Tisha B’Av: Carrying Loss, Choosing Healing

Tisha B’Av, the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, is the saddest day in the Jewish year. It marks the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, but over time it became the day we also remember expulsions, pogroms, massacres and persecution through the centuries. It is a day built for grief. Judaism did something very wise when it gave us not only permission but a commandment to stop and mourn. In a world that often tells us to keep moving, to push feelings aside and get back to work, this tradition says: sit down, cry, and feel the weight of what was lost.

La distruzione del tempio di Gerusalemme -Francesco Hayez - gallerie Accademia Venice

This idea is rooted in how Judaism handles personal grief as well. Even when someone might want to bury themselves in work and avoid the pain, Jewish law tells them to take seven days (shiva) to sit still and mourn, and then, on the seventh day, to stand up and walk around the block because life must continue. That rhythm—allowing grief and then gently nudging life forward—is not only compassionate, it is empowering. It says we do not have to be afraid of our pain because it has a place and a time.

Tisha B’Av extends this wisdom from the personal to the collective. It holds centuries of grief in one container, a single day where we process many losses, even those that happened long before our time. The verses we read in Megilat Eicha still captures that feeling:

“My eyes are spent with tears, my innards burn; my heart is poured out in grief over the destruction of the daughter of my people"

אֱכָל֨וּ בַדְּמָע֤וֹת עֵינַי֙ חֳמַרְמְר֣וּ מֵעַ֔י נִשְׁפַּ֤ךְ לָאָ֨רֶץ֙ כְּבֵדִ֔י עַל־שֶׁ֖בֶר בַּת־עַמִּ֑י  (איכה ב, יא)

When we read these words, we are reminded that trauma and grief are not only events, they are experiences passed from generation to generation. This year, after nearly two years of war, displacement, loss of life and hostages still not home, it feels like we are living inside Eicha. It is not just ancient poetry, it feels like a mirror of what we are going through now.

And there is something in how we carry these layers of memory. French author Anne Berest, in her book The Postcard, writes about how her grandmother’s Holocaust trauma shapes her life decades later: “I carry within me, inscribed in the very cells of my body, the memory of an experience of danger so violent that sometimes I think I really lived it myself, or that I’ll be forced to relive it one day.” Many Jews feel this, even if their families’ stories are different. We carry the echoes of past danger inside us.

Historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi wrote that Jews see the destruction of the Second Temple as an “ur-catastrophe,” a single frame through which all later tragedies are understood. He was critical of this tendency, saying it kept us from developing new interpretations for new events, yet it also explains why Tisha B’Av holds such power. When so much history is packed into one day, we feel not only the pain of what is happening now but also centuries of ancestral memory. That can feel overwhelming, but it also reminds us that we are part of something larger, that we have been through devastation before and rebuilt.

That same theme appeared in a short video released after October 7 called “Never Again All Over Again” by the satire show The Jews Are Coming. It starts with Tisha B’Av, flashes through pogroms and massacres across centuries and ends with October 7. It is shocking to see our history lined up that way, but it ends with a simple truth: we always get up and rebuild.

For me, this is why Tisha B’Av feels so important this year. It gives space for our grief, both present and inherited, and at the same time it reminds us to get up and walk around the block, just like after shiva. It says to future generations: we are not afraid to feel, but we are also not defined by despair. We heal so that our children do not have to carry the same wounds we inherited.

This is the work ahead of us as a society. To feel the pain, to process it, and to choose healing. Tisha B’Av is not only a memorial, it is an invitation to break cycl

es of trauma, so the next generation can inherit strength instead of fear.