This is my column for Tishah B’Av, to raise a voice...to object in the name of G-d and his People
Chazal (Rosh Hashanah 18b) teach that “the death of tzaddikim is equivalent to the burning of the House of our G-d.” This can be understood with the words of the Nefesh Hachayim (1:4), that the ultimate purpose of the dwelling place for the Shechinah, which we call the Beis Hamikdash, is to enable every individual Jew to bring that Divine Presence into himself. Righteous Jews suffused with Torah and yiras Shamayim are living Temples, human personifications of the entire purpose of the inanimate structure standing on the Har Habayis.
I sometimes try to imagine standing in the Beis Hamikdash at the unspeakably painful moment when the crazed Roman hordes first breached its holy walls, or when a flaming arrow first found its mark, igniting the blaze that would soon reduce Makom Hamikdash to smoldering ash. The true aveilus, of course, is over the complete destruction of the Bayis. But there’s a certain poignancy to that first brazen breach, the taking of a flame to the abode of the Master of the Universe. I close my eyes and witness it, and I cry inside.
If the demise of a tzaddik is tantamount to the destruction of the Beis Hamikdash, then perhaps an assault on the honor, certainly on the actual person of such a holy Jew, is nothing less than a flaming arrow aimed at Hashem’s dwelling place. Just weeks ago, such a sacrilege took place, when several of Jerusalem’s renowned elder talmidei chachamim traveled to a site along the main highway in Gush Etzion, where the graves of Jewish ancestors were said to have been disturbed by excavations related to widening the road. Among those who made the arduous trip to register their protest were the frail, aged Eidah Hachareidis Gaavad Rav Yitzchok Tuvia Weiss and Breslov mashpiah Rav Yaakov Meir Schechter.
As they sat in the cars that had brought them there, police lobbed multiple stun grenades in the direction of those vehicles, landing right near them. These “less-lethal weapons” emit an intensely loud noise of 170 decibels and a blinding flash capable of causing flash blindness and deafness; these stun grenades are used in order to create disorientation but have been known to cause serious permanent injury. One demonstrator showed how the entire begged of his tzitzis was badly singed.
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