The saddest day hit me like a knife in my chest. The images of Evyatar David and Rom Braslavski’s tortured and starved bodies, images that evoke the ultimate incarnation of Jewish suffering, were the final twist.
Six people in my family were taken hostage on Oct. 7, and my cousin’s husband David Cunio and his brother Ariel Cunio are both still held in captivity. I was already overcome by grief after a series of heartbreaking moments in the past couple weeks. My grief does not have hard borders: My heart grieves for the children of Gaza whose emaciated bodies have haunted me over and over; I grieve for the six soldiers who died by suicide in the last month alone because of PTSD; and of course I grieve for my family’s agony that still has no end in sight.
But underneath, there is something deeper causing my soul so much unrest and I have been feeling like I need some answers.
As is customary, I spent Tisha B’Av reading Eicha, or the Book of Lamentations. It is critical that you first understand that I’ve never done this in my life. Until now I had never once given a thought to Tisha B’Av. I am a secular Jew, and despite my devout Yemenite Israeli grandparents on my mother’s side, my upbringing was something I call “Jewish-light” when it came to scripture or holy days like this one. Our doorways were all marked by mezuzahs, we lit Shabbat candles, celebrated High Holidays in synagogue and I had what I believe to be a chic havdalah service for my bat mitzvah, but that’s pretty much where the Jewish journey ended.
As I’m now finding out, Tisha B’Av is the saddest day in the Jewish calendar. It is a day we grieve our destruction. It commemorates the destruction of both the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem, along with a string of other disasters in Jewish history that somehow all fell on the same date. Basically it’s our day of collective Jewish grief. So I guess it’s not all that surprising that this day of supreme mourning happened to coincide with this particularly heartbreaking moment as if divine, like it has many times before (as I have just recently learned.
Since I am a deeply spiritual seeker I like to look for words and metaphors to make sense of my pain, so I was called to turn towards the ancient poetry we read on this day. What I found was not just a story from the past, but one from the here and now. It opens:
Alas! Lonely sits the city
Once great with people!
She that was great among nations
Is become like a widow;
The princess among states
Is become a thrall.Bitterly she weeps in the night,
Her cheek wet with tears.
There is none to comfort her
Of all her friends.
All her allies have betrayed her;
They have become her foes.
Just before I discovered these opening verses for the first time, I had tearfully taken to Instagram with a desperate lament (pun intended) filled with anger directed at the polarized Jewish community for our failure to save the hostages and end the war. I think I was prepared to be abandoned by the Israeli government, but nothing could have prepared me for the loneliness of a Jewish community divided. Of course I have a lot of support in our community, but we lack the unity we had for most of my life. A unified, not uniform, community is the greatest strength of our peoplehood and we have destroyed it.
That is the grief that is crying out in Lamentations. Jerusalem, once vibrant, is imagined as a widow, abandoned and humiliated. But the grief isn’t only hers. It’s ours. It has become clear to me that by letting go of the stronghold on our communal bond, our internal allyship, we have become our own worst enemy.
We are caught up in these rigid political and ideological camps that define and segregate us from one another as if we’ve shattered into multiple tribes again. I find myself calling out: Don’t you get that we are at war with ourselves? And we have to find a way to put the pieces back, perhaps to create something new, or we will not survive.
This breakdown of mine had been 22 months coming. I have been battling within our community far more than outside of it for a long time now. Israelis are divided, the Jewish Diaspora is divided, and the Diaspora and Israeli relationship is not working the way it used to. Deep in the pit of my stomach I know these fractures are the root of what is causing us so much grief, underneath the obvious.
Now I see that Tisha B’Av is a warning. It holds up a mirror to what happens when we turn on each other. According to Jewish tradition, the Second Temple wasn’t destroyed just because of the outside Roman empire — it fell because of something called sinat chinam, baseless hatred between Jews themselves.
As I kept reading the verses in Eicha, I discovered a haunting resonance with the pain and devastation we feel within our community now. Though written to mourn the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 586 BCE, its themes of suffering, starvation, loss, abandonment, and moral reckoning feel tragically familiar. And in truth, it does not leave us with a happy ending. It doesn’t rush to comfort but instead asks us to feel into the anguish, to look deeply into the wounds we ourselves have created. It doesn’t tie things up with hope or redemption, but rather it dwells in the pain (something I am perhaps too good at doing myself). It asks us to witness the desolation of a city, a people, a soul — because only through witnessing will we find a way to do something about it.
When I think about nearly every Jew I know, there is one thing we all have in common regardless of the political tribes we belong to — we love being Jewish and we don’t want to be anything else. This is where all of our discomfort comes from. For most of us, we are born as Jews and we will die as Jews and we would not have it any other way. Isn’t that a beautiful thing worth saving? But only the collective recognition and acceptance of our interdependence will save us again. We have survived for thousands of years not because of the Torah or the Talmud, not because of our rituals or values alone, but because we are a people, and we must not give up on our peoplehood. That is what I believe is most holy.
The embattled state where we now find ourselves only happens when we stop seeing each other as part of the same whole. When we let bitterness and judgement become weapons and when we let politics become identity. When compassion becomes conditional. That’s the kind of destruction that doesn’t become headlines on the news, but it has hollowed us just the same. If there is a bright side to this very depressing time it is that destruction is also an opportunity. I will spare you the clichés, but believe me when I say this is a chance to ask ourselves: What are we fighting for? Who have we turned into strangers? And how will we find our way back?
This anguished day isn’t just about the mourning of our ancient Temple, because in truth we are the Temple now. Our community was once a sanctuary, and it can be again. Tisha B’Av is not only inviting us to mourn what we have lost, but more urgently it is asking us to ask how we might stop losing each other.
This piece first ran on Alana Zeitchik’s Substack, Articulate.
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