Tisha Be'av: Breaking rocks in Jerusalem

For Shivi Froman, who will be taking part in a Tisha Be’av program in the City of David, the Temple is more of a spiritual than a physical concept.

By BARRY DAVIS
Shivi Froman 521 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Shivi Froman 521
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Shivi Froman tries to keep things in balance. That’s what the thirtysomething educator hopes to achieve when he participates in the Tisha Be’av program “How the Rocks Break” in Jerusalem’s Old City next week.
“The whole thing will take place in Section G of the archeological excavations at the City of David, where, as far as I understand, there is the greatest number of archeological strata,” notes Froman, who serves as an assistant to Education Minister Shai Piron.
But although the Old City event will involve an atmosphere of debate, his participation in it has nothing to do with politics.
“It is important to know the history of the place, and when you talk about the local history and current affairs, I believe it is important to encounter all of that in physical terms, to actually visit the place you are talking about, and not just Google it,” says Froman, who is the son of the late Rabbi Menachem Froman of Tekoa. “We are going to be talking about Jerusalem in abstract terms, and that makes it all the more important to come into tangible contact with Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple. You can find evidence of that in Section G.”
It is said that the Second Temple was destroyed because of baseless hatred, and Froman feels the issue is just as relevant today.
“For me, the venue of the Tisha Be’av event in which I will be taking part has the physicality of the past of the destruction [of the Temple] and the physicality of the present of the destruction,” he says, explaining that by “destruction” he means “a situation that is not complete.”
“The fire [that destroyed the Temple] started on the ninth of Av and ended on the 10th. As far as I am concerned, that fire is still raging today. That means that the holiness and good of the rebuilding [of the Temple] is simply not happening today. As long as that does not happen, the fire is still here, and still causing destruction.”
He adds that he is unsure what the rebuilding of the Temple – or lack thereof – actually entails. “I don’t know whether it is a physical thing or a spiritual one.”
However, on a couple of visits to India, the educator did get some sense of the corporeal shape the Third Temple might take.
“I visited the Golden Temple in Amritsar on two occasions,” he recalls.
“It was built by the Sikhs, which is a monotheistic religion, and it is...
exclusively a house of prayer. There were no sacrifices made there, like in our Temple, or anything else.”
His visits there aroused some understanding of what it might have felt like to visit the Temple in Jerusalem.
“When I was there, in Amritsar, they were the only real times when I missed our Temple in a physical sense – of a home, in an atmosphere of purity, silence and sanctification. It was only [then] that I longed for our temple as a real building.”
Nonetheless, he largely relates to the tragic events of Tisha Be’av on a spiritual plane.
“I know there is much discussion, in Judaism, about how the actual Third Temple will look, but I don’t really relate to that,” he says. “For me, the Temple is about being in a healthy, good and complete state of reality. I don’t really care [about] the appearance of the Temple, or whether there will or won’t be sacrifices made there, or whether there will be gold, silver, purple or scarlet. It is not about the physicality.
Rather, it is about the possibility that the building represents.”
One way of achieving the spiritual level required for rebuilding the Temple and Jerusalem, he suggests, is by getting involved in honest-togoodness dialogue.
“You know the Second Temple was destroyed because of baseless hatred, and the first one was destroyed because of idol worship,” he says. He contends that the latter can result from people getting on their hobby horses and becoming oblivious to the views of others.
“The First Temple was destroyed at a time when everyone thought that the other was an idol worshiper – because they had a different opinion – and that led to bloodshed,” he explains. “It was a situation in which people said: ‘As we don’t, God forbid, want to arrive at a situation in which there is idol worship, I have to kill anyone who doesn’t think like me, anyone who doesn’t follow exactly the right approach to life.’ The world of idol worship is a world in which anything goes – as the Indians say, ‘Sab kuch milega,’ everything is possible, everything is cool. That’s the world of idol worship.”
Froman says the ideal is to tread the middle ground between the go-withthe- flow mind-set and the punctilious approach.
“One temple was destroyed because people didn’t care about the details, and the other was destroyed because they paid too much attention to them,” he explains, adding that the principles themselves are fine, it is just a matter of maintaining a healthy equilibrium. “The two extremes of the divine reality – precision and endless possibilities – have to be expressed in the right way.”
That involves accommodating a wide spectrum of ideas and approaches, and allowing healthy discussion to take place, as will be the case during the July 15 event in the Old City.
“We have to know how to live in a world of precision, infinity, and of debate. I think that is what we will aim to create at the ‘How the Rocks Break’ event – a genuine and searching discussion-debate, but in a way that builds the world up, rather than destroying the world.”
Monday evening’s program (in Hebrew) starts with prayer and a reading of the Book of Lamentations at 8 p.m., followed by a guided tour of the City of David, with the discussion slot starting at 10:45 p.m. Froman’s fellow debaters represent an eclectic array of schools of thought; among them are internationally acclaimed singer David D’or; Rabbi Danny Segal, spiritual head of a religious and secular community settlement in the Judean Desert; and Midrashic researcherjournalist Yael Mali. Yaniv Mezuman, head of the pluralistically-oriented Lachish pre-army mechina program, will act as discussion moderator. For more information: *6033.