Celebrating Destruction? - Tisha B'Av 5784

We are in the period of mourning known as the Nine Days, from the first of Av until the ninth - Tisha B’Av.  Tisha B’Av, a(n almost) 25 hour fast which spans this Monday night and Tuesday until nightfall, is the saddest day on the Jewish calendar.  

In addition to fasting, we observe mourning practices.  We do not wear leather shoes (belts and other leather clothes are fine), we do not bathe or wash ourselves except for our fingers when necessary, we do not rub any lotions onto our bodies.  (There are some exemptions for health reasons.  Consult your Rabbi if you have a medical issue.)  We also refrain from intimate marital relations.   

Five major historic calamities are recorded by our Sages as having happened on Tisha B’Av.  The spies whom Moshe sent to scout out Israel came back with a bad report (except Yehoshua and Kalev), and the Jewish people cried all night, losing their faith in Hashem and demanding a return to Egypt.  It was after that event that Hashem said that Tisha B’Av would be a day of crying for generations.  

Both the first and second Holy Temples were destroyed on Tisha B’Av.  The Jews revolted against the Romans after the destruction of the second Temple, believing that their leader Bar Kochba was Moshiach and would bring them redemption.  The Romans ended the revolt with a massacre of the inhabitants of the city of Betar, on Tisha B’Av.  It was on that day a year later that the Romans plowed over the Temple Mount.

In later years more calamities befell us on this day.  The Jews were expelled from England, and later from Spain, on Tisha B’Av.  Germany declared war against Russia, starting the First World War, on Tisha B’Av, and this led to the Second World War and the Holocaust. 

In addition to the above-mentioned mourning practices, it is customary to sit low to the ground, as mourners do, beginning from sunset on Monday until halachic midday on Tuesday (1:12 in Palo Alto).  It is also preferable not to work, although after midday it is permitted.  However our Sages have said that we don't get any blessings from work done on this day.  Obviously employees have to fulfill their responsibilities to their employer.

Among the other customs of the day:  The Book of Eicha is read, ideally with the community in the Synagogue, on Monday evening.  The Torah is read on Tuesday morning and again in the afternoon at Mincha.  We read the book of Kinot, which contains many elegies and lamentations for the destruction of the Temples and for other massacres that happened through the generations.

With all the above, it is easy to get depressed and sink into the negativity of the day.  Chassidus reminds us that we need to recognize that all these events are part of the journey to the coming purification of the world and the glory of the redemption.  We don’t understand why we have to suffer so much, but we can be assured that Hashem has not forsaken us.  The reason we mourn the destruction is in order to remind us that our real existence is not exile.  We remember where we came from, why we are here and where we are heading.

The Tisha B’Av observances are part of the unbroken chain that has kept us going throughout our history.  A Jewish community leader once told me that “we don’t observe Tisha B’Av nowadays” because we don’t feel the connection to the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.  And this attitude was visible in the total assimilation of her community.  When we are connected to our past and our future, we feel the pain and lack of the daily miracles and sacrifices in the Temple, we feel the pain of the challenges to our ownership of our Holy Land, and we feel the pain of all the Mitzvot we cannot observe without the Temple to perform them in.  And we yearn and pray for the rebuilding of the Temple and the fulfillment of the promises in the Torah of a truly enlightened world.

When Moshiach comes, Tish B’Av will instead be celebrated as one of the happiest days of the year, because then we will see how the pain was leading to the joy.  May it be transformed this year.