Why do we observe Tisha B'Av?

Rabban Gamliel, Elazar ben Azariah, Rabbi Joshua and Rabbi Akiva went to Jerusalem.  They reached the Temple that was in ruins and saw a fox emerging from the ruins of the Holy of Holies.  The others started to cry but Rabbi Akiva laughed.  They asked, “Why are you laughing Akiva?”  He replied, “It was prophesied (Book of Lamentations) that foxes would haunt the Temple Mount, and it was also prophesied that the ‘old men and women will yet dwell in the streets of Jerusalem’.  Now that the first has happened, we know the second, the redemption, will happen, too.”

They replied, “Akiva, you have consoled us, you have consoled us!”

We have an ambivalent approach to mourning the Temple.  In our Siddur, we changed the language in our Musaf service from ‘we will offer sacrifices at the Temple’ to ‘We once offered sacrifices…’ but we also kept “May the Temple be rebuilt soon and in our days.” 

We support the State of Israel as a democracy and the evolution of our faith from priesthood and offerings to prayer, tzedakah, and community building.  I suggest we’d find it strange to see rebuilding of the Temple and restoration of its rituals with the inevitable political and religious fallout from the actual rebuilding.

So why then do we observe this holiday of Tisha B’av, even granted that other national tragedies occurred on the same day in history?

Why observe this holiday that in many communities is even less familiar that Shemini Atzeret or T”u Bi’shevat?

It’s a holiday that according to writer Simon Yisrael Fuerman (Tablet Magazine) probably was familiar to many only from a classic Allan Sherman song, “Why did she go and fall in love, I haven’t seen her since last Tisha B’av.”

One way to see Tisha B’av’s relevance is as a day long Tachanun – the weekday prayers when we ‘lean in’ on God for support.  We’re soaked in tears, we’ve had too much, we’re done, we’re cooked and we can’t go on without a source of strength from outside ourselves.

There are two pieces of the Tachanun that have always spoken to me and that bear on our experience of Tisha B’Av – giving us two ways to reflect on this upcoming moment of remembering sadness, destruction, pain and loss.

The first is “We do not know what to do…” Va’anachnu lo nedah mah naseh…We search, often in the dark, for answers, what to do, how to do it, why me?  Why us?  Why now?  The 9^th of Av is a day of recognizing our humanity, recognizing we don’t have all the answers, that we’re searching, hoping, praying for inspiration – but often that light bulb just doesn’t pop up over our heads.

The second is “Remember compassion in the midst of anger” Bero’gez ra’chem tizkor…Around us there is so much anger, stress, crankiness, edginess, and impatience.  It feels like the world is on edge.  There are 7 billion, 442 million, 886 (or so) people on earth flying past each other at digital light speed, car horns blaring, lives exposed on social media more than we’d care to realize [even for those of us who are not on Facebook].  And so we ask God to remember compassion for each of us when thing don’t work out the way we hoped, when we’re lonely and lost and angry with ourselves, angry with God.  We ask God to help us be gentle, not backing down or giving up – but patience in strength and endurance.

The 9^th of Av makes the evils of the world more real to us because we choose to confront them through the lens of our lived experience, to shed tears at what we’ve lost while never forgetting how far we’ve come against all odds.

And if we find ourselves laughing like Rabbi Akiva, then let’s laugh, release the tension, notice the irony, and live with things unfinished and in disorder, at least for a day.