Tisha B’Av: Mourning and Resilience. |
Contemporary Context to Fasting and Lamenting
American Jews should pay more attention to Tisha B’Av because it offers the raison d’etre for American Jewry and all other great diasporas particularly this year when internal strife in Israel is at boiling point and Jews in America are anxious about their future. Against such a backdrop, Tisha B’Av should be experienced not merely as a day of mourning for past calamities, but also as an annual celebration of communal resilience even in case of doomsday. Fasting and lamenting will help you acknowledge the past, but learning will prepare you for the future.
Tisha B’Av, the ninth day of the month of Av, is the most solemn day in the Jewish calendar. It primarily commemorates the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE and of the Second Temple in 70 CE, which represents the loss of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel and the beginning of exile. Traditional Jews mark Tisha B’Av with customs of mourning a tragic loss: We fast, sit low, read the searing words of Megillat Eicha and recite lamentations, kinot. At midday of Tisha B’Av, the mourning begins to ease, and six days later, by the 15th day of Av, Jews celebrate the “Jewish day of love”.
Tisha B’Av also memorializes later catastrophes, most of which did not actually happened on that date: the fall of the city of Betar at the end of the Bar-Kochva Rebellion in 135; the devastation by the Crusades in the 11th-12th centuries; burning of the Talmud in Paris in 1242; the expulsions from England in 1290 and Spain in 1492; and the mass deportation of Warsaw’s Jews beginning in 1942. As of 2024, some rabbis suggested........