July 28, 2022

If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand lose its cunning; let my tongue stick to my palette if cease to think of you, if I do not keep Jerusalem in memory even at my happiest hour.—Psalm 137

Whoever mourns for Zion will be privileged to behold her joy.—Talmud, Sotah

To believe is to remember. The substance of our very being is memory, our way of living is retaining the reminders, articulating memory. After the destruction of Jerusalem, the city did not simply become a vague memory of the distant past; it continued to live as an inspiration in the hearts and minds. of the people. Jerusalem became a central hope, symbol of our hopes.—Abraham Joshua Heschel

I remember a family trip several years ago to Jerusalem for my brother-in-law’s wedding. Late in the summer, Israel’s heat extends into its nights, thick and heavy. The week prior to Danny’s wedding, my wife and I were in Jerusalem, walking the city’s streets — now alive again with activity, development and people, savoring our chance to absorb its smells, sounds and character. With the coincidence of Tisha B’Av (the ninth of Av) and Danny’s wedding at the same time, Elana and I had a chance to mark the fast in one of Jerusalem’s many synagogues.

We chose Congregation Emet Ve-Emunah (Truth and Faith), where my father-in-law had become a bar mitzvah many decades prior. The congregation still met in the same basement, at the bottom of an old apartment building on one of the city’s winding side streets.

As my eyes adjusted to the dim light of the synagogue, which was itself little more than a basement with benches, a podium and a ponderous wooden closet containing a few Torah scrolls, the attendants passed out candles to everyone present. To my surprise, they then turned out all the lights, punctuating the dark with a scattering of candles, one per worshiper. At the front of the sanctuary, his back facing us so he would pour out his song toward the Ark, to God, the Hazzan chanted the mournful words of Eikhah, the Book of Lamentations, describing the Babylonian assault on Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E. and the suffering of its inhabitants.

The present dissolved. Huddled on low benches while mourning the Hurban (the destruction) of Solomon’s Temple, and of the Second Temple some two thousand years ago, I felt that Tisha B’Av seemed more compelling, a more potent symbol of the human predicament than anything in contemporary life. In the basement of a rebuilt apartment complex in Jerusalem, we fasted and cried over the ruins of ancient Jerusalem and the disappointments of the human condition.

Each year at the same time, the residents of Jerusalem enact a poignant paradox. Despite the fact that the city has been reunited, that Israel’s capital is now the home of a great university, impressive museums and concert centers, bustling commerce, vibrant new and old neighborhoods, once a year the people of Jerusalem, as do Jews everywhere, pause to mourn the destruction of their ancient city — our city — thousands of years ago.

To observe Tisha B’Av in Jerusalem is to allow the past to engulf the present, to induce a willful amnesia in the conviction that the resultant memory will be more true, more incisive and more real. To mourn the destruction of ancient Jerusalem is to deny the present its despotic hold on our attention, to affirm that there is much to learn from the past—about human living, about coping with despair and suffering, about redeeming the human heart.

Tisha B’Av is a day of mourning that originated in the year 586 B.C.E., when the First Temple—the one built by King Solomon some 400 years earlier—was destroyed by the Babylonians, and the Jews of Israel were forcibly deported east. At the same season, in the year 70 C.E., the Roman troops under their general Titus destroyed the Second Temple, ending an era in Jewish worship. Throughout the years, this day has remained a magnet attracting Jewish suffering: The Edict of the Expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290 and the expulsion from Spain in 1492 were both signed at the time of Tisha B’Av. The tragedy of World War I was initiated on Tisha B’Av, in many ways setting the stage for World War II and the murder of six million Jews in the Shoah.

For the past two thousand years, Jews have used this day as a sponge, absorbing millennia of suffering and abuse at the hands of pagan, Christian and Moslem persecutors, and more recently, Nazi, Communist, terrorist and White Supremacist assaults. Years of forced conversions, rape, degradation, pogroms, lynchings and murders contribute to a renewed memory and determination on Tisha B’Av.

Suffering alone cannot provide purpose to Jewish identity, but one cannot come to terms with what that identity has meant without grappling with the ancient and resurgent presence of antisemitism. 

Suffering alone cannot provide purpose to Jewish identity, but one cannot come to terms with what that identity has meant without grappling with the ancient and resurgent presence of antisemitism. On Tisha B’Av, we mourn that so many people have hated so much. We cry over the consequent suffering of innocents beyond counting.

But this fast is not simply to record the endlessness of Jew hatred and Jew beatings. This day also marks the end of Jewish sovereignty, of the kind of security and self-confidence that can only emerge when a people controls its own destiny, lives on its own land, determines its future for itself.

Some two thousand years ago, on Tisha B’Av, Jews lost the power to cultivate our own character according to our own standards. Stripped of control, of the authority of our own leaders and laws, Jews became the subject of other peoples’ legal systems, other peoples’ cultural priorities and prejudices, other peoples’ armies and police. For two thousand years, we have developed a variety of Jewish identities and cultures, always judged by external standards, living as a persecuted minority, in countries we were told were not ours, we learned to keep a wary eye on how others would perceive our values, our symbols and our achievements.

On Tisha B’Av, then, we mourn our lost independence and our weakened self-confidence. We mourn our dependence on the whims and kindnesses of strangers.

Finally, on Tisha B’Av, we attend not only to history — the loss of a building and of national standing — we mourn a psychological and spiritual reality as well.

For our ancestors the Temple was not merely a place of worship and pomp; it was a symbol of wholeness. There it was possible to fulfill the desire of our Creator completely, to become one with God. Religion — tangible in form and simple in concept — provided a concrete way to expiate guilt, express gratitude, and share in success. By its very structure the Temple stood beyond time, offering the iron-clad assurances that God dwelt there, that all was well.

The Hurban destroyed that sense of well-being. Instead of providing a place where Jews knew exactly how to make good with God, the ruins now became a potent symbol that we all live in a world of inevitable pain and ultimate abandonment. Love affairs, so full of promise at the start, often slide into mediocrity or erupt into hostility. Careers fail to provide a sense of excitement or purpose — jobs are frequently lost or denied. Children and parents rarely fulfill each other’s dreams and expectations. Those we love move to distant places. Illness erupts into the best of lives; people die. Each of us, no matter how content we may be, live under the shadow of aging and our own mortality.

The Hurban symbolizes all that. There is no perfect place. The Temple, a projection of the harmony and unity that we perceived as children, has fallen before the onslaught of maturity, sexuality and death. On Tisha B’Av, we mourn the loss of that innocence. And of wholeness.

At the very beginning of the evening service for Tisha B’Av, the Hazzan rises to announce that “This year is the __th year since the destruction of the Holy Temple. Each generation in which the Temple is not rebuilt should regard itself as responsible for its destruction.”

There is no Temple. The world is still saturated with disappointment, disease and despair. Our task, simple to articulate and impossible to complete, is to begin the work of rebuilding the Temple — by restoring a wholeness to our shattered planet, renewing a bond of trust between humanity and its members, repeating the commitment made by our ancestors to nurture our covenant with God, to be a holy people.

Tisha B’Av, by forcing us to recognize a trail of tragedy and a psychology of division, is the crucial first step toward transformation and transcendence. In the words of the Talmud, “You are not required to complete the task, yet neither are you free to desist from it.”

Tisha B’Av signifies a willingness to begin the task, even though its conclusion eludes our view.

It is up to us to begin.

Bradley Shavit Artson, a contributing writer to the Jewish Journal, is Abner and Roslyn Goldstine Dean’s Chair of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, American Jewish University.

During the summer heat, as we anticipate a time of slowing down and perhaps even finding moments of pleasure, we Jews tap into a sadness leading to grief. Tradition encourages our memories to be jogged as we enter into the new month of Av, laden with historic calamities, particularly the ones most pivotal and strikingly cataclysmic: The destruction of the holy temples, the first in 586 BCE and the second in 70 CE. Both were a devastation of our then central physical home as well as the Holy Land on which it stood, Jerusalem, in blazing fire and blood-filled streets. Tisha B’Av, the Ninth of Av, is calendared so as not to forget. And the destruction included the annihilation of thousands of Jews, as well as the dismantling of our community, with many fleeing for their lives, inaugurating an ongoing exilic journey for generations to come.

The rabbis, with their astounding and innovative coping mechanisms, reshaped Judaism, shifting from the sacrificial as the center of ritual life to a religion focused on words based on Torah (both written and oral) and prayer. The words of Torah are the first words and teachings from above, from HaShem to us, and prayer is comprised of heart-felt words of devotion, pain and gratitude from us to HaShem. Yet our beloved sages made sure we continued to honor our history, the customs of our past, and vast breadth of emotions including the pain and sadness interwoven with these events. Grief, which reflects the depth of pain and loss in our souls, is among the most necessary of emotions to be expressed. The deep wisdom of our sages instilled, as part of our tradition and rituals, an ongoing connection to empathizing with our ancestors and their pain, reliving it as if it is a reality in the moment. When we sit low to the ground, chant the text of Lamentations, surrounded by the dim light of burning candles, we relive in a visceral way the degradation, the despoliation, and horrors that besieged our people 2,000 years ago. In fact, this same date also marks the devastating events of 1492 when Spain expelled all Jews, as well as events connected to WWI, WWII and the Holocaust.

Opening our hearts to pain creates a soul more tender and open to the coming messages of the High Holy Days and T’shuvah, change and return.

It is not only a powerful moment to be honored in the present, but also the beginning and preparation for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Opening our hearts to pain creates a soul more tender and open to the coming messages of the High Holy Days and T’shuvah, change and return. It is a brilliant, well-connected continuing circle that we dance year after year.

But for Jews, women and Americans where do these vital and painful emotions reside? How do we have an opportunity to connect with them and find release and transformation in the process? Grief has been an integral feature of these past years. We’ve watched millions throughout the world die of COVID, seen cities burn as a result of climate change, been witness to the dismantling of democratic beliefs and actions, witnessed devastating carnage from rifles that belong on fields of war, experienced the removal of freedoms and choice for women left only with fear, and observed the outrageous lack of consequence for those who participated in a political coup, while also managing our own losses in many facets of our lives — familial, professional and personal. For some it is as if the world we once knew is slipping through our finger tips.

We must embrace and honor grief, even as it has a way of draining energy, causing foggy minds and even moments of sadness and depression, which have risen over the past three years.

So many mourn and don’t even realize it. Life is a constant confrontation with change and many of us manage to acclimate to and even accept these moments in our lives, but the life-altering and cultural shifts brought on by such devastations as war, climate change, outrageous political controls, deaths of innocent young children, and a global pandemic impact each of us at our very core. The result is grief. We must embrace and honor grief, even as it has a way of draining energy, causing foggy minds and even moments of sadness and depression, which have risen over the past three years. Close to 300,000 million people have incidents of depression and my hunch is this does not include the many who have not shared what they are experiencing, particularly those alone and still in lockdown. Living with unknown has a way of bearing down on one’s spirit, particularly when it is laden with potential terrifying, negative outcomes.

As we come to honor our Jewish past, we must also give homage to the human dilemma in which we reside, find connections to others who feel the same and explore and share ways of expression and new modes of healing that can transform suffering and brokenness into new levels of inner calm and wholeness.

Eva Robbins is a rabbi, cantor, artist and the author of “Spiritual Surgery: A Journey of Healing Mind, Body and Spirit.”