Tisha B’Av is the major day of communal mourning in the Jewish calendar, specifically focused on the destruction of the First (586 B.C.E.) and Second (70 C.E.) Temples in Jerusalem. This year, Tisha B’Av begins Saturday night, August 6.
While centered around the destruction of the First and Second Temples, our tradition has always attributed a number of collective tragedies to the Ninth of Av. The Mishnah teaches:
On the Ninth of Av it was decreed upon our ancestors that they would all die in the wilderness and not enter Eretz Yisrael; and the Temple was destroyed the first time, in the days of Nebuchadnezzar, and the second time, by the Romans; and Beitar was captured; and the city of Jerusalem was plowed.
Additionally, history records that the edict of King Edward I compelling the Jews of England to leave the country was signed on the Ninth of Av in 1290, the Jews were expelled from Spain on that day in 1492, and World War I broke out in 1914.
All this to say that while the Book of Lamentations was written from and for the mourners of a destroyed Jerusalem, its plaintive chant and powerful imagery have often been matched to the losses of particular times and places. This summer, as we continue to grapple with an ongoing pandemic, as Europe melts under the hottest temperatures on record, as war rages in Ukraine, and as many in America mourn the protections removed by the Supreme Court’s decisions in Dobbs v. Jackson—there is certainly plenty about which to lament.
I hope that some of you will join Rabbi Yoshi and others at Adat Ari El on Saturday night, where you’ll hear the traditional words of Eicha and reflect on Tisha B’Av. I also want to offer two distinct versions of Eicha for this summer of 2022.
The first is the teaching I offered earlier this summer, at an evening of lament and of hope after the Dobbs decision was handed down, in which I imagined b’not Yerushalayim, the daughters of Jerusalem whose anguish fills the Book of Lamentations, as the workers and patients in abortion clinics around the country at the moment the decision was announced.
And, I share this beautiful rendition of Amanda Gorman’s poem Hymn for the Hurting set to the traditional melody (trope) of the Book of Lamentations by Rabbi David Evan Markus. While I cannot say, “enjoy,” I hope the sounds and the words will inspire you—as does the Book of Lamentations—towards empathy and even towards hope.
—Rabbi Sari Laufer