Tishah B’Av Gets Real

Our generation has grown used to the reality that do what we might, the central idea of Tishah B’Av is beyond us. The most that we can hope for when it comes to the saddest day in our calendar is “wanting to want.” We all know the famous mashal of the son whose mother gives her life for him in childbirth, and who then forgets to visit his mother’s grave — a metaphor for our own inability to connect to the loss of the Beis Hamikdash. “We can’t mourn — and that itself is what have to mourn for,” is our mantra.

But wanting to want only takes you so far. And so, the day became a mixture of sadness and watch-checking. Kinnos until chatzos, post-taanis preps and on to the ubiquitous videos.

In a very sad year, that may no longer be a problem. Tishah B’Av will be more resonant because the atmosphere of the Churban seems to be all around us. In a period steeped in historic Jewish disaster, the viral reports about Iran timing an attack for Tishah B’Av are chilling. Whatever their veracity, they hammer home the fact that while other countries have wars, they don’t echo events thousands of years past. The seething inter-Jewish hatred in ancient Jerusalem plays out before our eyes in the frightening struggle between right and left in modern Israel.

There’s another parallel to that long-ago destruction: We’ve been admitted to an elite club whose last members joined 2,000 years ago. We’re the first generation in millennia to have lost Eretz Yisrael — not just in a figurative sense, but quite literally. Twice over the last two decades, we’ve had to pull out of territory that held thriving shuls and communities, leaving swaths of holy soil in Eichah-like desolation.