On Tisha B’Av, Let the Shared Home Survive the Argument

Jewish memory does not ask us to erase disagreement. It warns us not to destroy the bonds and institutions that allow us to survive it.

As Tisha B’Av begins, Jews around the world turn again to the destruction of the First and Second Temples and to the calamities gathered into the Ninth of Av.

But Jewish memory is more than an archive of grief.

It is a warning system.

It directs our attention not only to the armies outside Jerusalem’s walls, but also to the breakdown within them. Rabbinic tradition remembers zealots burning storehouses of wheat and barley during the Roman siege. The Talmud later associated the destruction of the Second Temple with sinat chinam—baseless hatred.

These teachings do not erase Rome’s responsibility for conquest and destruction. They insist that external danger does not release a people from responsibility for what it does to itself.

That is the hard lesson of Tisha B’Av: a people can face real enemies from outside and still deepen its vulnerability from within.

Today, our shared storehouses are not filled with wheat and oil. They hold public trust, habits of civil speech, legitimate institutions, mutual responsibility, and the conviction that people with profound differences can still share one country.

Generations fill those storehouses.

A few reckless matches can burn them.

The danger is contempt, not disagreement

For decades, I have worked with couples who arrive convinced that conflict is destroying their relationship.

Again and again, disagreement is not the deepest wound. The deeper wound is what disagreement has become: accusation, contempt, humiliation, withdrawal, threats—and the belief that one person must lose for the other to feel safe.

In every close relationship, there are three realities: you, me, and the bond between us.

I may overpower you. You may shame me, silence me, or walk away. Either of us may win the point. But when victory comes at the expense of the bond, the victory is self-defeating.

A nation is not a marriage. National politics involves law, coercive power, competing rights, genuine security threats, and questions no listening exercise can resolve.

Yet nations are still lived by human beings.

We carry the same fears, reflexes, wounds, and habits into the Knesset, protest lines, synagogues, television studios, WhatsApp groups, and family dinners that we carry to the kitchen table.

When fear rises, curiosity narrows.

When each camp becomes convinced that the other camp’s success will make the shared home unlivable, compromise feels like surrender. Restraint looks like betrayal. Institutions become weapons to seize or obstacles to destroy.

Jewish life has never depended on unanimity. The danger begins when we abandon shared rules for managing disagreement and treat raw power as the only language that matters.

That is when fellow citizens begin speaking as though only one camp can remain standing.

Empathy is not capitulation

Empathy is often confused with moral surrender.

It is nothing of the kind.

It does not require us to pretend that every claim is true, every action moral, or every side equally responsible. Some claims are false. Some actions are unjust. Some uses of power demand firm resistance and accountability.

Empathy is not arithmetic. It does not divide blame evenly or turn every conflict into a story of equal fault.

It asks a narrower and harder question: Can I understand what the world looks like from where you stand?

What are you afraid will happen?

What are you trying to protect?

What experience, value, or wound makes your position feel necessary?

Understanding is not approval. Listening is not capitulation. Recognizing another person’s humanity does not require surrendering our own principles or boundaries.

Empathy is the discipline of responding to the person actually before us, not to the caricature we have built.

In my work with couples, we teach listeners to begin with simple words:

“What I hear you saying is…”

“Did I understand you?”

“Is there more?”

The listener’s first task is not to rebut, correct, diagnose, or prepare a devastating reply. It is to understand accurately.

Agreement may not follow. But disagreement becomes more thoughtful when neither person must first fight to prove that they have been heard.

In my experience, people who feel unheard rarely become more open when met with greater contempt. They speak louder. They harden. They withdraw. Or they begin looking for ways to force the outcome they no longer believe conversation can produce.

None of this means that every conflict can or should be handled through dialogue alone. Dialogue is appropriate for disagreement. Threats, violence, intimidation, and unlawful conduct require protection, enforcement, and accountability.

Empathy does not replace those responsibilities. It helps prevent us from treating entire communities as indistinguishable from their worst actors.

A shared home needs guardrails

Empathy alone is not enough.

Healthy relationships also require agreements about conflict: no threats, no humiliation, no unilateral rewriting of commitments, no weaponizing vulnerability, and no treating every mistake as proof that the other person is beyond redemption.

Societies need guardrails of their own.

Israelis will continue to disagree about where power should reside, how institutions should be balanced, what rights require protection, and how majority rule should be constrained. Those arguments are legitimate and necessary.

But no temporary majority should mistake electoral victory for ownership of the country.

A durable democracy requires rules that remain legitimate when our side loses, limits that restrain the people we support as well as the people we oppose, and institutions that no coalition can treat as private property.

The underlying principle is simple: a shared home cannot remain durable when any large community comes to believe that its survival depends on permanently defeating, silencing, or frightening another.

Accountability still requires us to name lies, abuses, violence, and unlawful conduct clearly. But accountability can address conduct without turning entire populations into enemies beyond the circle of concern.

When each election is cast as the final battle, every political loss becomes an existential emergency. Winners assume that victory entitles them to remake the shared home without restraint. Losers conclude that the home no longer belongs to them.

That is not democratic strength.

It is a warning that the rules of shared life are failing.

One act of repair

Tisha B’Av does not ask Israelis, or Jews around the world, to care less about the future.

It asks us to become more responsible for what we do with our passion.

Before we return to our usual volume, choose one person whose political or religious views trouble you. Ask what they most fear, what they are trying to protect, and what they wish people like you understood.

Then listen without cross-examining.

Reflect back what you heard before defending yourself—not sarcastically, not as a setup, but fairly.

Afterward, state your own convictions and boundaries without declaring that the person who disagrees with you is unworthy of the country or people you share.

This exercise should begin with each of us examining our own camp, not merely demanding better behavior from the other one.

It will not settle Israel’s fiercest debates. It may preserve the human and civic conditions in which those debates can continue without consuming the country.

Tisha B’Av reminds us that mourning is also a form of responsibility. We do not grieve only for what was destroyed long ago. We ask what remains in our hands to protect now.

Empathy will not make us agree. Its purpose is to keep disagreement from becoming destruction.

Let us argue as if we intend to live together afterward.