and should be carried forward––even if doing so requires making them in some ways unrecognizable. Creativity because we need many new and innovative ideas––even the ones that don’t work––in order to find ones that do. And curiosity because we need to stay open to whatever those ideas turn out to be.

On this Tisha B’Av, as we read, pray, and fast amidst layers of grief past, present, and future––for the destruction of the Second Temple, for the Holocaust, the genocide in Gaza, the violent presence of ICE in our communities, the scourge of anti-Black racism and the death of Nolan Wells, and many other horrors too countless to list––we give ourselves the gift of sitting in the not knowing. In this moment of polycrisis, of simultaneous crash and churn, we don’t yet know which of the many gorgeous emerging threads of Jewish community and imagination will become our Yavneh. We don’t yet know which threads of scholarship, story, ritual, protest, and prayer being woven right now will be the ones that carry us through this crash and into whatever comes after it.

This uncertainty is not a failure of vision. It is the ground every option 3 has ever been built on. May we have the resilience to carry our communities forward, the creativity to risk building what doesn't yet exist, and the curiosity to recognize it when it arrives—even, and maybe especially, on a day when we can't yet see it.

L’shalom,

Becca