The Midrash characterizes the three weeks between the Seventeenth of Tammuz and Tishah B’Av as the time when demons prowl and the destroyer lays waste at noon. It is the time when our people’s pursuers – demons in bodies of flesh and blood – overtook and laid waste to her as well. Rav Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler (Michtav MeEliyahu, Vol. 2, p. 48) points out that the Midrash is teaching us not only of a phenomenon that occurred at the time of the destruction, but of one that recurs throughout history. The edict banishing the Jews from England was signed by the English monarch on Tishah B’Av in the year 1290. The expulsion of the Jews from Spain occurred on Tishah B’Av in 1492. And World War I, which caused great upheavals for European Jewry and was the precursor of World War II and the Holocaust, essentially began on Tishah B’Av of 1914, the day that Germany declared war on Russia.
More Recent Events During the Three Weeks
[None of these events occurred on the spur of the moment. All were preceded by incidents and plans that took place “between the straits.”] In a fascinating book, “The Hidden Hand,” Rabbi Yaakov Astor expands on this theme and adds several other events to this list, among them: The Seventeenth of Tammuz, 1934, was “the Night of the Long Knives,ˮ the internal purge of the murderous Nazi party, which consolidated the power of the Nazi leader, whose blotted name we will not dignify with mention in these pages. And the gas chambers of Treblinka began their grisly work precisely on the day of Tishah B’Av, 1942. The fact that these misfortunes befall our people during the Three Weeks is in fact a source of consolation to us. For it makes us realize that these events are not mere happenstance, but are part of the Divine plan and orchestration of history.
