Fasting on Tisha B’Av this year
* Translated by Janine Muller Sherr
“I’m fasting on Tisha B’Av for the first time this year,” a makeup artist told me yesterday in the TV studio. She isn’t alone. Many people will be fasting this year for the first time and there is no need to explain why. Last Shabbat, I met another young person who told me the same thing.
More than 100 survivors of the Nova festival had come to spend a Shabbat together in Jerusalem. One participant, who lost several of her friends at the festival, told me that she has been waiting for Tisha B’Av so she can sit on the ground, cry, recite the kinot (lamentations), and feel the pangs of hunger from tonight (Monday) until Tuesday night.
She had never felt any connection to the word churban (destruction)—it seemed to be from another world. But now she feels directly connected to the mourning and is searching for away to express her pain. She explained her feelings in a profound way: “I didn’t sit shiva for my friends because we weren’t family. But Tisha B’Av is the national day of shiva for our entire Jewish family.”
This year, Tisha B’Av is not symbolic, but painfully real. It is not a coincidence that our enemies are threatening to attack us on that day, God forbid. This day has been “prime time” for all of our suffering: the day when both of our Temples were destroyed, the day of the Sin of Spies, and the day on which countless tragedies have befallen our people throughout the ages.
But I told that survivor, who so desperately wants to fast, that there is another side to this story; Tisha B’Av is also a day for us to notice how much progress we have made and where we are heading.
Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach said that there are two types of tears: ones that flow down from our sorrow and pain, and those that rise up through our hopes and prayers. The second type of tears are the tears of Tisha B’Av.
It is the day to take all of our tears— not only those we have shed since October 7th—and direct them upward: to scream, to pray, to hope, and to dream great dreams for the future. It is for this reason that already on the afternoon of Tisha B’Av, we get up from the ground and shake ourselves off. Some communities even have the custom of sweeping the house to welcome the arrival of Moshiach.
Yes—Moshiach! If we have learned this year to adjust our thinking, then maybe it’s time for us to start using terms like “complete redemption.”Just as we were shocked this year by the enormity of the evil we faced, we look forward to being surprised by the amount of good that that will come our way.
We have witnessed a nightmare that we could never have imagined; but we have also been promised the fulfillment of visions of beauty, consolation and joy, beyond our wildest imagination.
Our fate is in our hands
* Translation by Yehoshua Siskin
It’s amazing. Whenever the question is asked why the Second Temple was destroyed the answer is immediately forthcoming: baseless hatred. And why was the First Temple destroyed? Idol worship, incest, and bloodshed.
No one says that the Babylonian army was stronger than ours or that the Romans attacked from the north or from the south. It is clear that there was a military defeat, but it is also clear that the real reason for the Temples’ destruction was spiritual since our values had been compromised. The source of everything that happens here is the values we uphold and how we treat each other. We were exiled because we were alienated from our divine souls, from our true identity and heritage, from our togetherness as one people.
Tisha B’Av is a day to remind ourselves that beyond the day-to-day events that we see, hidden forces are at work. If we become more spiritually aware, this will have a positive influence on the physical reality around us. Thus, the optimistic message of today is that our fate is in our hands. It’s possible to make amends at any moment and make unity among our people the abiding value in our lives.
(Tonight in the Kotel. Photo: Yossef Cohen. The shirt says "We rose and we will get better")
