Where Redemption Begins: On Tisha B’av and Abuse

Tisha B’av is a story of destruction. 

We mourn the literal destruction of the Beis Hamikdash, crumbled and aflame, our centuries of persecution, and now—so recently—October 7th. We spend the day revisiting the history we can’t bear to confront the rest of the year.  

But Tisha B’av has an even more unsettling message to teach us—that too often, our greatest destruction comes from within.  

Long before the destruction of the Temple itself, on the seventeenth day of Tammuz, Moshe descended from Sinai carrying the Luchot, only to shatter them after witnessing the sin of the Golden Calf. The shattered tablets reflected a relationship that had already fractured, highlighting a terrible truth—that sometimes, the story of Jewish destruction is not only about external forces, but our own failings. 

This theme continues in the foundational story of Tisha B’av, the ill-fated tale of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza. At first, the story seems small, maybe even comical, the sort of identity-confusion tale that might introduce a romance or comedy. But what follows is anything but humorous—A guest is publicly humiliated, bystanders are frozen into silence, and the fallout of this event ultimately leads straight to the Churban. 

What has always struck me about this story is how contemporary it feels. We’ve all sent a text to the wrong person. We’ve all felt the sting of exclusion or embarrassment. The emotions at the heart of the Bar Kamtza story—rejection, anger, communal indifference—remain painfully familiar. Our tradition explains the Bar Kamtza episode as an instance of sinas chinam, or baseless hatred; a moment where we forgot we were all part of one community. The very ordinariness of the story is also its relevance, reminding us that we self-destruct not only in big moments, but in small, ordinary encounters.  

Too often, we talk about the frum community in extremes—it’s amazing, it’s wonderful, there’s so much chessed; it’s terrible, it’s awful, it’s full of problems. But really, neither is fully true. We can be an extraordinary community with so much to give, and we can also be a community that has room to grow, that sometimes fails our most powerless members. 

I have seen this duality every day in my work on domestic abuse. Again and again, I have seen how communities are shaped by seemingly ordinary choices—whether we acknowledge uncomfortable truths or look away, whether we believe someone in pain or remain silent, whether we ask difficult questions of ourselves or reassure ourselves that everything is fine. For abuse survivors, these ordinary communal choices have extraordinary impact. 

Just like the host in the Bar Kamtza story, we rarely recognize the significance of these choices in the moment. Only later do we understand how much they mattered.  

During Mincha, we hear Isaiah’s prophetic reminder that the fast G-d really desires is the one that frees the bound, that feeds the hungry, and that bears responsibility for the vulnerable. Tisha B’av asks us not only to mourn what we have lost, but to be honest about what we owe one another.  

Chazal teach us that the Beis Hamikdash was destroyed because of what happened inside our own house—not only through great failures, but through ordinary ones. Perhaps, then, redemption begins there, too.