How was your Tisha B'Av? It sounds like a strange question. Isn't everyone's Tisha B'Av more or less the same? We fast, we read Lamentations and Kinot, and then it's over. It's time to think about Rosh Hashanah. But Tisha B'Av is profoundly connected to the

Tisha B'Av is profoundly connected to the repentance theme of Rosh Hashanah.

repentance theme of Rosh Hashanah.


Tisha B'Av is a time to cry. Some of us cry for our tragic history. Some cry for the wounds we caused ourselves in precipitating Divine justice, and some cry for the pain the world still suffers because of all we have lost. Some elevated souls cry for the pain we caused God through our exile, and we all cry - we hope - from the pain of knowing we have not yet deserved complete redemption.


Like all of our holidays, Tisha B'Av has a flavor and a message, more than caffeine withdrawal and dehydration. Did we get it? Did we realize and then internalize that there is Divine justice, not just endless mercy? Did we accept that it is our fault that we have not yet been redeemed? Did we acknowledge and respond to the ultimate question: What are we doing wrong?


It is a profound question. What - are - we - doing - wrong? What are we doing. What are we? Who do we actually count as "we"? Do a thought experiment: imagine that we are headed for another application of Divine justice. Disaster strikes and we lose a segment of our population again, but "we" survive. In your mind, who lives and who dies?


The settlers in the periphery are overrun, but the center around Tel Aviv is successfully defended? Or Tel Aviv is bombed into oblivion, but other areas of the country, especially the religious areas, are saved? Or the State of Israel is overrun, but some refugees are rescued and resettled in America, where the Jewish population is unscathed? Or the great Diaspora communities are destroyed (intermarriage or jihad, take your pick), but Israel is defended and eventually absorbs the American and European remnants?


Think about it.


We Jews are afraid, or at least uncertain. We have so few friends in the world and so many enemies. It takes a tremendous effort of will to look at the current world situation and be optimistic - even for those of us who believe the Messiah will come eventually and rescue us. More of us than would admit it console ourselves with just such a survival scenario. It calms us, perhaps subconsciously, to imagine it will be OK - for us. But the Tisha B'Av readings tell us no, it won't be OK. Every communal disaster we memorialize involved the deaths of people who thought it might not happen. We survivors are left to remember, fragmented, God sends enemies to make us reorder our priorities.


Over the millennia, every conflagration has decimated us without distinctions - right, left, religious, non-religious, Chassidic, mitnagdic, educated, ignorant, modern, shmodern... Think World Wwar II and expand it, because World War III is completely without borders. To God, a Jew is a Jew, whether he "identifies" or not. The barbarians shouting "Death to the Jews" feel the same way. They intend to kill all the Jews they have access to, and ballistic missiles with WMD warheads give a whole lot of access.

Every conflagration has decimated us without distinctions.



We must stop subdividing ourselves. It is not acceptable to lose any of us - the sinners, the backward, the parasites, the ignorant, the rich, the poor, the Ashkenazim, the Sfardim, the white, the black, the smug American, the corrupt Israeli - we all have the same value. No one is more Jewish than any other Jew, no life is more precious than any other life. We are truly "one nation under God" - because He said so. And so, the nations will never let us be anything else.


What should we do with this? Maybe start by asking: Which survival scenario do I secretly hold deep inside? Which group of Jews have I consciously or unconsciously lopped off my concept of the family tree? If someone I loved very much was one of them, what would I do to reconnect with him or her? Then step out, find one of them and do it. Do it again, and again, and again. This is the redemptive message of Tisha B'Av, the secret of Jewish survival in a vicious world. Work to unite us, and help us approach our Days of Awe as one loving people. Then, together, we may see Jerusalem redeemed and Zion consoled by the return of all her children.