Broken Vessels, a Burning Temple, on Tisha B’Av
I miss Jerusalem, even when I’m standing in it. I know that sounds like a strange thing to say, missing a city while walking its own streets. But as Tisha B’Av approaches I keep returning to the same feeling, as though I could walk among its stones and still never quite arrive at Jerusalem itself. Maybe this is what Simmel’s concept of the stranger describes, a position neither fully inside nor fully outside, distance and closeness lived at the same time. Maybe that’s why I ask myself the same question every year, what am I actually missing, the stones, or the peace the stones once held.
In the beginning there was a contraction. Ein Sof, the Infinite, drew its own light into a single point, tzimtzum, so that room could open for the world. In the emptiness that withdrawal left behind, chalal panui, creation became possible. But that first movement was itself a kind of concealment, the Divine pulling back and making itself unseen. Then, in that empty space, the partzufim appeared, the different faces of divine light, different configurations, a passage from one face to another, an attempt to reconstitute itself.
The vessels came in this same moment, the kelim. Light needs a vessel to flow through, but as the Ari taught, the first vessels couldn’t hold that light. They shattered. Sparks fell downward, scattered into matter, everywhere. Birur, the gathering of those sparks, is what happens in every mitzvah, every act of goodness, a little more light returned to its place. This is close to what Halbwachs said about memory, no spark gathers itself alone, gathering is always a shared effort of a group, never a single generation’s alone.
Read through this frame, the churban stops being a historical event and becomes a repetition of that same shattering. The Temple was itself a vessel, the place where the Shechinah could dwell in the world. When it was destroyed, that presence broke too, scattered into sparks, dispersed into galut. But reading Tisha B’Av only as a mystical repetition leaves something out, because it also works as a social mechanism. For Halbwachs, no memory is purely individual, every memory takes shape within a group’s frame, we remember what the group deems worth remembering, we forget what the group forgets. No one fasting today witnessed that destruction, yet every year, on the same date, with the same restrictions, the same lament, it gets remembered, almost relived. This isn’t an individual recollection but a collectively built frame, passed down generation to generation. What Durkheim said about mourning rites completes this, a community binds itself back together by grieving as one, even in the middle of its own scattering, and that binding is precisely the opposite of what sinat chinam breaks apart.
The Talmud traces the destruction of the Second Temple to a single dinner. A man had a friend named Kamtza and an enemy named Bar Kamtza. He held a feast and told his servant to invite his friend Kamtza, but the servant mistakenly invited his enemy instead. When the host saw Bar Kamtza at the feast, he told him to leave. Bar Kamtza offered to pay for his own portion, the host refused. He offered to pay for half the feast, refused again. He offered to pay for the whole feast, just to avoid the shame, and the host still threw him out. What’s worst is that none of the sages sitting there intervened. Bar Kamtza felt that silence wound him more than the host’s hatred had. He went to Rome and told them the Jews were preparing to revolt. The chain ran from there all the way to the destruction of Jerusalem.
What stops me every time in this story isn’t the host’s hatred. It’s the silence of the sages. Sinat chinam doesn’t live only in the one who hates outright, it lives in the one who sees and doesn’t step in. Thinking through Bourdieu’s concept of the field, that banquet hall was itself a small field, its rules reproduced by the silence of everyone sitting in it. As long as no one intervened, the host’s power stayed unchecked, the same way a field’s rules today keep reproducing themselves as long as no one objects.
The Talmud asks, in Yoma 9b, why the First Temple was destroyed, why the Second was destroyed. The answer differs for each. The First fell for three grave sins, idolatry, sexual immorality, bloodshed. In the time of the Second, people studied Torah, kept the mitzvot, did acts of kindness. But there was sinat chinam, hatred without cause. The sages weigh this as equal to all three grave sins combined. What’s hard about sinat chinam is that no one calls their own hatred by that name. The host probably felt justified too. Everyone thinks their own anger has a reason, that it isn’t baseless.
There’s a phrase here, and gematria makes it concrete. The same four letters appear twice in the Tanakh, aleph yud chaf hey. The first time, in Bereishit, after Adam sins and hides, Hashem asks him, Ayeka, where are you. The second time, at the opening of Eicha, Jeremiah laments over the ruins of Jerusalem, Eicha, how did this happen. Same four letters, different vowels, different sound. The Zohar splits them apart, aleph yud meaning where, chaf hey pointing to the Shechinah. So Eicha is really asking another question, where is the Shechinah. Eicha’s numerical value is thirty-six, and the first word of Devarim, read on the Shabbat before Tisha B’Av, Eileh, carries that same thirty-six. Two texts, two different moments, tied together through the same number.
There’s another number I keep coming back to. Ahava, love, its letters add to thirteen. Echad, one, unity, adds to thirteen too. Put them together and you get twenty-six, the numerical value of Hashem’s four-letter Name. When love and unity come together, the Name itself becomes whole. Sinat chinam is what breaks that sum apart, separating love from unity, fracturing the Name. Rav Kook’s answer is built on reversing exactly this math, if the destruction came from baseless hatred, then the rebuilding must come through baseless love, ahavat chinam. For him this wasn’t a temporary remedy but a way of seeing the underlying unity of the world. There’s a story told of him, that when asked why he spoke with love even toward someone hostile to him, he said he’d rather err on the side of baseless love than err on the side of baseless hatred.
If the question asked of Adam and the lament sung over Jerusalem are written in the same letters, I think one answers the other. Eicha asks, how did this happen. Ayeka answers, where are you. The cause of exile is traced back to hiding in the Garden first, to concealing oneself from the Divine presence. Maybe that’s what Bar Kamtza felt leaving that feast too, a small rehearsal, being cast out of his own people’s presence, before the larger exile.
Tisha B’Av itself was never only the day of one destruction. Tradition counts five separate calamities on the same date. The decree that the generation would wander the desert forty years, over the spies’ evil report. The destruction of the First Temple. The destruction of the Second. The fall of the fortress of Beitar. Jerusalem plowed over into a Roman colony. In Halbwachs’s terms, this repetition is itself a technique of memory, gathering destructions from different centuries into a single day and making them impossible to forget. As though the calendar were itself a vessel, gathering the sparks of different centuries into one day.
This year Tisha B’Av begins at sundown on July 22 and ends at nightfall on July 23. The Three Weeks have already begun, the Nine Days start next week. And in this year’s landscape, the divisions within Israeli society itself have never been talked about quite this much. Coalition partners call each other dangerous, former commanders call current decisions miserable, everyone is so certain of their own righteousness that they no longer feel the need to listen to the other side. But maybe the real question isn’t this harshness. Like the sages in Bar Kamtza’s story, I don’t know how many are watching and staying silent, how many should be stepping in and aren’t. A society’s memory isn’t built only by remembering shared pain, it’s built by not looking away from who’s repeating it today.
Maybe this year’s Eicha isn’t only asked of Jerusalem. Maybe the question Ayeka isn’t only asked of Adam. Whether we’re growing our own fractures through baseless hatred or working to gather them back together, that answer gets given anew in every generation.
As the Talmud says, the gates of prayer may have closed, but the gates of tears never did. We pass through that gate and remember the sparks still ungathered, every year again.
Maybe that’s what the longing I feel walking through Jerusalem really is. The city itself is there, its stones are there, but the vessel is still broken, the peace still scattered. Maybe that’s why I ask the same question every year, why even walking among the stones, I’m still searching for my own answer to Ayeka.
