‘Shabbat Hazon’ – the Shabbat before Tisha B’Av – ‘is on a level higher than all other shabbatot of the year’. Thus writes the Apter Rav, one of the great Hassidic teachers of the late 19th and early 20th Century, in his work Ahavat Yisrael.
How so? The Apter Rav relates being asked about a midrash so outrageous it almost feels forbidden to quote. ‘There was no day as festive for Israel as the day the Temple was destroyed’. What could such a midrash possibly mean?
Consider – if you have ever had the experience (most of us have) - the failure of a romantic relationship that you were deeply invested in but which for one reason or another just couldn’t work out. What were the emotions of the last day?
The British author, Ian McEwan, in his novella, Chesil Beach, describes the painful relationship of a young couple in the early 1960s. Although genuinely in love with one another they are unable to properly communicate. Shy, embarrassed, unable to empathise and understand one another, their wedding night is a disaster which results in the young bride fleeing the honeymoon suite to be alone on the beach. Her groom follows her out, a heated dispute erupts between the two of them, and she runs away down the beach. But he does not follow her. He stays where he is and never sees her again. McEwan writes:
This is how the entire course of life can be changed – by doing nothing. On Chesil beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back. Instead, he stood in cold and righteous silence in the summer’s dusk, watching her hurry along the shore, the sound of her difficult progress lost to the breaking of small waves, until she was blurred, receding against the immense straight road of shingle gleaming in the pallid light.
At the moment of greatest pain, as the relationship fell apart, she loved him more than she ever had before. How paradoxical and strange yet how relatable. The moment of greatest pain is also the moment of greatest love.
To return to the Apter Rav. This confounding midrash, of the day of the Temple’s destruction being one of the greatest days of God’s relationship with Israel, is to be understood in relation to a halacha in the laws of Nidda. The gemara in Yevamot 62b states:
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