# Tisha b'Av: The Bottom of the Calendar - with Rachel Goldberg-Polin

An episode of [Call Me Back - with Dan Senor](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1539292794), 20 Jul 2026, 59 min.

Audio: https://podcasts.beehiiv.com/d9ee47aa-cc91-4ad0-b1e2-000191888049/01a0599f-c7dc-725e-a326-2afd78c94e7e/01a059a0-00df-7a7d-a3b2-fda93ea6dd91/01a059a0-016f-7e8d-a0fe-1859e5f74c40.mp3

What does Tisha B'Av ask of us after October 7? Tisha B'Av is the saddest date on the Jewish calendar, but Rachel Goldberg-Polin argues it also offers hope and opportunity. In a conversation shaped by the personal and collective trauma of October 7, she explains why Jewish tradition gathers centuries of loss onto a single day, why it compels us to look inward, and how mourning is meant to become the first step toward repair. Rachel’s suggested reading: This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation by Rabbi Alan Lew ___ Call Me Back is made possible by our subscribers. If these conversations are where you turn to understand Israel and the Jewish world, consider joining them. It's what keeps this show going. Become a Subscriber - Inside Call me Back This episode was sponsored by Birthright: Invest in the Jewish future today at onetripchangeseverything.com. ____ In this episode: - Why Tisha B'Av became Judaism's day of mourning - The original national failure: The spies and the Promised Land, - The centrality and importance of the Temples we can’t comprehend - Sinat chinam and the danger of baseless hatred - Why Jewish tradition looks inward after catastrophe - How Tisha B'Av is observed and why the rituals matter - Rav Kook's answer: from baseless hatred to baseless love - Finding hope, repair, and "yet" after grief More Ark Media: • Want to join Ark Media? Check out our careers page for new openings. • Explore Israel Votes • Listen to Ark News Daily • Listen to For Heaven's Sake • Listen to What’s Your Number? • Newsletters | Ark Media | Amit Segal | Nadav Eyal • Instagram | Ark Media | Dan • X | Dan • Dan Senor & Saul Singer’s book, The Genius of Israel • Get in touch Credits: Ilan Benatar, Ryan Lohr, Beth Pearlman, Brittany Cohen, Ava Weiner, Martin Huergo, Mariangeles Burgos, and Yuval Semo

## Transcript

[0:02] Over the past couple of years, Call Me Back has grown into something much bigger than we ever expected, a place for clarity, context, and honest conversations at a time when those things can seem hard to find.
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[0:37] You can subscribe at arcmedia.org or through the link in the show notes. And to our insiders, thank you. \[gentle music\] You are listening to an Arc Media podcast.
[0:56] Back in the early aughts when I was a younger teacher, and there was this real challenge of how do you create a feeling in people who maybe don't know about this date, don't care about this date, don't have an emotional bond in any such way to this date?
[1:15] How do you make it feel impactful in any way? And so I would say to my class, "Who can share where they were on September 11, 2001?" And every hand would go up in the air, even the people who never participated.
[1:31] And that's when the somberness of how a date can define time became very real. And of course, now, tragically, I don't have this challenge at all right now. I can say six words to you.
[1:46] Where were you on October 7th? That's it. That is the defining Tisha B'Av moment in this generation.
[1:57] \[upbeat music\] It's 8:00 AM on Sunday, July 19th in New York City.
[2:12] It's 3:00 PM on Sunday, July 19th in Israel. Before we get to today's episode, an update on the war with Iran. The American death toll in the Iran war has now reached 16.
[2:25] Two soldiers were killed Friday when Iran fired a barrage of ballistic missiles at a base in Jordan. US and Jordanian defenses knocked down most of them, but at least one got through.
[2:36] A third service member is still unaccounted for. These are the first Americans killed by enemy fire since the ceasefire was announced last month, and they are the first US casualties in the conflict since April.
[2:49] Manned and unmanned aircraft on the ground were also hit. Overnight, US Central Command said it had responded.
[2:58] The State Department issued a rare global travel advisory warning Americans abroad of the, quote, "potential for unforeseen escalation."
[3:07] And the US Defense Secretary's message after the Jordan attack was that it, quote, "only stiffens our resolve." That's where things stand this morning.
[3:17] In the days ahead across Arc Media's podcasts, we will be following these new developments. And for daily updates, be sure to subscribe to Arc News Daily. Now to today's episode.
[3:28] This Wednesday evening, July 22nd, Tisha B'Av begins. Tisha B'Av is the saddest day on the Jewish calendar. It marks the destruction of both the first and the second temples in Jerusalem.
[3:43] The first temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, and the second temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE.
[3:52] And our tradition commemorates nearly every major catastrophe that has befallen the Jewish people onto this single date.
[4:00] Expulsions from England and Spain, massacres during the Crusades, and later reflections on the Holocaust, just to give a few examples.
[4:08] Not every event literally occurred on Tisha B'Av, but the day became the symbolic focal point for Jewish historical suffering. Tisha B'Av is not simply a remembrance of ancient history.
[4:21] It is Judaism's annual meditation on how a people responds to catastrophe.
[4:27] Along with Yom Kippur, it is one of two major fast days on the Hebrew calendar, meaning they're one of two days in which we are supposed to not eat for twenty-five hours straight.
[4:40] But while Yom Kippur is a day of repentance, Tisha B'Av is a day of collective mourning. There are no songs, no festival meals, no costumes, no celebrations, no exchanging of gifts.
[4:53] It's the most solemn day on the Hebrew calendar, the floor of the Jewish year. In this episode, Rachel Goldberg Poland joins me from Jerusalem to take us inside this day.
[5:05] Rachel, who's the author of When We See You Again, is a Jewish educator, and she became a teacher on this show, on Call Me Back, helping us learn the Jewish holidays, not as they appear on the surface, but how they actually work.
[5:20] Every other time we have done this together, these study sessions together for the Call Me Back community, Rachel has taken a holiday we think we understand and turn it inside out.
[5:31] But each of those days had something lighter to open with, some familiar surface before and beneath the depth. Tisha B'Av has none of that, or so we think.
[5:42] So today I'm asking her to take us down into it and then show us how the tradition built the way out of the grief. We'll be right back.
[5:53] \[upbeat music\] This is the moment to send young Jewish adults on a birthright trip to Israel. Not next year, now. Because after two and a half years of misinformation, reality needs to speak for itself.
[6:07] Over the past twenty-five years, Birthright has sent more than nine hundred thousand young Jews to Israel. They come back more confident, more connected to each other and to Israel.
[6:17] They go on to build Jewish families, lead our communities, and feel part of a four-thousand-year Jewish history that belongs to them.
[6:25] Birthright's new goal is to send another two hundred thousand young adults to Israel by twenty twenty-nine, but it takes people like you to make that happen. To help shape that future, go to onetripchangeseverything.com.
[6:43] And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast Rachel Goldberg-Polin, who joins us from Jerusalem. Rachel, it's wonderful to see you. You too. Thank you for having me.
[6:55] You've been all over the world, so it's glad to see you've settled in your home, and we can dig into some learning. Great. Well, I'm looking forward to it.
[7:03] And I was thinking, Dan, how part of why I really like learning with you is because we actually have very different worldviews and philosophies and approaches and perspectives, and I think that that is exactly why our conversations end up being these vibrant and very valuable outputs.
[7:23] And so I'm happy to be here with you, especially for this. I actually think this is a tough topic. Mm-hmm.
[7:30] Well, um, before we jump into things, in Jewish tradition, before we study together there, we have this practice of dedicating the learning. So why don't we start there?
[7:40] We've done that, I think, at the beginning of almost every episode we've done together. Who are we learning in the merit of or in memory of today?
[7:49] So I think definitely it is appropriate to study together in the merit of every single person that we have lost since October seventh, two thousand and twenty-three, and that their souls should be elevated.
[8:02] That's part of the Jewish tradition. And also that we are learning in the merit of anyone who has been injured in body or spirit since October seventh, who is trying very hard to walk forward. Mm.
[8:18] And that is, uh, certainly, sadly, a perfect segue to the topic we're gonna get into today and the, and the holiday we're studying. I should add one caveat to this conversation.
[8:30] Uh, you and I both get feedback sometimes when we do these sessions together from those who would want these, uh, study sessions to resemble their fondest memories from their Orthodox yeshivas.
[8:42] But we should know we're, we're speaking to a pretty broad audience today.
[8:45] We have a lot of listeners who have a range of backgrounds in Judaism, and we actually have a lot of listeners who aren't Jewish who listen to our episodes.
[8:53] I'm always moved by some of the comments we get from non-Jews who listen to our episodes, who feel that we're making these topics accessible to them, too, and, and giving them some kind of meaning or access to a way of thinking about their world or their lives or dilemmas or challenges in their lives.
[9:09] So I just wanna put out there that we're trying to speak to a very broad group of people and a range of backgrounds. So as you put it, Rachel, it's an introduction to the introduction. Right.
[9:19] I think of it as we're dipping the tippy end of one strand of hair into the ocean of Jewish literature and literacy and lusciousness that is out there. So it's not even a taste.
[9:32] It's more like an aroma that you're walking by a restaurant and you think, "Ooh, I wonder what's in there." And that's how we should feel.
[9:39] I think that these conversations should make us and anyone listening more curious to find out more. Great. Okay. So I'm gonna posit that most people, including most Jews, couldn't tell you what Tisha B'Av is.
[9:53] Other topics, Hanukkah, Passover, Rosh Hashanah, even if they have a limited background in, in Jewish ideas, in Jewish religion, they know something. Most have never heard of Tisha B'Av. So let's start with that.
[10:06] What is Tisha B'Av, and why do we care about it? So the word Tisha B'Av actually means the ninth of Av. So Av is one of the months in the Jewish calendar.
[10:21] It's actually is the second to last month before Rosh Hashanah falls out. We call Rosh Hashanah the Jewish New Year. So the Jewish New Year will be in two months from Av. So Tisha is the number nine. Correct.
[10:36] And Av would be like a holiday called the ninth of July or the ninth of August. I just want people to understand what the- Correct. So it's very, it's very literal. Exactly. And so why is the ninth of Av noteworthy?
[10:50] And by the way, you can hear it pronounced two different ways because either it's pronounced in Hebrew, which is Tisha B'Av, or sometimes we pronounce it the way that it's written in English, which is Tisha B'Av.
[11:01] It's like when we say Rosh Hashanah or Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur or Yom Kippur. So they're interchangeable.
[11:09] Historically, it is considered the saddest date in the Jewish calendar, that there are many things that happened to the Jewish people on this date.
[11:20] Many calamities happened, and this is considered the most inauspicious of dates in the Jewish calendar. And we will get to examples of those things.
[11:31] But what I will tell you, Dan, is that I used to have a terrible challenge back in the early aughts when I was a younger teacher. I was teaching in Berkeley, California. I was teaching in Richmond, Virginia.
[11:44] And there was this real challenge of how do you create a feeling in people who maybe don't know about this date, don't care about this date, don't have an emotional bond in any such way to this date?
[11:59] How do you make it feel impactful in any way?
[12:03] Remember, at that time, I didn't know that we were, in retrospect I understand, in sort of the golden age of the diaspora Jewish experience in these last seventy years leading up to two thousand and, let's say, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen.
[12:22] I don't know when, when this golden age sort of seems to have been tarnished a bit. But I had this challenge. How do I get these people to feel anything about a before and after destructive period?
[12:35] And so I would say to my class, "Who can share where they were on September eleventh, two thousand and one?" And every hand would go up in the air, even the people who never participated.
[12:47] Everybody had a story of where they were when those planes went into the Twin Towers and into the Pentagon and into the ground. And that's when the somberness of how a date can define time became very real.
[13:03] And of course, now, tragically, I don't have this challenge at all right now. As I am speaking to you or to anyone who is hearing us have this conversation, I can say six words to you: Where were you on October 7th?
[13:20] That's it. That is the defining Tisha B'Av moment in this generation, for sure. I actually have a habit.
[13:30] Whenever I have a first-time guest, the first thing I ask them to kind of center them in where my head is at and my world is at and where our audience and community's head and world are at, I always ask them, "Where were you on October 7th, and what were you thinking?"
[13:45] I just get a sense of what that date did to you, what it did to you inside of your head, did to your world.
[13:51] And obviously, to your point, Rachel, everyone has a very visceral reaction and story in response to that question. Everyone. Jews, non-Jews, everyone.
[14:02] This was the national catastrophe for the Jewish people that will define us until we're both not here anymore.
[14:10] And this is 100% part of the Jewish story, the Jewish history story, certainly modern Israel's history.
[14:21] And going forward, this is an inflection moment of destruction that took place to the Jewish people in our land, in our kibbutzim, in our music festivals, in our sovereign country.
[14:36] And it is very much Tisha B'Av, even though that's like me saying, "Oh, it's April 4th. That's November 19th. They're the same."
[14:47] And I am telling you, actually, there's precedent in taking horrific events that have happened to us and consolidating it into this date of Tisha B'Av.
[14:56] So it's appropriate that I am telling you October 7th was Tisha B'Av, was the Ninth of Av. So I-- Can you walk us through some examples in the tradition of national calamities that occurred on Tisha B'Av?
[15:09] So I think what's always helpful when we have these conversations is to go back to the very first time that we ever hear in our tradition about whatever the topic is.
[15:18] And that's where, in this situation, what's great is that the Mishnah, which is the oral law that was written down and recorded around the year two hundred of the Common Era by Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, Rabbi Judah the Prince, had the written law, which is the Torah, which is on the parchment, which we still have today, and we also had this tradition that was an oral law that was passed down generation to generation, and around the year two hundred, that gets recorded.
[15:46] And in one of the tractates of the Mishnah, we have a list of sad, tragic things that happened to the Jewish people on the Ninth of Av.
[15:57] And the very first thing that is listed in that is something that happened back in the Torah.
[16:04] And it says, "The spies came back with a negative report, and everything that we originally thought was gonna happen gets altered." So we have to say, "What? Freeze. Stop. What spies? What report? What was altered?
[16:20] What are you talking about?" So everybody get in the time machine. We go back thirteen hundred and thirteen years ago. So thirteen thirteen BCE.
[16:31] You and I studied at Passover that the children of Israel are taken out of slavery. They're taken out of Egypt by God with Moses as the wing man.
[16:41] They travel to Mount Sinai to pick up the blueprint for life, because just because we weren't gonna be slaves didn't mean there was gonna be a free-for-all.
[16:50] It meant let's go get sort of the plan of how we're gonna live to infuse meaning and purpose and aim into our lives, and we're gonna take this new way of living, this Torah, this blueprint, and we're gonna go live in the promised land.
[17:05] And we wander through the desert, and everything is not going according to plan because that's how we roll.
[17:12] And it's about a year after we have received the Torah at Mount Sinai, and we're about to go into the promised land, to Eretz Canaan, the land of Canaan.
[17:24] And the people get nervous, and they say to Moses, "We're a little scared.
[17:29] Can we send some spies to do some recon, to do some surveillance, to see this land that we've heard about for over a year and that we're gonna be moving into?" And Moses says, "All right, fine, people."
[17:43] Everybody is traveling in tribes. There are twelve tribes. What's interesting is Moses doesn't say, "Everybody give me one person. Let me have twelve people from-- one from each tribe.
[17:56] Let me have Joe Schmo who looks cute in camouflage." No, he specifically uses the word nasi. "Everybody bring me someone really important, a chieftain." Even the modern word for nasi, right?
[18:10] Isaac Herzog is the nasi of Israel. The current modern-day president of Israel. Yes. And the twelve spies go to look at the land. They're gone for forty days.
[18:21] Moses gives them a to-do list of what they should be looking for. And the spies come back, and the overwhelming tone of ten out of the twelve spies is complete fear- Complete lack of belief in the mission.
[18:37] They start to freak out, and it's not necessarily that what they're saying is inaccurate. It's that Moses did not ask them for their opinion. He didn't say, "Give me your color commentary and give me your analysis."
[18:52] He was saying, "Give me the facts."
[18:54] And instead, these people who were really looked up to by all of these tribes, with the exception of two, there were two spies who did not do that, Joshua, the son of Nun, Yoshua Bin-Nun, and Caleb, Kalev Ben Jephunneh.
[19:10] Those two spies actually said, "You guys, calm down. We can do this. The land's amazing. God is with us. We're gonna be able to do it. Come on." They were like the ultimate Tony Robbins.
[19:23] Like, they really believed we could do this. But when you have 10 out of the 12 saying, "We're doomed. Everybody there looked huge.
[19:33] They're gonna kill us," all the people start going into panic and they actually say, "We wanna go back to Egypt. We'd rather go back to slavery." And pandemonium breaks out.
[19:43] And, you know, when you think of it within the larger picture, what's been happening, for over a year, God has been taking care of these people who are, we guesstimate that it's somewhere between two and three million people who left Egypt, okay?
[19:57] It's 600,000 men over the age of 20, so you're assuming people are married, they have children. It's somewhere around two and a half million people. Nobody's clothes are wearing out. Nobody's shoes get a hole.
[20:08] Everybody has a nice warm fire at night that's this pillar of fire. During the day, there's, like, this moving cloud that keeps everybody cool in the desert as they're hiking.
[20:19] Every morning when they're hungry, Uber Eats shows up with manna- \[laughs\]... that they say tastes like anything you want. You want overnight oats, you got it. You want a cinnamon bun, here it is. Oh, you like protein?
[20:32] All right, over easy or scrambled? And yet here suddenly everyone is freaking out, saying, "It's not gonna happen."
[20:40] And God gets very upset and he makes a decree that says, "No one over the age of 20 is going into that land. You guys have too much of a slave mentality. You are not believing in the project and the enterprise.
[20:55] Turn around."
[20:56] It's an about-face, and everybody goes back into the desert and wanders around for 40 years so that anyone over the age of 20 perishes in the desert, with the exception of Joshua and Caleb, who were the two spies who did have faith in the project.
[21:13] And everybody is wandering around. It's not that we didn't have a map. It's not that we didn't have ways.
[21:19] It's that we didn't have the mentality needed to be visionaries and to understand, how are we gonna make this place work?
[21:28] And so that was the first debacle that happened on the Ninth of Av, and that is recounted in the Mishnah as the first tragic national disaster, is that the people didn't believe in the mission, in the mission of being a free people in our land.
[21:49] I just wanted to pause on that for a moment because- There's a lot in there... you're painting a picture of something that I'm, that led to the destruction.
[21:56] Well, that's a destruction of what the vision and dream had been, and that maybe is more painful almost than when it's really an outside factor.
[22:08] But I think there's something very poignant that the very first one was we didn't believe in ourselves. Right.
[22:14] I think that's very important, and that's why I really wanted to share that because usually if you ask people what happened on Tisha B'Av that's so terrible, they will name the next two things I'm gonna tell you, which are- Right.
[22:26] That's where I was gonna go. What would you have said? I think of the physical destruction. I have this image in my mind of the temple. We can get into the First Temple, the Second Temple.
[22:34] We'll get into that, but I, I just imagine the destruction of the temple.
[22:38] And then there's always this debate about why was the temple destroyed, and there's a tendency to blame it on those who, quote-unquote, "destroyed the temple," which we'll get into, the Romans, but then the deeper meaning is no, it wasn't the Romans.
[22:49] It was our own division. It was us being at war with each other that actually preceded the destruction of the temple. Right.
[22:56] Well, so in the Mishnah that, in the oral law that I was referencing, the first mention is the spy story, which I just shared, and the second is what you are referring to, which is the destruction of the First Temple.
[23:11] Now, what I think is a little bit tricky is when I hear temple, I just think this big, beautiful building. I think of Temple Shalom on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago.
[23:21] That was a very beautiful shul, and I don't think that any of us can really fathom what the temple, what the Beit HaMikdash was back in these years when King Solomon built the temple.
[23:35] This temple was really the epicenter and the hub and the central nervous system of Jewish life and Jewish legislature and Jewish faith and service and fate. Everything wove around the temple.
[23:53] So that image you just painted, I mean, this rabbi who's a teacher at, at my kids' school tried to explain this in a commentary that I, that I read of his in which he just said it's difficult for people to fathom today what the Beit HaMikdash was because it made it very easy.
[24:11] Because it was the center of all Jewish life, it, it was this place, it made it super easy to connect to God, and I actually think it's very unrelatable today is the point he makes. Completely. I don't understand it.
[24:22] You don't understa- None of us can. It was, apparently it was so obvious. It was sort of the touch point between the manifestation, the Godifistation of God and holiness on Earth.
[24:36] I can't begin to wrap my head around what that means, but I can begin to wrap my head around the idea that losing it would create this complete tectonic shift in what it means to be in a world absent of this defining feature.
[24:53] Yeah, it's a loss of a connection. And the loss of an easy button for connection, as your, your son's teacher was saying.
[25:01] And so what's interesting is that the question is asked in another Gemara, in another part of the Talmud. It's asked, "Well, why did this happen?"
[25:10] Because what happened, Babylonia, led by Nebuchadnezzar, comes in and conquers Jerusalem, destroys the temple. This is around 586 BCE. There's always some debates with dates, but we're gonna say it's around that time.
[25:26] And the question is asked, why? Why did this happen to us?
[25:31] And the Talmud explains, well, honestly, starting at the very top down, we had horrific corruption and horrific immorality from the kings, the nobles, the judges, the priests, the Kohanim, the people who were running the temple were being corrupt.
[25:47] There was idolatry, there was immorality, there was murder, there was corruption at the highest levels.
[25:52] We have the prophet Jeremiah running around in the worst mood saying to people, "We are gonna lose all of this because we are not behaving right. We are not behaving as we should be."
[26:06] And so when Nebuchadnezzar comes in, yes, that is the cause of the actual burning of the temple and the destruction of the temple.
[26:18] But woven into our tradition is always we have huge mirrors that we hold up, and we say, "What part did we play in this?" And that makes some people very uncomfortable. Don't get me wrong.
[26:31] No one's giving anyone who does something terrible a pass. It's just that part of the DNA of being part of the Jewish tradition is we also say, what were we doing at the time?
[26:43] And this piece of the Talmud ig- completely enumerates what we were doing and what was so wrong.
[26:50] And so Nebuchadnezzar destroys the temple, takes many of these holy vessels that we used to use, and everyone who is not killed is exiled to Babylonia.
[27:02] And so this Jewish community ends up in Babylonia and interestingly ends up prospering there. We make schools and we make shuls and we make houses of study for advanced scholars.
[27:15] What's interesting is about fifty, fifty-five years later, knock, knock. Who's there? It's Persia, the next-door neighbor of Babylonia. And guess what? It's the Purim story that you and I have learned together in March.
[27:29] And King Cyrus, who was in charge of Persia, he has a different way of handling communities that have been exiled.
[27:37] He actually encourages them to go back to where they've been exiled from because he thinks that will garner goodwill and that only good can come from people feeling good about where they are.
[27:49] And so some of the Jewish community in Babylonia starts to go back to the land of Israel and goes back to Jerusalem and starts rebuilding what becomes the Second Temple.
[28:01] And it takes about seventy years, and it's not anywhere as beautiful initially as the First Temple was.
[28:08] But around, again, these are all around 516 BCE, you have the Second Temple that starts being active, and there are lots of renovations that take place in that Second Temple.
[28:22] Rachel, does the Second Temple play the same role that we were talking about, that Rabbi Natan talks about this, as you put it, the easy button to connection.
[28:30] Does, does the Second Temple play the same role in that regard as the First Temple? Supposedly, it wasn't nearly as spiritually connected as the First Temple. That there were- Okay...
[28:40] things that happened in the First Temple that did not happen in the Second Temple, and yet it still was way more than anything you or I can imagine in today's world, where we're so far removed from the sort of spiritual touchability.
[28:54] But the Second Temple is up and running, and good things are happening maybe. And then we get to the year seventy of the Common Era, and guess what? Rome comes and conquers Jerusalem and destroys the Second Temple.
[29:09] And again, we have this big question in the Talmud. Why? Why is this happening again?
[29:17] And again, we hear, first of all, that the priestly leadership had been misbehaving, and even the military had been fighting, infighting with each other. What does misbehaving mean? Misbehaving how?
[29:30] The priests who ran the temple were doing different things for, at a cost, at a price.
[29:37] Like, they were not above the temptations that befall most people, and all the more so in the temple construct, you don't want any sort of immorality happening. And yet the people supposedly were behaving very well.
[29:54] People were trying very hard to live within the framework of being moral, ethical people, and we have some of our greatest teachers. You have Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai during this time.
[30:07] And yet we have this horrific epidemic, and it's named. When we say why, why did the Second Temple fall? We know the first one fell because of terrible behavior and immorality.
[30:21] And it says we had this epidemic called Sinat Chinam, which means- Free hatred, baseless hatred Hatred without a purpose And it was hateful rhetoric. It was just hateful, ugly behavior.
[30:38] And the story that is brought in the Talmud, and I think it so bears telling, is the story of Kamsa and Bar Kamsa, because it just kind of, it puts everything into, like, a little nugget.
[30:51] Because what happened is there was a very fancy man, so picture your fanciest friend, who was gonna be having a lovely party, and he said, "I'm gonna make my guest list."
[31:01] He gives the guest list to his able servant, because we didn't have Evite and we didn't have any other way, so the servant's going door to door around Jerusalem to invite the guest list from his employer.
[31:14] And one of the names on the guest list is Kamsa. The problem is that the servant goes by a house and he sees on the nameplate Bar Kamsa, and he thinks, "Oh, it's him."
[31:26] And so he knocks on the door and he invites Bar Kamsa. Little did he know Bar Kamsa is the arch nemesis of his employer. So this host, never in a million years would he have invited Bar Kamsa. He hates Bar Kamsa.
[31:40] We don't know why. We don't know what happened, but Bar Kamsa says, "Wow, that's so nice." This guy, who has no name in the Talmud, by the way, so we could call him whatever we want, he says, "I can't believe it.
[31:52] He invited me to his party. It must be that he wants to make amends. Great, I'll go." And he goes to this party, and all the fancy pants people are there, right? This is not just, like, low-level party.
[32:04] This is, like, a party for bigwigs. This is, like, the mo- It's the Met Gala It makes the Met Gala look like a real throw-together-with-paper-plates kind of party. Yeah.
[32:14] \[laughs\] Um, and what happens is that the host sees Bar Kamsa at the party, and he goes over and says, "What the heck are you doing here? Get out."
[32:24] And Bar Kamsa is so embarrassed, he said, "There must have been some mistake. Please let me stay. I'll pay for my food. Please don't embarrass me. Let me stay." The host unfortunately says, "Absolutely not.
[32:36] You have to get out." And Bar Kamsa says, "Please, please. I'll pay for half the party."
[32:40] And the host is so irate, and I think kind of irrational in his hatred, that he says, "I am getting my servants to drag you out of here." And Bar Kamsa says, "I'll pay for the whole party."
[32:52] And remember, it's a really expensive party. He says, "Please, just don't embarrass me."
[32:57] And the host has his servants drag Bar Kamsa through the party, through the gala, and of course you can picture everything goes silent and everybody's staring at this spectacle of this very well-known person being embarrassed in front of the scions and the luminaries, and all the rabbis are at the party.
[33:22] Everybody's on the dais, and they're watching Bar Kamsa be dragged out and thrown into the street.
[33:27] And Bar Kamsa is so hurt and humiliated that he actually goes to the satellite offices of the Emperor Nero that are located in Jerusalem, and he says to them, "The Jewish community, all of them, are planning a secret revolt against Rome."
[33:50] Now, that was not true, but he was so filled with shame and anger and hurt that he tells this story to this satellite office of Rome, and it doesn't happen overnight.
[34:03] In fact, the Emperor Vespasian is the one who ends up with his son Titus, who's sort of the governor in charge of Jerusalem at the time in 70 CE, who ends up saying, "The Jews are trying to revolt against Rome, so we're gonna preempt that and we're gonna make them miserable, and they make us miserable," and then they end up destroying the temple.
[34:25] First of all, I think it's really interesting that it's showing how much emotional pain can be equated in the law to immorality.
[34:34] Because remember, in the Talmud it says, "The First Temple is destroyed because of murder and theft and immorality and idolatry, and the Second Temple is destroyed because of baseless hatred."
[34:48] Ergo, these things are equal to each other. So you see a thread in all three of these. So I see in all three of these a failure of leadership.
[34:59] Because in the spy story, we have the leaders who are going, who come back, and they don't know how to speak to their people in the right way.
[35:06] In the First Temple period, we know that coming from the kings down, the kings were vassal kings. They were not behaving.
[35:14] And we see now in the third example at this party where it was the luminaries and the most respected people were there, and they allowed this to happen. They knew. It wasn't that they didn't know.
[35:28] They're watching this man be humiliated publicly, and they know it's wrong, and they are silent, and they allow it to happen. The silence is so loud. And remember, we also come from a tradition that most of us have seen.
[35:44] When you go to a Friday night dinner, what is on top of the challot? What's on top of the bread at the table? A cover. A, a fabric. Right. And the reason is because we make two big blessings at the table.
[35:56] One is on the wine and one is on the bread, and our tradition says, "Well, so why are we covering the bread?"
[36:02] And we say, "Well, we don't want the bread to feel bad that it gets the second blessing, that it doesn't get the first blessing." And then the rabbis come and they say, "Really?
[36:10] You really think that this inanimate object has any feelings?" Like, why are we worrying about the bread?
[36:15] And the answer is, if children are raised in a home where they see that you're going so out of your way not to hurt the feelings of something that's an inanimate object, all the more so, kal v'chomer, are you going to be careful not to hurt the feelings of a person.
[36:32] And here we have every rabbi, every scholar, every head of the community at this party watching Bar Kamsa being dragged, humiliated, when we know we don't even do that to our bread. And we're doing this to a person.
[36:48] What a complete failure, and what it leads to is total destruction. We have many different examples of tragedies that did happen on the Ninth of Av and around this time of year.
[37:01] There's this whole three-week period before the Ninth of Av is considered a period of mourning, with more intense mourning in these nine days preceding the Ninth of Av, but we're not gonna go into that right now.
[37:13] But we also have very much modern-day examples that didn't happen on this date, but that we use this date to remember. We'll be right back. \[gentle music\] Hi, it's Gabe Silverstein from the Ark Media team.
[37:28] You may know me from Research by Gabe Silverstein. Last summer, I participated in a Birthright trip, so I can tell you exactly what they mean when they say, "One trip changes everything."
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[38:12] Birthright, one trip changes everything. And we're back with Rachel Goldberg-Polin.
[38:23] Okay, so we have a, we have a vibrant tradition elucidated in the Talmud by Maimonides, who we've talked about in previous episodes, and in rabbinic writings throughout the millennia about the national and, and communal response when tragedy befalls us.
[38:39] Well, I think that it's important to remember that it's not in any way... Please do not misunderstand.
[38:45] We are not giving a pass to the Babylonians or the Greeks or the Romans or the Crusades or the Inquisitors or the Cossacks or the Nazis or the fill-in-the-blank. Or Hamas on October 7th. Right.
[39:00] But we are also saying, "What have we been doing?" That is just part of the DNA of being part of this tradition, is that we don't just believe that evil, terrible things happen.
[39:15] We also believe, what were we doing also? Again, it doesn't give a pass to anyone who did anything horrific. It's just saying, what are we doing as well?
[39:26] And there's a rabbi who, he passed away in 2009, but he wrote this incredible book that I love. This is the time of year to read it. His name is Rabbi Alan Lew, L-E-W.
[39:38] It's called This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared. We'll link to the book in the show notes. He actually suggests that you start reading his book right at this time.
[39:49] He kind of feels like this is a spiritual journey. It first starts with a national journey of introspection.
[39:55] Tisha B'Av should be a day of national recognizing, national responsibility, and national reckoning, and then it culminates toward the end of, you know, when we get to Yom Kippur, then we're doing that very much on a personal level.
[40:12] How do I start to hold myself accountable to levels that I would like to get to?
[40:17] But I like that what Rabbi Lew says, he has a famous quote where he says, "Spiritually, the question about any conflict that we encounter, any recurring catastrophe that we experience, we need to say, 'What is my responsibility?
[40:32] How am I complicit? How can I prevent this from happening again?'" And he continues and says, "This is what Tisha B'Av should serve as.
[40:42] It should serve as a starting point of national reflection, a reflexive process that begins right now on the ninth day of Av and culminates on the Day of Atonement on Yom Kippur."
[40:55] So I just think that's something really helpful to keep in mind as we're doing, trying to observe this day.
[41:03] So it doesn't seem like this is by accident that, you know, the Talmud doesn't concentrate all of this loss, all of this suffering, all of this trauma and tragedy on this single day by accident. Why?
[41:15] Like, why does Jewish tradition gather all its worst days? We just-- You rattled off the Nazis and the Cossacks and the Babylonians and the \[laughs\] Romans and the Greeks and Hamas, you know, all of this.
[41:26] Why do we feel the need to, to channel this all into a single point on the calendar? You know, there is Yom HaShoah, which is the day that for which we memorialize the loss of the Holocaust.
[41:36] There are these other days, but yet there, it does feel like all those other days are subordinated to Tisha B'Av.
[41:43] Well, I remember actually reading the debates that went on when the modern state of Israel was first being established.
[41:50] The challenge was Tisha B'Av, the ninth of Av, falls out in the summer, and there was a concern that if there was not a Holocaust Memorial Day or a memorial day for fallen soldiers at a different time when it's still during the school year, then it's a missed opportunity to teach about these losses.
[42:12] But I think that your question is more almost psychological.
[42:17] Every single day of the year, there are many people that have tragedies that have befallen them, and if we were all constantly making a list of terrible things that happened to Jewish people on, uh, July 16th, terrible things that happened to Jewish people on October 21st, terrible things that happened to Jewish people on January 9th, you know, we'd have something probably tragically on every single day, and I think we don't wanna be drowning in loss.
[42:44] I think that it's important to acknowledge loss and not drown in loss. I mean, I can say for myself what's really terrible and very challenging is I think every day for me now is Tisha B'Av.
[42:56] And that's awful, and I am grateful that it's not for everyone. I feel some sense of relief that the nation can kind of try to...
[43:08] And th- the nation, I mean all of the Jewish people, and all of caring people, and human beings in the world can sort of focus on, you know, maybe one or two days.
[43:17] But even as we approach Tisha B'Av, I'm already dreading. I dread Tisha B'Av. I dread that Hersh's yahrzeit is coming up soon, his English yahrzeit, his Hebrew yahrzeit.
[43:30] That his birthday's coming up, his Hebrew birthday, his English birthday, his, you know, that October 7th will come up every year, that Simchat Torah, the Jewish holiday that fell out on October 7th of 2023.
[43:45] Even just having all of these days coming up, it can really consume you. It can s- consume people.
[43:54] And so I think that there's wisdom when the rabbis said, "You know, this is a three-week period where there happened to have been a lot of really tangible, rough stuff that happened.
[44:06] We're gonna have some days that we acknowledge that." And we do it in very profound ways.
[44:12] You know, the, uh, the observances that we do for the Ninth of Av, there are two things that we do actively, and then there are many things that we abstain from.
[44:20] Because we're trying to get our- us all in the mood of loss and mourning. So, you know, one of the things that we do is we read the Book of Lamentations, which is one of the five megillot, one of the five scrolls.
[44:32] You and I have actually learned together about the other four scrolls: the Book of Ruth, which we read on Shavuot, the Book of Esther, which we read on Purim, the Book of Ecclesiastes, which we read on Sukkot, and the Book of Jonah, which we read in the afternoon on Yom Kippur.
[44:50] And now, for, for Tisha B'Av, we actually read this Book of Lamentations, which is written by the prophet Jeremiah. It is a very sad... It's only five chapters. It's sung in a way that sounds like it's crying.
[45:04] People sit on the floor, either at a synagogue or even a community center. We had friends over, and we all sat on the floor with candlelight, and we read the Book of Lamentations.
[45:14] We also have a tradition of reading these poetic elegies that are very haunting that are called the Kinot, K-I-N-O-T, in English.
[45:25] And those are elegies that have been written from different times in Jewish history on different dates, not on the Ninth of Av, but that are calamitous and that are read.
[45:37] And those are stories about the Crusades, and about the pogroms, and even about the Nazis. And actually, Sohar has put together a booklet of Kinot, of these poetic elegies, from the last couple of years.
[45:52] And there's a really beautiful, haunting one that was written by members of Kibbutz Be'eri about the horrors, and the trauma, and the terror, and the destruction, and the before and after that Kibbutz Be'eri has experienced.
[46:06] So I encourage people to check that out. But we don't study or learn Torah on Tisha B'Av. Because we are trying to really make ourselves not be happy. It's a day of mourning. So there are things that we don't do.
[46:19] We don't eat. We don't drink. We don't shower. We don't put on lotion, uh, perfume. We don't wear leather. It's considered, you know, a real luxury comfort item. We don't even say, "Hi, how are you?"
[46:33] Because what do you mean? I'm not well. It's a mourning day. Um, and we don't learn beautiful parts of Torah. So you are permitted to learn the Book of Job, let's say, which is a really rough, hard book.
[46:47] We are trying to be sad. But I would say to people, "You know, you have to do what you're comfortable with." I actually know someone who, she said, "I eat. I shower. I drink. I wear my leather shoes."
[46:59] But before she leaves that morning, she lights a memorial candle. And that's great. I would never tell someone what they should or shouldn't do.
[47:08] But I think that the danger of people saying, "Well, either I'm doing all or nothing," that's a really extreme approach. But just so people understand, folks listening, you don't have to do all of this.
[47:19] You don't have to do any of this. But, but I just, I do want people to come, at least come away understanding what is typically done by those who wanted to observe this day traditionally.
[47:27] And that is everything you just said. It is fasting. So it, it is like Yom Kippur in that sense, absent a festive break fast. And then you walk around Jerusalem at night, the night before, the night of Tisha B'Av.
[47:40] And you see... Describe the scene, 'cause I do think it's a uniquely kind of Jerusalem visual that you see. Well, you see people sitting all over the place with candles reading the Book of Lamentations in giant groups.
[47:52] Sitting on the ground. On the ground. Right. No chairs. Right. It's, it's very much let us help you get in the mood. If you don't feel bad, we are going to try very hard to help you feel bad.
[48:04] I, I will also tell you, you know, I have a friend whose daughter is not able to fast because she has some health issues. And I remember her daughter saying to me, "So I don't fast, but I'm not eating my favorite food."
[48:16] So there are ways all of us can interpret if we want to acknowledge this day of national reckoning and national remembrance of calamitous things that have happened to the Jewish people throughout the millennia.
[48:30] There are many options of how that can look. And I also, by the way, Dan, you know, this is not just something that we do once a year.
[48:40] There are pieces of remembering this destruction that we integrate into many different practices of Jewish life. So for example, I mean, your happiest day of your life, when you married your wife- Right?
[48:52] What happened at the very end of that ceremony right before everyone screams mazel tov? You break the glass. Right.
[49:00] Even at the, at the most happy moments in our lives, we know there's a shatteredness that is existing alongside of it. So at Jewish weddings, we always shatter a glass at the end of the, of the ceremony.
[49:13] My rabbi who taught me about that years ago, Rabbi Tsvi, Tsvi Wolf, always said, "Make sure you have a real gap between when you shatter the glass and you shout mazel tov, 'cause otherwise it sounds like you're celebrating the shatteredness, which you're trying not to."
[49:28] You know, three times a day when we're praying, every single day, wrapped into the prescribed prayers that many people do, we talk about the destruction and the, the hopeful rebuilding, you know, in the future of our fractured community.
[49:44] Um, in the Grace After Meals every day, in the Birkat Hamazon, we're mentioning it.
[49:48] A lot of people who build a home will leave, um, a little patch not painted in a corner of their home, usually near the door, to remind us that even as happy and wonderful and blessed as our life is, it's not complete, and there is brokenness here.
[50:06] The other thing that I think is important to mention, which you and I sort of talked about earlier, is this idea that there was so much sinat chinam.
[50:18] There was so much baseless hatred that could really be so destructive, and Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook was the first chief rabbi of the land of Israel in its modern incarnation before 1948, before it was even a state.
[50:36] And he was this very special ultra-Orthodox rabbi that everybody commented, he just had this true love and connection to everybody that he met. He didn't care what you wore. He didn't care what you did and didn't do.
[50:50] He just sort of saw the specialness in, in the person in front of him, and he was once asked around this time of year, you know, this is, we're coming up on the Ninth of Av. It's such a time of destruction.
[51:02] There's so much, uh, acrimony and, and distance between people. What can we do to heal and to repair? Like, how can we repair all this baseless hatred that all of us have?
[51:13] And he said, "We're only gonna be able to find redemption if we figure out how to have baseless love."
[51:21] You know, that kind of sounds like it would take a miracle and that it's not something that's really real or possible, but I remember what David Ben-Gurion, our first prime minister of Israel, said.
[51:33] He said famously, "In Israel, to be a realist, you have to believe in miracles." And so I think about the great Al Michaels asking the question, "Do you believe in miracles?"
[51:46] Rachel is making a reference which I didn't expect, so I feel like I have to put out a little explainer.
[51:51] Rachel's making a reference to the 1980 Winter Olympic Games, where the US hockey team defeated the s- at the time, the Soviet hockey team, and it was a complete shock, and it was epic, and it was historical, and it was one for the ages.
[52:06] And Al Michaels, in this iconic moment, which was totally authentic and obviously completely improvised and in the moment, said, as he watched the US win, said, blasted, "Do you believe in miracles?"
[52:18] I'm trying to say that if the first prime minister of Israel, if David Ben-Gurion, said that, "In Israel, to be a realist, you have to believe in miracles," then it follows from that, that of course Al Michaels asks, "Do you believe in miracles?"
[52:33] And I am telling you, Dan, yes, I do. Yes, I do. And may this be a Tisha B'Av that is flooded with meaning and with miracles, and may we all find comfort among the mourners of Jerusalem.
[52:50] May we start to have the ability to have some sort of baseless love, even if it's just baseless like. Let's just start with baseless like, one foot in front of the other, and let's hope to get there. So that's beautiful.
[53:04] It's taking what we think of as a very, the darkest of the dark days, and you're kind of pulling us out of the darkness.
[53:10] I mentioned this teacher at Heschel, Rabbi Natan, who says, in one of his sermons, he said, "Tisha B'Av needs to be a day of inspiration."
[53:17] In his words were, "It should slap you in the face and say, 'You're missing something. Don't get it? There's something better than this.'"
[53:23] He actually says, like he emphasizes the need to stand up, to declare that we actually want our redemption and to do something about it.
[53:31] He says, "'Cause otherwise, if you just make this dark day about the darkness and you wallow in it," he says, "Tisha B'Av might as well be Groundhog Day."
[53:39] There has to be a way that we keep walking, and I think it's easier for some than for others. I think that some are bearing horrific challenges and, um, so there really is no judgment there.
[53:54] But I do think that the idea of how can we work on, on this repair. You know, when a tsunami happens, we've talked about this. Like, on the one hand, oh my gosh, this is like complete and utter emptiness now.
[54:08] And on the other hand, now you have this blank canvas, and we have so much opportunity. There is so much fracturedness. There's so much pain. There's so much suffering.
[54:19] There's so much loss, and there's so much opportunity. Don't waste it.
[54:25] Rachel, you said to me when we were discussing the, the idea of doing this episode on, for Tisha B'Av, you said to me, of all the holy days that you and I have talked about studying together, this was the one you were most enthusiastic about doing.
[54:39] And you said, you alluded to this earlier, this is Tisha B'Av. The way we're supposed to feel on Tisha B'Av is the way you, Rachel, now feel every single day.
[54:47] So, like, your point that, you know, you say, you're not supposed to say to people, "How are you?" You're not supposed to greet people in a way that you normally do. Like, that's how you feel every day.
[54:56] So finally, finally, we get a day where you're actually, no one's allowed to say, "How are you?"
[55:01] And that feeling of dread, pulling yourself out of bed in the morning, is the way you feel every day, and so Tisha B'Av is almost like everyone is in the moment that you're in every day.
[55:10] Is that the part that- Connects to s- or is it what you just said, which is yes, it's dark, but it's also a basis for which to pull us out of the darkness? Is it that part, or is it both, or is it something else?
[55:25] Well, I don't think it's that I want everyone else to be where I am, 'cause I don't think it's actually possible.
[55:31] But it's that I was excited to share something sad, because I often feel that when I'm teaching about anything tied to Yiddishkeit, which is such a beautiful and soulful part of my life, I feel a lot of pressure now because I'm always in a lot of pain, of how do I give that over in a way that masks some of my pain?
[55:56] And this was an opportunity to say, "I can actually tell you the truth of the pain, because that's what this day is about."
[56:03] This day is about everybody tapping into what is your loss, and the problem and the challenge of people sometimes just can't feel.
[56:14] The Shulchan Aruch, which is, like, the code of Jewish law that was written in the 1500s by Yosef Karo, he puts down the idea of every single person should be troubled and disturbed about the destruction that has taken place to our people.
[56:32] And the commentators say, "But what if there are people who don't feel troubled or disturbed about the destruction?"
[56:38] And they sort of massage it in a certain way, and they say, "Okay, then be troubled and disturbed that you're not troubled and disturbed."
[56:48] So I felt like being able to have this conversation with you and to admit that I'm in this constant pain, and yet I'm so hopeful and I'm so believing that somehow there will be repair. I don't have that.
[57:06] I don't have it yet. The word yet for me is a very hopeful word.
[57:11] So I try to say, when people will ask if I could do certain things, and I say, "No, I can't do that," and then I, I'm always trying to be very conscious of saying yet, because that's the hopeful part.
[57:23] So I really, you know, I look around and there's so much to be worried about and so much to be scared of and so much to be holding such tension over, but there's yet.
[57:35] And so for Tisha B'Av, I'm just praying that we will get there yet. All right. Rachel, thank you for doing this. And I don't know what the... Obviously, someone doesn't say We could say, "Have a bad Tisha B'Av." No.
[57:49] Right. \[laughs\] Yeah, like, what is, what is... I don't even know. I don't know what to say, so I won't say anything. No, but I, I, more than anything, I think this is, have a meaningful Tisha B'Av.
[58:00] I mean, there's such possibilities and opportunities to have this be meaningful. And to mark it, if you've never heard of it before, mark it any way you want. It's the ninth Av. We will leave it there. Thank you.
[58:13] Thank you.
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