The Jews’ saddest day is the Ninth of Av, which this year is Tuesday. During a fast as long and stringent as Yom Kippur, the children of Israel chant dirges mourning their alienation from God. Study of sacred texts, excepting certain theodicical and funereal writings, is forbidden, limiting the greatest intellectual expression of a Jew’s love of God. The day concludes eight prior days of mourning—those, in turn, embedded in three weeks of solemn reflection. Wherefore this grief?
Principally, the destruction of both temples in Jerusalem, and subsequent exiles from the land of Israel. This is our most abiding catastrophe. Mass death and religious decay are familiar features of Jewish history. Even as the former has, for now, ceased, the latter is embodied in a contemporary Jewry most of whose members disobey Jewish law. But a Jew may always return. This spiritual suicide is optional. Equally, physical destruction is compensable. Seventy-two years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Talmud study flourishes in Jerusalem and in New York. But we have no Temple. This lack is not yet made whole.