Tisha B’Av is not a holiday I grew up with, and not one that makes much sense to me. I have mixed feelings about mourning the destruction of the First and Second Temples in ancient Jerusalem, and no interest in praying for a third one to be built. I’m a proud Jew of the diaspora, and believe the things I find sacred and beautiful in Judaism come from the experience of exile.
But I also love Tisha B’Av. I love that there is a day reserved for acknowledging catastrophe and grief. It feels like it holds the promise for a kind of spiritual comfort that I otherwise have a hard time finding in Judaism.
Over the last few years, as I have practiced both Zen Buddhism and Judaism, a new approach to Tisha B’Av has emerged for me. My proposal is that the traditional Tisha B’Av — the day of mourning the destruction of the temples — can be reclaimed as a new Tisha B’Av, celebrating the day that the Jews of the diaspora decided to stop mourning the destruction of the temples.
The new Tisha B’Av can be a day for practicing letting go. For taking stock of all of the things we have lost, and deciding whether these are things that we still wish to mourn. From small things to big things — lost relationships, lost opportunities, old versions of ourselves. But also things that it sometimes feels like we have been holding on to since before we were born. The things it feels like we have been holding on to for thousands of years.
For Jews on Tisha B’Av, that feeling is literal. But my experience in Buddhist spaces tells me it’s a universal experience. So many of us feel like we arrived in this world already enmeshed and interdependent, longing for things we don’t even remember, attachments from past lives.
The new Tisha B’Av can be a day to be grateful for the gifts of exile. Above all, we are grateful that we discovered that God can be found just as easily in Babylon and Poland and Brooklyn as in Israel. Just as easily in our homes and in nature as in our places of worship. We are grateful for the experience of wandering, which showed us the humanity we share with all lost and oppressed people.
The new Tisha B’Av can be a holiday for humanist Jews. Which also means that the new Tisha B’Av can be a holiday for leftist Jews and anti-Zionist Jews. Jews who are grateful that when the temples were destroyed, so was Judaism as a state religion. Jews who don’t want their spirituality mediated by government institutions, and who want a religion that insists on certain moral truths in defiance of the state.
The new Tisha B’Av can be a holiday for Jews who are glad that the old forms of religious authority are gone. Jews who want to be their own source of spiritual authority. Jews who want to connect to God directly. To me, that means balancing the impulse to place our lives in the care of higher powers and the impulse to take responsibility for ourselves. Tisha B’Av is said to be a day when God would not hear the prayers of the Jews. It’s also the day the Messiah is supposed to be born.
The new Tisha B’Av, like the original, can still be a time to think about the Messiah. To ask ourselves if we really believe that this world will be saved. Personally, I don’t. And I don’t like the feeling that I’m waiting for a kind of help that will never come.
So the new Tisha B’Av can be a day where we consider what it means to save ourselves. Are we still lost after all of these thousands of years? And if we are, can we find our bearings within our own bodies? Can we end the exile within our own lives? (The new Tisha B’Av can be a holiday for Buddhist Jews.)
I think Jews like me have to stop feeling lost within Jewish tradition. We need some fluency with the parts of the tradition that don’t resonate so that we can confidently say, “No, I cannot accept this.” So the new Tisha B’Av can be a day for Jewish learning. For reading the book of Lamentations, as the tradition dictates. And for acknowledging that it has been a very long and very painful exile.
We don’t have to regret the time we have spent mourning the things we’ve lost. We don’t have to decide that we hate the parts of our Jewish communities or our Jewish selves that feel lost, or feel loss, and want back the things that were destroyed. But we can, at the same time, practice letting go of those things, and finding ourselves where we are. When God speaks to you, you say, “ Hineini , here I am.” You can’t find God anywhere other than where you are. Right now I’m in Brooklyn.
This new Tisha B’Av should be a feast day, not a fast day. People joke that the formula for Jewish holidays is: “They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat.” But on Passover, Purim, and Hanukkah, the story is actually, “They tried to kill us, we killed them, let’s eat.”
The destruction of the temples was different. The Jews never got revenge on the Babylonians and the Romans, but we did survive. So Tisha B’Av would be a feast day not tinged with revenge. Probably it should be a vegetarian feast. We don’t want to bring back animal sacrifice.
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