Dr. Alex Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society, a member of the Council of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and on the advisory board of the National Christian Leadership Conference of Israel (NCLCI). He has an MA and PhD in contemporary Jewish history from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Tisha B’Av is the anchor of Jewish grief. It began as the day of mourning for the destruction of the First and Second Temples, but over the centuries it became the vessel into which the Jewish people placed other national catastrophes: exile, expulsion, persecution, and eventually the Shoah.
Yet Tisha B’Av is not only a day of tears. It is also a day that demands moral clarity. It reminds us that Jewish history is not a chronicle of victimhood, but a record of survival, faith, rebuilding, and defiance. We mourn, but we do not collapse. We remember, but we do not surrender. We grieve, but we do not allow despair to become our theology.
From Ancient Ruins to Modern Tragedy
Tisha B’Av marks the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E. and the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. These were not merely political or military defeats. They were existential blows to the Jewish people. The Temple was the center of Jewish spiritual life, national identity, and divine service. Its destruction raised the terrifying question of whether Jewish life could continue without sovereignty, without Jerusalem, and without the physical House of G-d.
The Mishnah teaches that the Ninth of Av recalls not only the destruction of the Temples, but also the divine decree that the generation of the Exodus would not enter the Land of Israel, the fall of Beitar during the Bar Kochba revolt, and the plowing over of Jerusalem. Tisha B’Av therefore became the calendar’s great repository of Jewish national trauma.
This pattern continued through the centuries. Rabbi Isaac Abravanel noted the spiritual connection between Tisha B’Av and the expulsion from Spain in 1492, when the last Jews were forced to leave the country around that mournful date. In modern history, the outbreak of World War I also fell on Tisha B’Av, unleashing forces that would reshape Europe and devastate Jewish communities. During the Holocaust, the mass deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka were also bound to this season of mourning.
It is therefore natural that the Shoah has become part of the emotional and theological landscape of Tisha B’Av. The destruction of European Jewry was not the destruction of a Temple of stone, but of living sanctuaries: families, yeshivot, synagogues, communities, scholars, children, and entire worlds of Jewish memory.
Beyond Victimhood
But there is a danger in allowing catastrophe to define us only as victims. That is not the Jewish way. We are not a people whose identity is built on suffering alone. Jewish life is made rich and spiritually satisfying through Torah, mitzvot, Shabbat, the festivals, family, community, and the obligations that give life meaning.
Tradition teaches that Mashiach is born on Tisha B’Av. That teaching is not sentimental. It is radical. It declares that even at the lowest point in Jewish history, redemption is already being born. The seed of rebuilding is planted inside the very day of destruction.
This is the essence of emunah. Faith does not mean pretending that suffering is not real. Faith means refusing to let suffering have the final word. It means believing that the Jewish people have a destiny, a mission, and a future. That belief has propelled Jews to rebuild after every catastrophe and to contribute disproportionately to medicine, science, technology, law, literature, morality, and civilization itself.
Arthur Hertzberg captured this Jewish sense of duty when he observed that to be a Jew is to be commanded to act because something is right, not because it is comfortable or profitable. Had Abraham wanted tranquility, he would have remained in his father’s idol business. Instead, he opened his tent on all four sides and began a journey that would transform human history.
To be a Jew is to believe that the world can be redeemed. It is to be carried by an ancient river that began with Abraham, flowed through Sinai, survived Jerusalem’s ruins, crossed the ghettos and crematoria of Europe, and still moves forward.
The Response to Despair
The survivors of the Shoah offer the most profound testimony to this truth. After witnessing the darkest capacities of mankind, they did not allow Jewish history to end in ashes. They rebuilt families. They founded communities. They restored Torah life. They helped build the State of Israel. They chose life with a force that no enemy could understand.
Elie Wiesel understood that despair could never be the Jewish answer. Despair may seem understandable after Auschwitz, but for the Jewish people it cannot be final. To despair completely would be to hand Hitler a posthumous victory. It would mean declaring that thousands of years of covenant, faith, study, sacrifice, and love could be erased by murderers.
That is why our response must be faith in Klal Yisrael, Ahavat Yisrael, and Netzach Yisrael - the eternity of the Jewish people. Our faith has never been more necessary, and it has never been more justified.
The last word belongs to Wiesel:
“Having failed to redeem Jewish life through normative steps, [Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai] adopted new ones. Instead of crowning kings, he ordained rabbis. The physical Temple was destroyed, so Jews took the idea of it with them into exile. Because it was too late to save Jerusalem, he maintained its dream. Yavne was not meant to replace Jerusalem but, rather, to keep it from disappearing into oblivion."
“And the people did follow him. His school at Yavne became a center for Jewish learning; others were created elsewhere. In the hour of distress, Yavne gave Israel a road to consolation. Yavne stood for memory and against abdication. And there Rabbi Yohanan laid or reinforced the foundations for the Talmud, our life-boat throughout exile. On the ruins and with the ruins, he rebuilt hope. With words, nothing but words. What is the Talmud if not a kingdom erected within words and a celebration of them?"
Am Yisrael Chai.