Pirkei Avot has no obvious point of contact with Tisha be’Av.
On a day when Eicha, the Book of Lamentations, is twice recited in most
synagogue services, we find reference to only one verse from that Book in Avot—and
that is taken out of context. At Eicha 3:28 we read:
יֵשֵׁב בָּדָד וְיִדֹּם כִּי נָטַל עָלָיו
The Lamentations translation is:
“Let him sit in solitude and be
submissive, for He [i.e. God] has laid it upon him”.
In other words, a person who has been beset by misfortune
should sit as one who has been forsaken while he awaits an improvement in his
condition. In contrast, the Avot ‘translation’ is taken as proof for the
proposition that if even a solitary individual sits and learns, without sharing
his words of Torah with anyone else, he will still be rewarded for it:
"He sits alone in meditative
stillness; indeed, he receives [a reward] for it".
On Tisha be’Av we do indeed sit by ourselves for much of the
day, and most Torah learning (including Avot) is prohibited.
It is ironical that we may not learn Avot on Tisha be’Av if we follow the extensive narrative in the Babylonian Talmud that seeks to attribute a chain of causation to the destruction of the Second Temple. In short we can deduce that, if our forefathers had taken the tractate of Avot to heart and applied it in
their daily lives, the Second Temple would never have been destroyed. This narrative (Gittin 55b – 56a) opens with the story of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza,
where a guest mistakenly invited to a party was publicly humiliated (cf Avot
3:15, per Rabbi Elazar HaModa’i, on not shaming another person in public). The
rabbis who were present made no apparent effort to make peace between the warring parties (Avot 1:12, per Hillel); nor did they take the initiative and intervene to calm the situation (cf Avot 2:6, also per Hillel). Had they done so, we may infer, disaster could have been averted.
I hope and pray that this year’s Tisha be’Av solemnities
will be the last, that I shall see the Temple rebuilt in my lifetime and that
we, and the rest of the world, will experience the real peace that will prevail
when that happens. In the meantime, I wish those readers who are marking the
day in the traditional way an easy fast—and a meaningful one.
