Bangkok, Bangkok — Cut off shorts, t-shirts, flip-flops: Israeli backpackers in Thailand don’t shed their travel uniforms when they join Chabad for the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, and that suits Rabbi Yosef Kantor just fine.
Tisha b’Av: Making It A Meaningful Fast Day
Bangkok, Bangkok — Cut off shorts, t-shirts, flip-flops: Israeli backpackers in Thailand don’t shed their travel uniforms when they join Chabad for the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, and that suits Rabbi Yosef Kantor just fine.
“Come as you are Judaism,” at the Jewish Association of Thailand comes in many styles: as a taste of home ala hot pita served up in their Bangkok café and announcements about holiday services blasted from megaphones mounted on tuk tuk motor carts. But as summer numbers peak, Chabad draws a different, more contemplative crowd off the streets with a no-frills offer to commemorate the day of fasting and mourning known as “Tisha b’Av.”
Most who enter Bangkok Chabad’s doors on Tisha b’Av already know what they are looking for. As a day when eating, drinking, bathing, leather shoes are just the beginning of the off-limits lists for the day, Tisha bAv is not where most choose to start their exploration of Judaism. Israelis already aware of the traditions of the day stop in at Chabad for a chance to pray and to hear the reading of the Eicha, Lamentations, scroll.
“Religious observance is often habitual,” said Rabbi Kantor. When Israelis are in Thailand, “they have to deal with religion in their own mature terms. They have a chance to open up to new vistas.”
In Israel, the mood of the day that commemorates the destruction of the first and second Holy Temples in Jerusalem, the loss of sovereignty, death and exile that went with it, draws Jews from all factions toward the Western Wall. Today when Israel’s relationship with its land is tenuous, boundaries shifting in accord with political maneuvers, Tisha b’Av is stirring, emotional.
