Tisha B’Av asks us to sit among ruins and – as we encourage our Miller Intro to Judaism students to do – to ask questions.
On this holy day, starting at sundown Wednesday, we traditionally mourn the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem, along with other catastrophes that have marked Jewish history. We fast from sundown to sundown, the only day of the year we do this besides Yom Kippur. We sit on the ground like we do in a shiva house. But the day is not only about buildings and loved ones lost long ago.
It is about what happens when a world we trusted collapses, and how we respond when the future no longer resembles the one we had imagined.
Most of us know something about ruins. A relationship ends. A community fractures. A diagnosis arrives. A plan we carefully constructed becomes impossible. We may be tempted to hurry past the grief, to search immediately for the lesson, the silver lining, or the next practical step.
Tisha B’Av offers a different wisdom: Before rebuilding, we must be willing to see what has been broken.
And yet Tisha B’Av does not leave us forever in the rubble. Jewish tradition imagines redemption beginning precisely there – in the ruins of a world lost – not because every loss can be repaired, but because even among ruins we can choose what we will carry forward: compassion, memory, responsibility, and hope.
The question of Tisha B’Av is not simply, “What have we lost?”
It is also, “What kind of people will we become as we rebuild?”
