Tisha b’Av, Population Patterns
It wasn’t until my first Tisha b’Av in Jerusalem two years ago, that this day of fasting and mourning morphed from a 24 hour endurance test sans food or drink, to a day of compelling personal relevance. To someone who has been observing Tisha b’Av all her life, this came as a surprising discovery.
But that was the infamous summer of the withdrawal from Gush Katif . . . To so many of us, the destruction happening before our eyes, was hardly a matter of old history.
The day-to-day situation in Israel makes Tisha b’Av matter deeply to a wide cross section of Jews. The physical site of the Temple can readily be pointed to, making its destruction and everything represented by the dissolution of the Jewish Commonwealth, much closer to real life experience. And the politics makes the precariousness of Jewish sovereignty an immediate concern to Israel’s Jews, many of whom are still reeling from the trauma and self-inflicted wounds of the summer of 2005.
What of Jews in the Diaspora? Diaspora Jewry is a fact of, and a direct consequence of the destruction. Yet Tisha b’Av outside of Israel seems more removed, compared with the way it is experienced by Israeli Jews—many thousands of whom made their way to the Western Wall on the eve of Tisha b’Av, where Eicha, Lamentations and the dirges of Tisha b’Av known as Kinot were read.
Outside of Israel, the day does not seem to hold quite the same emotional intensity. And yet, in the course of the last week, I counted email after email coming from different Chabad centers across the U.S. and other countries, informing readers of their Tisha b’Av community-wide events.
Article continued (Lubavitch.com)
The Western Wall. Photo: I. Bardugo
