On the Ninth of Av, I don’t wear sackcloth. I wear Roman glass.

On the Ninth of Av, I don’t wear sackcloth.
I wear Roman glass.

Because their empire fell.
And we endure.

This isn’t triumphalism.
It’s a reckoning.
A memory carried in our bones and eyelashes.

We whisper the Shema to our children at bedtime.
We lit candles in closets in Spain.
We sang lullabies in basements in the Warsaw Ghetto.
We murmured Next year in Jerusalem even when it seemed impossible.
And we meant it.

I am not only the ruins of a Temple —
of stone and cedar and hammered gold.
I am descended from the people who lived here.
Who bled here.
Who died here.
Who didn’t just vanish in a puff of ash when the Romans came.

No.
There was a slaughter.

The streets ran slick.
With blood. With bile. With afterbirth.
Mothers tried to cover their babies, but the swords found them anyway.
Breasts hacked off in front of their children.
Children held aloft, screaming, then sliced down the middle.
Women raped while their babies wailed —
and then raped again once the crying stopped forever

And after the screaming?
Silence.
Except for the footfalls of the soldiers
picking through what was left
to finish the job.
It wasn’t abstract.
It was not poetic.
It was not a symbol.
It was hell.

And only since October 7
have I begun to understand what that kind of destruction looks like.
Smells like.
Sounds like.
The smoke.
The begging.
The way a body twitches when the soul is already gone.
The ones forced to dig their own graves, trembling.
The babies burned.
The parents bound.
The way the world turns away because it’s easier.

Yes, I weep for the Temple.
But more than anything,
I weep for my ancestors who lived through it
and for those who didn’t.
And still —
I don’t wear sackcloth.
Instead, I walk the Old City
in a floaty dress that wears history like a crown.
I wear Roman glass in my ears,
and a gold pendant of the Temple around my neck…

not to demand a new building,
but to remember,
to imagine,
to ask:
how can we build a holy home,
not of stone,
but of spirit?

I don’t wear sackcloth because we are here.
Yes, still haunted.
Still stumbling.
Still with exile in our blood.
Still circled by jackals.
Still arguing in cafés and on social media.
But here.
And loving harder than ever.
Because we know what tore us apart before:
Baseless hatred.
Snarling from within our own tent.
The kind that weakens the walls before the enemy ever arrives.

We now know what happens when they breach those walls.
And yes, we still disagree.
But now, beneath the rage, I hear the hum of love.

Earlier, a rabbi asked online:
“Finish the sentence: All Jews are…”
And this is what I say:

All Jews are my people.

The teachers in overcrowded classrooms
who still find a way to look each child in the eye. The doctors who take late-night shifts
and sit with our elders when the families are far away. The paramedics who run toward the smoke. The men in kippot who get out of their cars on Shabbat to help at terror scenes. The women in Tel Aviv who lead dance circles and protest injustice. The yeshiva boys with tzitzit flying behind them. The leftists in faded t-shirts carrying signs. The ones who light Shabbat candles in hostels in India. The ones who crank up their phones too loud on the bus and watch weird TikToks with zero shame.
The ones who cut the line at the post office
and pretend not to notice.

The Holocaust survivors with numbers on their arms
and the babies born in NICUs from Ashdod to Tzfat.
The soldiers.
The pacifists.
The loudmouths.
The quiet ones.The brokenhearted. The builders. The believers. The ones who I disagree with completely and totally.
The doubters.
The dead.
The living.

All of them. My people.

And that’s why I don’t wear sackcloth.

Last year on the 9th of Av, I walked through the Old City with Marcus James
as the call to prayer echoed off the stones.
We stood at the little Western Wall —
quiet, tucked away —
and I felt the hum in the stones
like a memory
like a hug from the Divine.

I saw my brothers and sisters —
more Crocs with socks than I’ve ever seen.
(I mean seriously, Crocs? Haven’t the Jewish people suffered enough?)
And I passed the Palestinian merchants I know.
The ones who sit low to the ground every day,
not just on Tisha B’Av.
I didn’t have the strength for long conversation
some days I barely have enough strength to hold myself together —
but I saw them.
And I wondered what today feels like for them.
If it lands.
If they feel it in the stones, too.

As I passed through Jaffa Gate,
a merchant I know looked up at me.

“Happy holiday,” he said.

“It’s not a holiday,” I replied. “It’s a day of mourning.”

He paused. He nodded.

“I understand,” he said.
“But at least you get to go home.
At least you get to build it.”

And that’s it, isn’t it?
We mourn. But we build. We grieve. But we return. We bury our dead.
But we raise children with wide eyes and open hearts.We are not just survivors.
We are architects of something better.
Not a Third Temple of brick and mortar and goat sacrifices.

Not something that requires another’s destruction.
But a holy home made from mercy, from justice, from the stubbornness of love.

A country worthy of God’s presence.
A world worthy of peace.

And that’s why I don’t wear sackcloth.
Because we are still building.

And we are far from finished.