Shalom everyone,
Tomorrow (Monday 4th August 2025), is the main daytime fast for Tisha be’Av, the 9th day of the Fifth biblical month, when we remember the destruction of the two Temples, and mourn for the fall of the Second Temple.
When you convert to Judaism, you become part of a specific people – the Jewish people. Wherever you were born, and whatever people you were born into, you spiritually and psychologically become part of another people. I think that is perhaps the most difficult part of the conversion process to cope with mentally. For some, the psychological process can take years.
Taking the same Road as Ruth
As part of the Talmidi process of conversion, some of the final words a convert speaks to complete their process, are the moving and emotional words of Ruth: “Wherever you go, I will go, and wherever you stay over, I will stay. Your people shall be my people, and your God shall be my God. Wherever you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. May YHVH deal thus with me, and worse, if anything but death comes between you and me!”
When you convert, you take on 4,000 years’ worth of joy knowing YHVH, but you also take on generations of grief and suffering. You agree to take onto your shoulders whatever is the fate of the Jewish people, be it for good or bad. You accept that, whatever the world throws at you for being a Jew, is going to happen. You don’t run away from it, in the sense that you don’t separate yourself from other Jews in order to escape the disdain that people might have for you for being a Jew. To save your life and remain safe, at times you might have to hide being a Jew, but you don’t curse your Jewish identity or regret it. Part of converting to Judaism, is never regretting your conversion; that’s why we spend so much time ensuring that conversion is what a potential proselyte truly, really wants.
Fourteen centuries of Genocide
1,400 years ago, a violent warlord and cult-leader in Arabia decreed that the day of redemption for Muslims would only come when all Jews were killed, wiped off the face of the earth by his followers. That edict has found expression many, many times over the last fourteen centuries, the most recent being on the 7th of October 2023, when a deliberate, planned, genocidal massacre of 1,200 Israelis took place. It has utterly traumatised an entire country, and unsettled an entire people. If you can imagine what the Tulsa Race Massacre did to the collective psyche of African-Americans, or what the Bear Creek or Sand Creek Massacres did to the collective memory of Indigenous Americans, you can appreciate what the Oct 7 Massacre has done to the Jewish people as a whole.
It has brought up the memories of centuries’ worth of trauma – Mohammad’s Muslims slaughtering entire communities of Arabian Jews, Christian massacres of Jews around Europe, the Portuguese and Spanish Inquisitions, the Holocaust. And each time, those who perpetrated the evil told us they did it because we deserved it. We also remember the good, righteous people among the Nations who helped us and stood by us, often at risk to their own lives – these people will be especially blest and rewarded by God.
I’ve said on several occasions, that the quickest way to end the war in Gaza would be to release the remaining 50 hostages still being held in inhumane conditions in dark, Gazan tunnels of shadow, not knowing from one day to another if that day is going to be their last; the war continues in order to find these hostages. This is something that western governments seem to have completely lost sight of; pro-Palestinian propaganda has been so successful, that what happened on Oct 7 has been entirely forgotten, just as Tulsa, Bear Creek and Sand Creek have been forgotten by most people, when innocent people were mercilessly slaughtered simply because of their ethnicity. And in every case, the people who did it proudly enjoyed doing it.
Remembering the Loss of the Temple
On Tisha be’Av, we remember the destruction of the First and Second Temples. We remember, because forgetting is the more terrible option. The fall of the Second Temple was the opening gambit in the Exile of the Jewish people under the Romans. The more terrible option is forgetting where we came from. As a scattered people, we have never forgotten where our ancestors came from – it’s even written in our genes. For example, an analysis of my own DNA-journey shows that my Jewish ancestors left the Holy Land twice – once during the Roman period, when presumably some were taken as slaves specifically to Rome, and again during the Arab-Muslim invasion and conquest of the Holy Land, when others were taken as slaves to North Africa by the Arab colonisers of the Holy Land.
On Tisha be’Av, we are meant to remember the sins that caused the Exiles, so that this time round, we will not be exiled again. We read the Book of Lamentations in the morning, and in the afternoon, the Massorite community also reads The Laments for Jerusalem, the ninth book in The Exhortations (its ordinal number symbolising the 9th of Av).
Mourning our Loss
Part of the tradition of mourning customs in Jewish culture, is to visit someone sitting shiva (when those directly related to the one who has passed away are attended to and assisted for seven days, by their relatives and friends, while they themselves concentrate on moving through their grief). Mourning on Tisha be’Av is like sitting shiva. We are either the ones sitting shiva ourselves, or the friends who visit someone sitting shiva. The ones sitting shiva since Oct 7 are Israelis, and those who visit are diaspora Jews – or even non-Jews, who care enough for the Jewish people to sit with us while we mourn.
If you yourself are such a non-Jew, you will probably never realise just how much it means to us to simply sit with us in our time of mourning and grief; to just understand the enormity of what has happened to us, what it has done to us, to empathise with the fear and sadness we feel when the world turns on us in our grief, and glorifies our murderers instead. You support those in grief not by what you say or do, but by listening, by caring, by being there for them.
Rachel’s Tears
The prophet Jeremiah made Rachel (Jer 31:15) the symbolic mother of the Jewish people, the daughter of God who mourns for the loss of her children – that is, the people of Judah who have been exiled. God comforted those who mourned for the First Temple by immediately saying that their descendants would one day return to the Land of their ancestors (Jer 31:16-17). We returned back then and we have returned again, just as God has promised. Our consolation for the loss of the Second Temple, is that it will be rebuilt once we have learnt the lessons of the books of Lamentations and Laments.
The Consolation in our own Time
Our consolation is to know that we will not be sitting in mourning forever. Just as sitting shiva comes to an end, so too our struggles with those who despise and hate us will come to an end, and we will have peace; there will come a time when aggressive nations will no longer seek to exterminate us; there will come a time when those nations will finally understand what they have been doing to us for millennia, and will feel what we have felt all along. One day, the Temple will be rebuilt in a sacred time of peace, not conflict, and we will no longer have to mourn the loss of the Temple. Tisha be’Av will be no more, and our time of sitting shiva will come to an end. YHVH will wipe away our tears, and our sadness will be no more, for there will be no more death, or mourning, or crying, or pain. In that day, we will simply be glad in the salvation that YHVH has given us.
If you are healthy enough to fast tomorrow, I pray you have a meaningful fast.
blessings
Your brother
Shmuliq