A censored essay reveals its truth again this Tisha B’av
by Diane Joy Schmidt
Tisha B’av, the commemoration of disasters in Jewish history, begins the evening of Saturday, August 2nd, 2025.
In 2013, twelve years ago, a paragraph in an essay I wrote for Tisha B’av as correspondent for the former NM Jewish Link was censored by the CEO of the Jewish Federation of New Mexico in that federation-controlled publication. What is ever clearer to me since is that people who welcome destruction will not listen to reason.
And that there is a through line to the current catastrophe in Gaza, with the bad actors of Hamas and of the extreme right in the Israeli government, which I fear in turn will lead to a repeat of history. In one view, hubris led to the destruction of the 2nd Temple. Here are the words that were excised in 2013;
”The coming of the Jewish Messiah, the coming of the Moslem Mahdi, the return of the Christian Christ — like a bad Western, all three gangs are converging on the same town at high noon, gunning for Armageddon.
Messianic fervor is rising, and with it, fanaticism.”
A later version of the complete essay was published as “Waters of Babylon“ on Schmidt’s Times of Israel Blogs in 2016 after Trump selected evangelist Mike Pence as his running mate: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/waters-of-babylon/
Diane Joy Schmidt was raised with humanist values and the traditions of Reform Judaism, is anchored by her memories of the fireflies at Union Institute camp and the Big Dipper over Lake Michigan, and is an admirer of all things spiritually resonant.
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