Bound Forever

I may be the only Jewish person in our long history to have ever made a Tisha B’av Resolution.

Yes, you read that correctly: A Tisha B’Av – the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, on which our tradition ascribes all of the calamities that have befallen the Jewish people, including the destruction of both Temples and the start of the Spanish Inquisition and more – resolution.

The customs of the day are designed to make visceral the pain and isolation and misery of millennia of collective trauma by fasting, not studying Torah, and even refraining from greeting one another. Some Jews’ practices include not cleansing, wearing leather and scents, and abstaining from sexual activities – all things considered by the rabbis to bring joy. However, for all its wretchedness and the tragedy it represents and honors, I believe that Tisha B’Av is not only one of the most important days of the year, but of equal weight to its fellow full-day fast, Yom Kippur.

Whoa.

How could Tisha B’Av and Yom Kippur possibly be as important as each other? Furthermore, why can’t one exist without the other?

I want to clarify that my spicy takes do not go so far as to suggest that Tisha B’Av and Yom Kippur are as holy as one another. Yom Kippur is a commanded Holy Day – the holiest of Holy Days, in fact – codified as such in the Torah. Tisha B’Av is the farthest thing from Torah on the holiness scale. It exists as communal, intergenerational, still-open scar tissue that’s been on and in our people starting hundreds of years after the Revelation at Sinai. Tisha B’Av exists because of a rejection of Torah and those who hold fast to it – a rejection promulgated by those outside and within the Jewish community.

No, if anything, Tisha B’Av is what happens when the holiness of Yom Kippur is forgotten and/or misused.

But possessing holiness is not the same as possessing reverence. The genius of Tisha B’Av stems from the hallowed Jewish tradition of making memory a lived, tangible ritual, not unlike the practices of eating matza as part of the retelling of Yitziat Mitzrayim on Pesach or building and dwelling in a sukkah on Sukkot. On Tisha B’Av, we are instructed to be miserable. As previously mentioned, we don’t eat or drink. We don’t do things that make us feel the glory of being human, like cleansing ourselves, wearing leather, or engaging in sexual acts. 

Yet, another question emerges: can we really force ourselves to feel a certain way?

The short answer: no. Therein lies the real emotion we are supposed to experience on Tisha B’Av: discomfort. Tisha B’Av makes us literally sit on the floor with and in our discomfort to read from Eicha, the Book of Lamentations, which is one of the most devastatingly disturbing pieces of text in our canon. We chant Eicha in a sorrowfully beautiful style of cantillation that simultaneously soothes our battered souls and haunts them.

During Shacharit, the morning prayer service, we continue enacting our discomfort, this time through fracturing routine and creating absence. Customarily, tallit and tefillin are worn during weekday Shacharit; on Tisha B’Av in the communities I’ve been a part of, the ritual garb is not put on until Mincha (afternoon prayer service). As Tisha B’Av starts to reach its end, putting on our tallit and tefillin becomes an act of communal resistance against the discomfort of the day. The act signifies spiritual shift as agony alchemizes into redemptive hope. This shift is even foreshadowed in the final verses of Eicha:

“(השיבנו ה׳ אליך ונשובה חדש ימינו כקדם” (איכה ה:כ״ב 

Hashiveinu Adonai eilecha v’nashuva chadesh k’kedem.

Return us to You, God, and renew the days of old.

I always get the chills as those words are first chanted by the assembled Mourners of Zion, then repeated by the assigned reader of Megilat Eicha, and then repeated one more time in unison. How exactly is one supposed to go about renewing the “good ol’ days” when so many have been murdered and the Temple is destroyed? 

Thus, a new source of Discomfort is born: surviving tragedy. At the time we say השיבנו in our reading of Eicha, our souls are still too raw to be redeemed; but, by Mincha, we start cracking through our  grief and our discomfort, swathed in our tallitot and tethered by our tefillin. Together we rise, like a family of mourners does at the end of shiva, and begin to chart our course forward, because going back is not a choice.

Yom Kippur’s importance is derived from the weight God puts on it in the Torah, but also in the imagery of the Heavenly Gates closings, names being sealed in the Book of Life after being inscribed nine days earlier on Rosh Hashana. In the times of the Temples, the Kohen Gadol, or “High Priest”, would enter the Holy of Holies in his full finery and entreat with God on behalf of בני ישראל, securing them their lives and good fortune for the year to come. Yom Kippur’s fasting and abstention mechanics, while identical in practice to Tisha B’Av’s, are framed as mimicking the behavior of angels, who don’t need to do earthly, mundane things like eating, drinking, bathing and the like. It’s not any easier to abstain on Yom Kippur, per se, but abstaining to attain a higher level of holiness for a day is a tad easier on the psyche than abstaining to embody the collective trauma of our people. Yom Kippur is about redemption from the lens of t’shuva and committing to being a better version of ourselves in the year to come.

What happens, though, when someone dies in an accident, even though they were on their path to personal redemption? My mind interprets that as not getting sealed in the Book of Life.

What do you do when the holiest time of year gets tainted by an act of God?

My parents were in a car accident in 2014 that ended up taking my mom’s life. Moving through the motions of our Jewish practice that year, my dad and I were unprepared for the reopening of our psycho-emotional wounds when I got asked to hold a Torah on Yom Kippur morning. Accepting the honor as I normally would have any other year, I slowly realized the passage being sung as I stood there was the Unetaneh Tokef, a somber prayer about the austerity of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. When we reached the fourth paragraph, which begins:

“בְּרֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה יִכָּתֵבוּן, וּבְיוֹם צוֹם כִּפּוּר יֵחָתֵמוּן. כַּמָּה יַעַבְרוּן, וְכַמָּה יִבָּרֵאוּן, מִי יִחְיֶה, וּמִי יָמוּת, מִי בְקִצּוֹ, וּמִי לֹא בְּקִצּו”

B’Rosh Hashana yikateivun, u’v’Yom tzom Kippur yachateimun. Kama ya’avrun v’kama yibarun, mi yichaiyeh u’mi yamut, mi viktzo u’mi lo biktzo…

On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed – how many shall pass away and how many shall be born, who shall live and who shall die, who in good time, and who by an untimely death…

I will never forget hugging that Torah as tightly as I could to prevent my body from heaving as I drenched its cover with my tears.

It’s been twelve years since then and I haven’t made it through a full High Holiday service. The year after my mom’s death, my dad and I adopted a tradition that we received from my uncle: instead of spending on Rosh Hashanah cooped up in synagogue, we went into nature and blew shofar, celebrating the aspect of Rosh Hashanah as the birthday of the Universe. We biked around Martha’s Vineyard, found an empty stretch of beach, and blew our shofarot in harmony with the crashing waves.

So what do you do when the holiest time of year gets tainted by an act of God?

You find new ways to approach God and holiness. As the Kotzker Rebbe taught, “Where does one find God? Wherever one lets God in”. The First Temple gets destroyed and our ancestors are exiled. And. If not for the rabbinic Judaism that developed in Babylonian Exile,  the Jewish people would have ceased to be.

Our ancestors did not let the destruction they witnessed and experienced stop them from maintaining their Jewish identity. Just as we in 2026 have not let the destruction of October 7, 2023 and all the antisemitism and antizionism that has followed break our spirit.

Some days – most days – that is easier said than done. Our longing for Jerusalem never went away. At least for this Jew living in Diaspora, it still has a grip on my heart. We remember Jerusalem of Old and Gold on our happiest and holiest of days, but also the loss of it. As Israeli singer-songwriter icon Naomi Shemer so beautifully and Jewishly composed:

“עַל הַדְּבַשׁ וְעַל הָעֹקֶץ, עַל הַמַּר וְהַמָּתוֹק”
Al had’vash v’al ha’oketz, al hamar v’hamatok.

[Thank You, God] for the honey and the stinger, the bitter and the sweet.

On Tisha B’av this year, as I wrapped the black straps of my tefillin around my arm, placed them on my head, and entwined them on my fingers that afternoon, I felt something I haven’t in a long time – I felt tethered. To my people. My culture. My past and my present. And on that day, I resolved to tether myself to my future. I’ve worn tefillin every applicable morning since.

Doing so won’t bring my mom back. It won’t bring back the millions of Jewish lives that have been snuffed out prematurely. Doing so doesn’t mean I’m about to grow out my peyot or become shomer Shabbat. 

All it means is that I’m committing to do what Jews who have and do live lives monumentally different than my own for millenia, tethered together.

Blessed be the One who gives Us the capability to bind ourselves together forever.