For this I mourn
A modern Tisha B'Av list of lamentations
This weekend, the Nine Days, culminating with Tisha B’Av fast, are upon the world’s Jewish population.
Outside of the Orthodox world, or outside of the confines of Jewish sleep-away camp, I bet most liberal or unaffiliated Jews will not even give it a second thought.
In their continued perversion and inversion of Judaism, anti-Zionist Jews will twist the day of fasting for their will and mourn the innocents lost in Gaza rather than lamenting for the blood spilled of their brothers and sisters or the loss of any perceived safety and security thanks to the incessant chanting of their friends in the pro-Palestinian encampments.
In short, Tisha B’Av (literally meaning the ninth of the Hebrew month of Av) is the saddest day on the Jewish calendar.
The outsider must see observers of this fast day pretty much as religious fanatics out of their minds.
Are you the average outsider?
I’ll test out my theory.
Check it out; Here is the crux of this day and the reason why some Jews fast and mourn today:
Over two thousand years ago, we, the Jews, had two Great Temples in Jerusalem.
Where we performed actual ritual sacrifices of animals and harvests, as according to the Torah.
On the Temple Mount.
Where the Al Aqsa Mosque now stands.
(Please, now tell me, who is colonizing who?)
The Holy Temples were destroyed, and the Children of Israel were carted off into exile and slavery by the Babylonians and then the Romans – first in 423 B.C.E. and then 70 C.E.
The destruction of the Temples also marked the Jewish Exile from Israel, which ended only with the establishment of the modern State of Israel in 1948.
Lots of other bad stuff happened to Jews on or around this day.
Through the centuries, some of our greatest leaders were killed in and around this date.
Through the centuries, Jews were expelled from Jerusalem, from England, France, and Spain, in and around on this date.
This is why we fast.
During the Nine Days leading up to the fast, we don’t have fun in pools.
Or chow down on burgers at barbecues.
At the height of the summer.
So now is your turn to respond: You are in mourning in 2025, in modern times, for the destruction of a building? And the destruction happened
HOW many years ago? But that was then and this is now. That has NOTHING to do with today. Seriously, get over it!
How do you observe Tisha B’Av?
You start the fast at synagogue, sitting on the floor. Mourning brings you mentally to a lower, less comfortable place and you want to match this mood physically. So you sit on the floor.
It is customary for the sanctuary lights to dim. Some bring flashlights or light candles to follow along in their prayer books.
Then, in a mournful melody, a leader or a group of leaders chant the entire book of Lamentations, or Eicha in Hebrew.
The imagery in Lamentations is so very sad and graphic. There is no comfort. Gd has abandoned His Chosen People to be starved, stoned, burned, raped and humiliated by our worst enemies. There is no one to comfort them and no one to answer Jerusalem’s cries.
There are mothers sitting in the ashes of what were once the glorious golden-paved streets of Jerusalem. The passage of babies suckling the empty breasts of their starving mothers always gets to me. I can hear the cries of the starving in the streets of the Old City of Jerusalem as the Romans attempted to starve them out from behind the walls. You can smell the burning and feel the heat.
“The tongue of the suckling cleaves to its palate for thirst. Little children beg for bread. None gives them a morsel.”
Fast forward a few centuries. Are the images that the author of Lamentations paints in the reader’s head any different or remote than those from the ghettos of Rome? Prague? Warsaw?
The foes set upon our sanctuaries…Our steps were checked. We could not walk in our squares.
Is it any different now? As Jews are afraid to openly show their Jewish identity and safely walk in the streets In Paris? In Brooklyn? Even Jerusalem?
Though the theme of my newsletter LaKoom is about getting up, standing up for Jewish rights and resiliency, at times like Tisha B’Av, you just have to get down.
Way down.
On the floor covered in proverbial ashes down.
Literally, sit in your sorrow and mourning and sadness down.
Fasting down.
If Wednesday Addams observed one Jewish holiday, I bet you she would be all down for Tisha B’Av.
So, outside of the traditional text of Eicha, I have come up with my own list of Lamentations.
This is not specifially about mourning for those lost on October 7th and all who have been killed since to defend Israel. That is reserved for Yom HaZikaron.
It should go without saying that I think of all the innocent souls killed on that day, those who have been killed since, and those who remain in captivity by Hamas on a daily basis.
But this list is more about concepts, sure things that we as Diaspora Jews once, before October 7th were deluded into complacency, thinking that certain things were decades behind us, never to surface again.
For starters, I mourn for the phrase Never Again, because, as we know, from Amsterdam, and New York, and Paris, and Brussels, and Los Angeles, that it’s happening again.
I mourn that I will probably never visit cities like Paris, Amsterdam, or Brussels because Israelis no longer feel safe there. And what is unsafe for Israelis should be a no-go for all Jews.
I mourn the thinking that the Holocaust was behind us, something that was necessary to teach lest it happen again, lest people go around shaking their heads, wondering, how could people have let this happen?
Once, almost a decade ago, I was at a bar mitzvah reception of the son of a very wealthy, prominent family in Rochester, NY. We sat under a beautiful tent at a lavish setting. When I got to talking about Jewish education, another very prominent, wealthy member of the Jewish community, one of the community’s largest donors in fact, said to me, “it’s time to stop putting such an emphasis on antisemitism. It’s over. The Holocaust and all that led up to it is SO over.”
I wonder what’s going through his head these days.
I mourn for today’s Jewish teens and college students, who, because of either the pandemic or the war, have not had the opportunity to fully visit and relish the joy of being Jewish and young and take the time and opportunity to enjoy an entire summer in Israel.
I mourn for my niece who, once a student enrolled at a private liberal college, lost all her friends after October 7th.
I mourn for all the Jewish teens and college students who have also lost friends.
I mourn for true liberalism and progressivism, not the garbage ideology that is now being passed off as liberalism and progressivism.
I mourn the home I once felt in the progressive movement, knowing to really be accepted there now, I’d have to check my Zionism at the door and censor my every word.
I mourn the next generation of young Diaspora Jews who, for the most part, have checked out of having Israel have anything to do with their Jewish identity.
To fit into their progressive circles, they renounce any connection to Israel and flaunt their anti-Zionism stance. I mourn that by doing this, they demonstrate just how little they know about Jewish history.
I mourn that one day, when the progressive causes they cling to no longer have any use for them, the progressive Jews, the “good anti-Zionist” Jews, will be discarded and ostracized as well.
Therefore, I mourn and lament the failure of Jewish education and the complacency and comfort of American Jews who were so very comfortable in the Golden Age of American Jewry that seems to be on its way out.
I mourn my trust in the public education system as it shifts ever further to the left, grasps onto socialist concepts, and no longer even tries to hide the notion that it views Jews as privileged, therefore oppressors, intersects all struggles of minorities except Jews and ultimately holds Israel as a pariah state among all the nations. And that Anti-Zionism is distinct from antisemitism.
I mourn for the future of New York City, being Jewish or not, if Zohran Mamdani is elected Mayor.
I mourn the inability to ever let my guard down.
I mourn not worrying about placing a pro-Israel or a Bring Them Home Now sign on my lawn without it being stolen. From my quiet, suburban lawn.
I mourn that I am always looking for the microaggressions, the slights, when I am traveling or even out listening to music, that there is a tinge of anti-Israelism nearby and present.
I mourn that I can no longer just casually and joyfully turn to a musician or actor, to listen to their music or watch a film they appear in, without knowing how much they have intently picked up and run with the Hamas propaganda as some gleaming torch to win them validation and a sense of “humanity” among their deluded Jew hating virtue signaling fans.
I therefore mourn:
Mark Ruffalo
Billie Eilish
Stanley Tucci
Sinead O’Connor
Pink Floyd
Roger Waters
Cold Play
John Cusak
Susan Sarandon
to name a few.
(Please let me know in the comments who I have left out. I want to be completely inclusive of all Zionist hating bigots.)
I mourn that for Jews (and I hate to tell you, my non-Jewish friends, it’s about the West too), things will never feel the way they felt on October 6th, 2023.
I mourn that for many Israelis, some who are still waiting for their loved ones to be freed from Gaza, dead or alive, it is still October 7th 2023.
And just like the liturgy of Tisha B’Av, I leave this with no words of consolation or comfort.
This Tisha B’Av, what do you mourn?
Let me know in the comments.