Why do we hate the Romans? - The Jewish Chronicle

Next Thursday evening Jewish adults across the country will be checking their watches, phones and computers over and over again, urging the digital numbers to progress more swiftly than is arithmetically possible.

Yet despite heroically suffering the effects of acute hunger, the fasters will in the main not actually be sympathetic with the apparent cause of their discomfort; Thursday’s fast, the Ninth of Av, commemorates the destruction of the two Temples.

The First Temple was destroyed by the army of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, in 586BCE and the Second Temple was destroyed by the Roman army in 70CE led by Titus. As a result the thousands of animals that would have been slaughtered as sacrifices get to live longer lives.

We don’t find ourselves standing ankle deep in sacrificial blood, as was the case in the Temple and the corrupt administrators and priests who used the Temple as their “cash cow” have had to find other institutions which they can bleed of money. For this we are fasting? For this we hate the Babylonians and the Romans?

Not only do we not really regret the loss of the Temples, necessity mothered a wonderfully inventive replacement for the lost Temples: the Judaism of the Rabbis. The centuries following the Roman Conquest were the centuries of soaring literary achievement. Mishnah, Talmud and Midrash — all works of intellectual genius and spiritual imagination. They are all the fruits of the post-Temple paradigm.

It was a time when Jewish intellectualism was cherished and rewarded. For the modern Jew this was a more than adequate compensation for the loss of the sacrifices and corruption. And yet we fast and yet we hate the Romans

This dynamic of cherishing a lost past that we hardly miss while embracing the new stands in contrast with our contemporary culture of revision and cancellation. The world in which we live assumes that we demonstrate our love for the new through affecting the intensity of our hate for the past.

Statues to perfectly decent people are pulled down. Streets and buildings are renamed and school curricula are rewritten. This barbaric binarism will surely make fools of us all. At some future date the currently unknown villains of our current culture will be revealed as abusers or discriminators, showing us to have been unthinking enablers of their evil.

For Judaism love of the new is not inconsistent with a respect for the past. There was a time that Jews were expected to kill any member of the nation of Amalek who may cross their path.

Fortunately, today we no longer have to seek out the unfortunate descendants of the Amalekite King Agag. We assume that they are assimilated into other nations and therefore beyond our reach. And yet once a year we change the regular Shabbat Torah reading and “remember what the Amalekites did”; this is Shabbat Zachor, the Shabbat of Remembrance when we recall a past which quite frankly we hope remains a thing of historical interest only.

I illustrated this tension once when I entered a Lunch and Learn at a fine all-girls school, equipped with a large kitchen knife and laminated sheets which purported to have the Order of Service for the Slaughter of Amalekites. It featured a bracha, some psalms and a very charming prayer for the soul of the deceased Amalekite.

I surprised the girls by telling them that I had found a real Amalekite who was now tied up in the boot of my car. The London Beth Din had recognised his provenance and we were going to do the mitzvah of despatching him from this life. Thankfully, the girls rejected my proposal for our lunchtime activity but most intelligently constructed this dichotomy, which is so crucial to both Jewish theology and practice.

The past, however repugnant it may be to our modern sensitivities, was meaningful and moral to our forebears. We don’t kill our nation’s enemies in cold blood. There are many other examples of past practices which on the one hand have been discontinued, yet on the other are not the object of our disdain.

We don’t have slaves any more, yet we study the laws of slavery as presented in the Talmud and subsequent commentaries. We don’t allow fathers to marry off underage daughters and yet a good understanding of the process is an essential part of the education offered by most yeshivot.

Brothers of a deceased husband do not marry their sisters-in-law, yet we insist on marking the abandonment of such marriages through the release ceremony of chalitzah. Similarly, our contemporary practices will no doubt be challenging to our descendants.

Nevertheless, as we have respected the Judaism of the past, so they too will recognise that today’s Judaism had great resonance for the 21st century. That is the brilliance of the halachic process. Continuously imaginative and inventive in creating beautiful new containers for our ancient ideals while still being able to admire those of the past.

We embrace the creativity and inventiveness of the talmudic literature in giving us a way of life that is so full of meaning and inspiration, yet we recognise that there have been other forms of practice which were also beloved and whose loss was deeply mourned. And so we fast and so we hate the Romans.

Rabbi Polak is on the faculty of the London School of Jewish Studies

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Tishah b'Av