The Day We Counted the Flames: Tisha B’Av and the Six Million
It is a warm, bright afternoon. The sky is a perfect, cloudless blue. You are sitting in a massive, open-air stadium, surrounded by the sensory overload of a classic summer day.
You hear the sharp crack of a bat, followed by the sudden, deafening roar of sixty thousand voices rising in unison. The smell of hot dogs and fresh-cut grass hangs in the air. High-definition screens flash, music swells, and everywhere you look, there is life, energy, and unbridled joy.
It is the picture-perfect image of a peaceful, modern Sunday.
You are sitting there with a close friend. He is a quiet man, thoughtful. He is also the son of Holocaust survivors.
As the crowd slowly settles back into their seats after a home run, your friend doesn’t look at the scoreboard. Instead, his eyes slowly sweep across the towering tiers of the grandstands. He takes in the sheer, staggering sea of humanity—the thousands of faces in the upper decks, the packed lower levels, the lines at the concourses.
He turns to you, his voice barely a whisper against the background hum of the stadium.
“Imagine,” he says quietly. “Just look at this crowd. This is the number of people the Nazis murdered… every single day.”
Suddenly, the green grass of the outfield seems to fade. The roar of the crowd goes dead silent in your mind. You look at those sixty thousand living, breathing souls, and the math of the tragedy becomes blindingly, suffocatingly real.
But for the survivors of that unimaginable horror, the tragedy didn’t end when the camps were liberated. It lingered in a cruel, quiet limbo.
Because the machinery of industrial slaughter did not keep polite records. There were no death certificates. No official times of passing. Millions of mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers simply vanished into the ash and smoke of Europe.
And for the survivors who made it to these shores, that left a devastating, open wound.
In Jewish tradition, we honor the memory of the dead on the anniversary of their passing—the yahrzeit. We light a single candle. We say the Mourner’s Kaddish. We remember them on their day.
But how do you light a candle when you don’t know the day? How do you mark a yahrzeit when the calendar is blank? Fordecades, survivors carried this silent ache, possessing no specific date on earth to weep for the ones they lost.
Until they looked back… to a day that was already drenched in three thousand years of tears.
This week, Jews around the world will observe Tisha B’Av, the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av.
Historically, it is a day of absolute, somber isolation. We fast, we sit on low stools, and we weep for the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. We weep for the exile, the crusades, and the expulsion from Spain.
But in the shadow of the twentieth century, this ancient day of mourning quietly took on a profound, modern weight.
With no graves to visit and no dates on the calendar to circle, Tisha B’Av organically became the collective, universal yahrzeit for the victims of the Holocaust. It became the day where those who lost everyone could finally light their candles, knowing that their tears were joined with the tears of an entire nation mourning its historic ruins.
The stadium of sixty thousand will empty out by the ninth inning. The lights will go down, the crowds will go home, and the silence of the empty ballpark will return.
But this Wednesday night, as the sun sets and the fast begins, millions will sit in the dim light of synagogues worldwide. They will mourn the ancient walls that fell in Jerusalem. And in the very same breath, they will remember the sixty thousand who perished today… and the sixty thousand who perished yesterday… and the sixty thousand who perished the day before that.
The date of their departure may have been stolen by history.
But through the enduring vessel of Tisha B’Av, their memory… will never be forgotten.
May their memory be a blessing.
-Image courtesy of The Witness Ledger
-more articles similar to this can be found at https://steventeplitsky.substack.com/
