Tisha B'Av and Book Lovers Day: No coincidence



(From Deutsches Bundesarchiv)

Those who believe that there are no coincidences will ironically note that Tisha B’av and Book Lovers Day overlap this year.  Tisha B’av 2011 is therefore a time to especially remember these unfortunately accurate words of Henrich Heine:  Where one burns books, one will, in the end, burn people.

Tisha B’Av especially mourns the faithlessness of Moses’ ten (out of twelve) spies plus the response of his Israelite followers, the destruction of the First and Second Temples, the crushing of the Bar Kokhba revolt, and the eventual plowing of the Temple Site.  However, there have been numerous other tragedies in Jewish history since ancient times.

According to Newzgeek.com, on Tisha B’Av 1242 CE there was a “mass burning of the Talmud and other Jewish books” in Paris.  This was “directly ordered by Pope Gregory IX and King Louis, who were fed up with the Jews’ refusal to convert.” 

Unfortunately, this was neither the first nor the last vicious burning of Judaism’s holy books.  Such book-burning had long become “a common practice for anti-Semites who thought that if they could destroy the Word, they would be able to destroy the Jew.”  World War I, which began on Tisha B’Av in 1914, set the stage for an eventual all-out Nazi war on Jewish intellectualism.

On the night of May 10, 1933, Joseph Goebbels addressed some 40,000 book-burning students with these words:  The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end…  And thus you do well to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past…

However, Fahrenheit 451 can only go so far.  The ancient martyr, Rabbi Chananya, was set afire by the Romans while wrapped in his beloved Torah scroll.  Before succumbing to the flames, he managed to cry out:  The parchment is consumed, but the letters fly up in the air.

Resources 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tisha_B'Av

http://www.newzgeek.com/the-day-they-burned-the-books/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_book_burnings

http://ohr.edu/holidays/tisha_bav/mourning/1094

Copyright August 9, 2011 by Linda Van Slyke   All Rights Reserved