17 Tammuz 5786: Between the Straits

Every summer the Jewish calendar enters a period known as Bein HaMetzarim/בין המצרים – “Between the Straits.” The expression comes from the opening chapter of the Book of Lamentations: “All her pursuers overtook her between the straits.” It begins on the Seventeenth of Tammuz, when the walls of Jerusalem were breached, and ends three weeks later on the Ninth of Av, when the First and the Second Temples were destroyed.

The Jewish tradition does not begin by remembering destruction. It begins by remembering the breach.

This distinction may be one of its deepest insights. A city does not disappear in a single day. Neither does a people, a civilization or a faith. Before buildings fall, something less visible begins to give way. The breach in the walls marks the moment when what had seemed secure becomes exposed. Destruction has not yet occurred, but it has become possible.

As we approach Tisha Be’Av 5786 and look toward the coming year 5787, this ancient remembrance acquires a striking relevance. We live in an age that appears powerful and interconnected, yet increasingly uncertain. States possess unprecedented technological means, religions continue to gather millions of believers, economies span continents, and information circulates instantly. Yet beneath this appearance of strength, many societies experience an unexpected condition that may be described as breakability.

Breakability is not weakness.

Jerusalem was never weak. The Temple was not fragile. Nor were the Jewish people. Across three millennia they have endured conquests, exile, dispersion, persecution and repeated attempts at eradication. Their very survival demonstrates extraordinary resilience. Yet strength itself can become breakable. A mighty tree withstands storms for centuries and may still split under a single decisive fracture. A bridge of steel is not fragile, but it remains breakable if the forces acting upon it exceed its capacity to remain whole.

The Seventeenth of Tammuz invites precisely this reflection. The breached wall represents the moment when a living structure begins to lose its coherence. From then onward, history accelerates.

The Jewish calendar refuses to isolate catastrophe from the process that precedes it.

One of the events traditionally associated with this day is the interruption of the Tamid/תמיד, the perpetual daily offering in the Temple. For centuries this sacrifice marked the rhythm of Israel’s life. It was not merely a ritual among others but the visible sign that the covenant continued to be lived every morning and every evening. When the siege prevented the offering from continuing, something much greater than a liturgical practice was interrupted. The continuity of ordinary sacred life itself had been breached.

Yet here another remarkable lesson emerges.

The Tamid ceased in Jerusalem, but it did not disappear from Jewish consciousness. Memory transformed absence into presence. Prayer, study and transmission preserved what history could no longer sustain visibly. The destruction of the Temple therefore did not signify the disappearance of Israel’s vocation. It required another manner of carrying that vocation through time.

Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai understood this with prophetic clarity. By preserving learning at Yavneh after the destruction of Jerusalem, he did not abandon the Temple. He ensured that memory itself would become a sanctuary. The stones had fallen. The covenant had not.

This distinction has never ceased to accompany Jewish history.

It also helps us understand the present.

Civilizations are rarely broken only by invading armies. Long before monuments collapse, confidence begins to weaken. Communities cease to recognize one another as indispensable. Public language becomes harsher. Shared memory fragments into competing narratives. What once united gradually ceases to bind together. The walls may still stand, yet they no longer protect what gave them meaning.

This process extends far beyond Jerusalem.

The ancient Christian heartlands of North Africa, Mesopotamia and much of the Arabian Peninsula once flourished with theological schools, monasteries and living communities. Many gradually disappeared, not always through one decisive catastrophe but through centuries of pressure, uncertainty and departure. Buildings sometimes remained after the people had gone.

Jewish history has experienced similar movements repeatedly. Late Rabbi Léon Yehudah Askenazi -Manitou – often spoke of a Jewish hemorrhage from Europe. The image was striking because a hemorrhage differs from ordinary migration. Migration may express hope or opportunity. A hemorrhage is the gradual loss of lifeblood from a living body. Already in the early 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union revealed that this movement extended well beyond Western Europe. Today, many Jewish communities throughout the world again ask questions they hoped history had already answered. The issue is no longer only where Jews live, but whether they still perceive a future where they have lived for generations.

Before stones collapse, a human presence slowly withdraws.

Perhaps this is one of the enduring meanings of the breached walls of Jerusalem. They have become more than an historical memory. They have become a mirror in which successive civilizations may recognize their own narrow places, their own bein hametzarim, before absence itself reshapes the landscape.

The expression Bein HaMetzarim – “Between the Straits” – has acquired an unexpected resonance in our own generation. It no longer evokes only the ancient walls of Jerusalem. It describes a condition in which individuals, peoples and civilizations discover that their path has become narrower, their choices fewer, their certainties less evident. The Hebrew expression speaks not simply of geographical confinement but of a human experience shared across history.

Jerusalem remains the place where these questions converge.

For Jews, the city preserves the memory of the Temple and of an unfinished expectation that has accompanied every generation since its destruction. Every Jewish prayer directed toward Jerusalem silently bears the memory of what once stood and of what still awaits fulfillment.

For Christians, this year marks the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. The anniversary has generated numerous encounters and declarations expressing the desire for unity. Yet it has also reminded Christians how readily the language of unity can conceal enduring divisions. The Nicene faith continues to be confessed throughout the Christian world, but communion itself remains fractured. The desire for unity has not disappeared; it continues to journey through history, marked by its own forms of breakability. Here again, Jerusalem quietly reminds Christians that reconciliation cannot be proclaimed before it is patiently lived.

Human history, and humanity’s interpretations of its own destiny, are breakable; the Shekhinah and the Messiah are not.

Islam likewise carries a universal vocation through the idea of the Ummah, the worldwide community of believers. Across the centuries, this aspiration has inspired immense spiritual, intellectual and cultural achievements while also experiencing profound internal divisions and struggles over authority, legitimacy and renewal. Jerusalem occupies a singular place within that history as well. The city continues to gather hopes that extend far beyond political frontiers. Its significance cannot be reduced to diplomacy alone because it belongs to the spiritual imagination of billions of believers.

This convergence explains why Jerusalem so often appears disproportionate to its geographical size. Cities much larger, wealthier or more powerful rarely attract the same intensity of attention. Jerusalem does because it has become a meeting place of universal memories. The city embodies hopes that no political agreement can entirely satisfy and fears that no military victory can permanently remove.

The Three Weeks therefore invite more than historical remembrance. They ask whether humanity recognizes the first signs of its own breaches before they become irreversible.

The prophets repeatedly warned that destruction does not begin with armies. It begins when justice weakens, when truth becomes negotiable, when memory is manipulated and when human beings cease to perceive one another as bearers of the divine image. Military defeat merely makes visible what has already been unfolding within society itself.

This is why the Jewish tradition insists on remembering the breach before mourning the destruction.

The lesson extends well beyond the history of Jerusalem.

Every civilization experiences moments when it appears outwardly stable while quietly losing part of itself. Sometimes this occurs through persecution or war. Sometimes through exhaustion. Sometimes through the gradual departure of communities that no longer believe they possess a future where they have lived for centuries.

History offers many examples.

The disappearance of ancient Christian populations from regions where Christianity was once native transformed entire civilizations. The successive departures of Jewish communities from country after country likewise altered not only Jewish history but also the societies those communities left behind. Rabbi Léon Askenazi’s image of a Jewish hemorrhage remains striking because it describes more than the movement of people. A hemorrhage changes the body from which life slowly departs. The question concerns not only the destiny of the Jews but also the future of the civilizations that discover, sometimes too late, what their own departures have meant.

Perhaps this is one of the least understood dimensions of the Three Weeks. The breach is never exclusively local. Once relationships begin to unravel, their consequences extend far beyond the original walls. The history of Jerusalem has become, over the centuries, a history of humanity itself.

Yet the Jewish calendar refuses despair.

The breach is remembered for three weeks, not forever.

The Ninth of Av itself, although associated with incomparable mourning, already contains the promise that destruction will not have the final word. Jewish memory has never existed merely to preserve loss. It preserves the possibility of return, renewal and rebuilding. It shows how the future will come up. Without that confidence, neither Yavneh nor the academies of Babylonia, nor the communities scattered across the world, nor the return to Zion could have emerged.

The same hope speaks quietly to all who continue to seek peace in Jerusalem.

Breakability is not destiny. It is a warning.

The walls of Jerusalem continue to teach that history unfolds first within the human heart and only afterwards upon the stones of cities. Before walls are rebuilt, trust must be rebuilt. Before civilizations recover confidence, they must rediscover the relationships that once allowed different communities to remain present together. Before memory becomes reconciliation, it must first become truth.

As the Jewish people enter the days leading toward Tisha Be’Av and prepare, beyond mourning, for another New Year, the ancient question remains as urgent as ever.

What breaches still await repair? At present the task is immense, implies to be capable to ask for forgiveness with much consciousness.

The answer cannot be given by governments alone, nor by religious institutions, nor by military power. It begins wherever men and women refuse to allow absence to become normal, wherever memory remains stronger than fear, and wherever the narrow places of history become, once again, the beginning of a road rather than its end.