The Tisha b’Av problem

Sara Horowitz

One summer a friend sent me a still from the original King Kong movie. The black and white photo caught the famed giant ape atop the Empire State Building in New York, cradling the love of his life, moments before he was defeated. Onto this photo from the 1933 film my friend had inserted a speech bubble that read, in Hebrew, Oy nah lanu ki chatanu. It was the first and only greeting card I ever received – really, the only one I ever saw – to mark Tisha b’Av, the day of mourning and fasting observed on the ninth of Av, in commemoration of the destruction of both ancient Temples. 

The added phrase, a wry commentary on the havoc created by the cinematic monster, and perhaps the well-meaning beast’s own demise, is a verse from the fifth chapter of Eichah, or Lamentations, the megillah recited on the fast day: “Woe unto us for we have sinned.”

This card notwithstanding, there isn’t a market for Tisha b’Av cards, especially humorous ones. Jews who mark the day acknowledge the great national loss and the toll of human suffering that the day ritually mourns, and treat it soberly. Other Jews have simply never heard of it. And many Jews, since the middle of the last century, have struggled with how (and whether) to give it meaning in our times. 

The humour in the card was part irreverent, part macabre, but also a commentary of sorts on the ambivalence of many modem, traditional Jews toward the day of ritualized collective mourning.  In our times, the Holocaust complicates the place of Tisha b’Av. 

The decades following World War II saw debates about the relationship between the older day of mourning and the more recent catastrophe. A significant number of Orthodox and Conservative rabbis argued against the establishment of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. They reasoned that Tisha b’Av – whose significance over time had expanded to encompass Jewish catastrophe more broadly – should serve to adequately and meaningfully mourn the Shoah. And indeed, it is impossible to hear the visceral depictions of anguish and death captured in the powerful poetry of Jeremiah in Eichah without thinking of the losses and atrocities of the Holocaust.

Jewish summer camps reinforce that link. Perhaps because there are no other Jewish holidays to mark during the summer, Jewish camps have focused on Tisha b’Av, using it for Holocaust education, reinforced by candlelit rooms, mournful melodic recitations amid unusual decorum. Many former campers carry these observances of Tisha b’Av into their adult life, so that it remains for them a day embedded with Jewish meaning, enfolded into Holocaust commemoration. 

At the same time, many modern Jews object profoundly to the theological implications of ritually linking the Shoah with Tisha b’Av. The problem is encapsulated by the verse inserted into the King Kong photo – the suggestion that the Jews of Europe had brought unspeakable catastrophe upon themselves, that they deserved their punishment. 

Many theologians across the denominations – and, indeed, many thinking Jews, find that suggestion deeply offensive. Conceptually, they separate the remembrances of Tisha b’Av from those of Yom Hashoah, and often the emotions evoked by Yom Hashoah eclipse the more ancient day. 

At the other end of the spectrum, many people feel that the establishment of the State of Israel, the renewed sovereignty of Jews over the ancient homeland, especially after the 1967 reunification of Jerusalem, obviates the need for a day marking the ancient displacement and  destruction. Along with the prophet Zechariah, they contend that the return to Jerusalem should occasion a change in the way we regard the traditional days of mourning – that Tisha b’Av should become a day of “joy and gladness” (8:19).  

Some might see such philosophical, theological and conceptual problems with an ancient Jewish sacred day as signs of an attenuation between the modern Jew and Jewish tradition. I see it as a place of struggle that affirms a meaningful engagement with the Jewish past, present and future.