Tisha B’Av: The Ninth of Av, the Day of Weeping and the Seed of Consolation

The Night They Wept: The Spies

The story of Tisha B’Av begins in the wilderness of Paran. In Numbers 13 Moshe sends twelve men to scout the land of Canaan. After forty days ten of them return with a report that melts the people’s hearts: the cities are walled, the inhabitants are giants, “and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers” (Numbers 13:33). Only Yehoshua and Calev stand firm. Then comes the seed of the whole day:

And all the congregation lifted up their voice, and cried; and the people wept that night.

That weeping was not grief but unbelief; the people wished they had died in Egypt (Numbers 14:2). The sentence followed: forty years of wandering, a year for each day of the scouting (Numbers 14:33–34). The psalmist summed it up: “they despised the pleasant land, they believed not his word” (Psalm 106:24).

The Talmud counts the days: sent out at the end of Sivan, the spies returned forty days later on the eighth of Av, and “the people wept that night,” the night of the ninth. Then comes one of the most quoted lines of the fast:

That night was the night of the ninth of Av. The Holy One, blessed be He, said to them: You wept a weeping for nothing, and I will establish for you a weeping for generations.

The sages were not claiming that later disasters were an arbitrary punishment for one night’s tears. They were naming the root of exile: the refusal to trust Hashem’s promise. The ninth of Av became, in Jewish memory, the day on which the gift of the land was refused and then, again and again, lost.¹

Five Calamities on One Day

The Mishnah, compiled around 200 CE, lists five things that happened to Israel on the seventeenth of Tammuz and five on the ninth of Av. For the ninth of Av it says:

On the ninth of Av it was decreed against our fathers that they should not enter the land, the Temple was destroyed the first and the second time, Beitar was captured, and the city was plowed.

The same mishnah adds a line that governs the whole season: “When Av enters, we diminish in rejoicing.”² The strands differ in kind: the spies are dated by the sages’ reckoning, the Temples’ fall is documented history, and Beitar and the plowing blend history and tradition.

The First Temple: The Seventh, the Ninth, or the Tenth?

The Babylonian army under Nebuchadnezzar broke into Jerusalem in the summer of 586 BCE (some scholars prefer 587). The Tanakh gives two dates for the burning of the Temple, and they do not match:

And in the fifth month, on the seventh day of the month, which is the nineteenth year of king Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, came Nebuzaradan, captain of the guard, a servant of the king of Babylon, unto Jerusalem: and he burnt the house of Hashem, and the king’s house, and all the houses of Jerusalem. — 2 Kings 25:8–9

Now in the fifth month, in the tenth day of the month, which was the nineteenth year of Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon, came Nebuzaradan, captain of the guard, which served the king of Babylon, into Jerusalem, and burned the house of Hashem.

The “fifth month,” counting from Nisan, is Av. Kings says the seventh; Jeremiah says the tenth. The Talmud harmonizes the two accounts into a single sequence of events:

On the seventh the gentiles entered the Sanctuary, and they ate in it and desecrated it on the seventh and the eighth; and on the ninth, toward dark, they set fire to it, and it continued burning all that day.

Rabbi Yochanan said he would have fixed the fast on the tenth, “because most of the Sanctuary burned on it”; the sages held that the beginning of a calamity is decisive. The Talmud also offers the principle that ties the day together: merit is brought about on a day of merit, and liability on a day of liability.³ Some communities keep a remembrance of Rabbi Yochanan’s view in the custom of refraining from meat and wine until midday on the tenth of Av.⁴

The fast itself is old. After the return from Babylon, men from Bethel came to ask the priests and prophets, “Should I weep in the fifth month, separating myself, as I have done these so many years?” (Zechariah 7:3). Hashem’s answer asked whether those fasts had really been for Him (7:5), called for justice and mercy (7:9–10), and promised that the fasts would become feasts (8:19). Mourning for the Temple in Av is thus attested already in the early Persian period.

The Second Temple Burns

In 66 CE the Jewish revolt against Rome broke out, and in the spring of 70 CE Titus besieged Jerusalem. Josephus, the Jewish general who had gone over to the Romans and watched the siege from their camp, records that the daily offering in the Temple ceased on the seventeenth of Panemus (Tammuz) for lack of men to offer it.⁵ He then describes the burning of the sanctuary and remarks on the date:

Now that fatal day was come, according to the revolution of ages; it was the tenth day of the month Lous [Av], upon which it was formerly burnt by the king of Babylon.

Josephus, like Jeremiah, says the tenth; rabbinic tradition, applying the same reasoning as for the First Temple, fixes the mourning on the ninth, when the fire began.⁶ Either way, both Temples fell on nearly the same day, a coincidence Josephus himself found remarkable. Historians debate whether Titus meant to spare the Temple, as Josephus insists, or ordered its destruction, as the later writer Sulpicius Severus reports; Josephus had reasons to protect his patron.⁷ The Arch of Titus in Rome still shows the menorah carried in triumph.

Beitar and the Plowed City

Sixty-two years later came the revolt of Shimon bar Kosiba, called Bar Kochba (“son of the star,” Numbers 24:17). Rabbi Akiva is reported to have hailed him as king Messiah, while another sage answered that grass would grow from Akiva’s cheeks before the son of David came.⁸ The revolt ended with the fall of Beitar, southwest of Jerusalem, around 135 CE, described in terrible terms in the Jerusalem Talmud and the Midrash on Lamentations.⁹ Tradition places the fall on the ninth of Av; historians accept the general period but cannot independently confirm the day.

The fifth calamity, “the city was plowed,” refers to the Roman refounding of Jerusalem as a pagan colony, Aelia Capitolina, from which Jews were barred. The Talmud names the Roman officer Turnus Rufus as the one who plowed the site of the sanctuary.¹⁰ Roman colonies were ritually founded by plowing a boundary furrow, and coins of Aelia Capitolina show such a scene. Jewish memory heard in it an ancient warning:

Therefore shall Zion for your sake be plowed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high places of the forest.

The Talmud tells that Rabbi Akiva and his companions once saw a fox come out of the place of the Holy of Holies. The others wept; Akiva laughed. Now that Micah’s prophecy of ruin had been fulfilled to the letter, he said, he could be certain that Zechariah’s prophecy of restoration would be fulfilled as well: “There shall yet old men and old women dwell in the streets of Jerusalem” (Zechariah 8:4). His companions answered, “Akiva, you have comforted us.”¹¹ That story holds the spirit of Tisha B’Av in miniature.

A Day That Gathered Sorrows: Later Calamities

Jews came to associate later disasters with the ninth of Av. Some links are documented coincidences of the calendar; others are tradition. Precision honors both the dead and the truth.

• The expulsion from England, 1290. King Edward I issued the edict expelling the Jews of England on 18 July 1290, which was the ninth of Av, 5050. The coincidence is documented, and several historians think the date was chosen deliberately.¹²
• The expulsion from Spain, 1492. The edict of Ferdinand and Isabella, issued at the end of March, required the Jews to leave by the end of July. Tradition holds that the last exiles departed on the ninth of Av, which fell on 2 August 1492, within days of the deadline. The exact day of the last departures is hard to document; treat the link as a strong tradition rather than a recorded fact.¹³
• The outbreak of the First World War, 1914. Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August 1914, which was the ninth of Av, 5674. Many Jewish writers have seen in that war the beginning of the catastrophes that followed for European Jewry.
• The deportations from Warsaw to Treblinka, 1942. The great deportation from the Warsaw Ghetto began on 22 July 1942, the eve of the ninth of Av, 5702, and the first transports reached the Treblinka death camp in the following days. Over the next two months some quarter of a million Jews were sent to their deaths there.¹⁴

Other associations in popular lists do not all survive scrutiny. The point is not that the date is cursed, but that the losses of exile are bound together. The Ashkenazi kinot (laments) mourn the Crusader massacres of 1096, which took place in the spring, because the community chose to mourn all its losses on the one day set aside for mourning.¹⁵

Causeless Hatred: Why the Second Temple Fell

The sages did not only record the destruction; they asked why it happened. Their most famous answer is in tractate Yoma:

Why was the First Temple destroyed? Because of three things that were in it: idolatry, sexual immorality, and bloodshed. But the Second Temple, in which they occupied themselves with Torah, mitzvot and acts of kindness, why was it destroyed? Because there was causeless hatred in it. This teaches that causeless hatred is equal to the three sins of idolatry, immorality and bloodshed together.

Sinat chinam (שנאת חינם), “hatred for nothing,” is the hatred that has no just cause: contempt, rivalry, the refusal to see a fellow Jew as a brother. The Talmud illustrates it with the story of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza. A host’s servant invited the host’s enemy, Bar Kamtza, to a feast by mistake. Bar Kamtza offered to pay for his meal, then for half the feast, then for all of it, but the host threw him out while the sages present said nothing. Humiliated, Bar Kamtza told the Romans the Jews were rebelling and secretly blemished the offering the emperor sent. Rabbi Zechariah ben Avkolas would allow neither offering it nor punishing the informer. The Talmud concludes: “The humility of Rabbi Zechariah ben Avkolas destroyed our House, burned our Sanctuary, and exiled us from our land.”¹⁶

The story is aggadah, a teaching narrative; historians read the outbreak of the war through Josephus’s account, including the suspension of the sacrifice for the emperor.¹⁷ Yet both describe a city destroyed from within before the Romans breached the walls. Josephus’s chapters on rival factions burning one another’s grain stores during the siege are a historian’s portrait of sinat chinam.

The same passage in tractate Gittin records the response that kept Israel alive. Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai was smuggled out of the besieged city and asked the Roman commander for one thing: “Give me Yavneh and its sages.”¹⁸ From Yavneh came the Mishnah, the order of prayer, and the life of Torah that has sustained Israel without a Temple ever since.

The Shape of the Mourning: The Three Weeks and the Nine Days

Tisha B’Av is the low point of a season. The fast of the seventeenth of Tammuz opens a three-week period known as bein hametzarim (בין המצרים, “between the straits”), from Lamentations 1:3: “all her persecutors overtook her between the straits.” (See 17 Tammuz.) Its three haftarot are prophecies of rebuke, ending with Isaiah’s “vision” (see Shabbat Chazon).

The customs deepen in stages:

• The Three Weeks (from 17 Tammuz). No weddings. In Ashkenazi custom, no haircuts and no listening to music for enjoyment; many avoid saying the blessing shehecheyanu on new fruit or clothing.
• The Nine Days (from 1 Av). “When Av enters, we diminish in rejoicing.” Ashkenazim refrain from meat and wine, except on Shabbat and at a meal for a mitzvah such as a circumcision, and from laundering, wearing freshly laundered clothes, and bathing for pleasure.
• The week in which Tisha B’Av falls. The Mishnah itself restricts haircuts and laundering in this week. Sephardi custom generally follows the Shulchan Aruch in applying most restrictions only in this week, rather than from 1 Av or 17 Tammuz.¹⁹
• The final meal. Before the fast many eat the seudah hamafseket (“the separating meal”), sitting low: bread and a hard-boiled egg dipped in ashes, the mourner’s food.²⁰

Keeping the Fast: The Laws of the Day

Like Yom Kippur, Tisha B’Av is a full fast of about twenty-five hours, from sundown to nightfall, with the same five afflictions, here kept as a mourner rather than a penitent:²¹

1. No eating or drinking.
2. No washing for pleasure; one washes only the fingers in the morning and after using the restroom.
3. No anointing with oils, lotions or perfumes.
4. No leather shoes; many wear cloth or rubber footwear.
5. No marital relations.

To these are added the customs of the mourner:

• Sitting low. From the start of the fast until midday, people sit on the floor or on low stools, as mourners do during shivah.
• No Torah study for its own sake, since the Torah “rejoices the heart” (Psalm 19:8), except the sad passages: Lamentations, Job, the warnings in Jeremiah, the laws of mourning.
• No greetings. People refrain from greeting one another, and answer quietly if greeted.
• Work is discouraged until midday, and many avoid it all day.
• Tallit and tefillin at Mincha. At the morning service men do not wrap tefillin or wear the tallit, which are called “glory” (Ezekiel 24:17). They put them on for the afternoon service, when the mood of the day begins to lift.²²

In the afternoon prayer the paragraph Nacheim (“Comfort”) is added to the Amidah: “Comfort, Hashem our God, the mourners of Zion and the mourners of Jerusalem.” Ashkenazim say it only at Mincha; Sephardim say it in every Amidah of the day.²³ Tachanun, the daily prayer of supplication, is omitted, because Lamentations 1:15 calls this day a mo’ed, an “appointed time”: “he hath called an assembly [mo’ed] against me.” The day of mourning is destined to become a festival.²⁴

When the ninth of Av falls on Shabbat, the fast moves to Sunday. Those who are ill, pregnant or nursing should consult a rabbi; Jewish law is generous where health is at stake.

Eichah, Kinot, and the Readings

On the evening of the fast the congregation gathers in a darkened room and chants Lamentations in its own mournful melody. Its Hebrew name, Eichah (איכה), is its first word: “How!”

How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow! she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!

The book closes with a verse so harsh that the congregation does not end on it, but repeats the one before it aloud:

Turn thou us unto thee, O Hashem, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old.

The morning is given over to kinot (קינות, “laments”), many by Rabbi Elazar HaKallir, the early medieval poet of the Land of Israel. Among the most beloved is the “Ode to Zion” of Rabbi Yehudah HaLevi of Spain, Tziyon halo tishali, “Zion, will you not ask after the welfare of your captives?” Modern communities have added kinot for the Shoah.

The Torah reading at Shacharit is Deuteronomy 4:25–40, Moshe’s warning that Israel would be scattered among the nations, joined to the promise that “if from thence thou shalt seek Hashem thy God, thou shalt find him” (4:29). The haftarah is Jeremiah 8:13–9:23 (9:24 in English Bibles), which includes the prophet’s lament:

Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!

It ends: “let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me, that I am Hashem which exercise lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness, in the earth” (Jeremiah 9:24). At Mincha the fast-day portion is read, Exodus 32:11–14 and 34:1–10, Moshe’s plea after the golden calf; Ashkenazim add the haftarah Isaiah 55:6–56:8, “Seek ye Hashem while he may be found” (Sephardi customs for the afternoon haftarah differ). See the readings for the fast days.

Yeshua Weeps over Jerusalem

Yeshua was a son of Jerusalem who loved the city and called it “the city of the great King” (Matthew 5:35; Psalm 48:2). Coming down the Mount of Olives before his last Pesach, Luke records:

And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it, saying, If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes. For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side, and shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another.

These are Jeremiah’s tears: Yeshua grieved for the city’s fall before it came. In Matthew he laments: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!” (Matthew 23:37). Of the Temple’s great stones he said, “There shall not be left here one stone upon another” (Matthew 24:2). In Luke the warning becomes specific:

And when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the desolation thereof is nigh. Then let them which are in Judaea flee to the mountains… And they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led away captive into all nations: and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.

Two things matter here. First, the word “until.” The treading down of Jerusalem has a limit set by Hashem: not Israel’s rejection but a season of exile with an end. Paul writes likewise that a partial hardening has come upon Israel “until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. And so all Israel shall be saved” (Romans 11:25–26). Second, Yeshua’s response is tears, not triumph. Christian preachers who for centuries used the destruction as proof that Hashem had cast off the Jewish people contradicted the spirit of Luke 19. “As touching the election, they are beloved for the fathers’ sakes. For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance” (Romans 11:28–29). The Messiah who wept over Jerusalem does not invite his followers to gloat over her.

Yeshua’s early followers worshipped in the Temple (Acts 2:46; 3:1), and Paul brought offerings there (Acts 21:26; 24:17–18). When it fell, they lost it too. Eusebius, the fourth-century church historian, reports a tradition that the Jerusalem believers, warned by a revelation before the war, left for Pella east of the Jordan.²⁵ Historians debate its historicity, but it fits Yeshua’s instruction to “flee to the mountains.”

The bridegroom taken away

Asked why his disciples did not fast, Yeshua answered: “Can the children of the bridechamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them? but the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then shall they fast” (Matthew 9:15). He expected his disciples to fast after his departure. Many Messianic believers find here a reason to keep Israel’s fasts, joining mourning for Jerusalem with longing for the Messiah’s return; that is a homiletical application, though in harmony with the verse.

Love Against Causeless Hatred

If causeless hatred destroyed the Second Temple, the cure is love that does not wait to be deserved. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook is often quoted as teaching that if the Temple was destroyed by causeless hatred, it will be rebuilt by causeless love, ahavat chinam.

The Torah had already commanded it: “Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart… thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am Hashem” (Leviticus 19:17–18). Yeshua placed this commandment beside the Shema as one of the two on which “all the Torah and the prophets” hang (Matthew 22:37–40). He taught that one who remembers at the altar that a brother has something against him should first be reconciled (Matthew 5:23–24), a word that reads with special force on the day the altar fell. And he gave a sign:

A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.

The apostle John goes as far as the Talmud does: “Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer” (1 John 3:15). Yoma 9b counts causeless hatred as heavy as bloodshed; John calls it bloodshed outright. Among Yeshua’s own twelve were Matthew, a tax collector who had worked for Rome, and Simon “the Zealot,” whose name may link him to the zealous circles that would later lead the revolt against Rome. That small company, held together around one Master, was a living answer to the factions that tore Jerusalem apart. Tisha B’Av is a day to ask: where is there hatred without cause, and how can it be healed?

The Comforter Born on the Day of Ruin

Jewish tradition holds a surprising teaching about the ninth of Av. The Jerusalem Talmud tells of a Jew plowing his field when his ox lowed. An Arab traveler passing by said, “Son of Judah, unyoke your ox, for the Temple has been destroyed.” The ox lowed again, and the traveler said, “Son of Judah, yoke your ox again, for the redeemer of the Jews has been born.” The Jew asked the child’s name and was told Menachem, “comforter,” son of Hezekiah, and that he was born in Bethlehem of Judah.²⁶ The Midrash on Lamentations tells the same story in connection with Lamentations 1:16, “the comforter that should relieve my soul is far from me.”²⁷ The Babylonian Talmud lists Menachem son of Hezekiah among the names of the Messiah, citing the same verse.²⁸

The point of the aggadah is not a birthday but that Hashem plants redemption in the hour of ruin. It is striking that it places the Messiah’s birth in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2), which the Gospels give as Yeshua’s birthplace (Matthew 2:1–6). The parallel is not a proof; the midrash speaks in images. Yet it offers a deeply Jewish way to hold Tisha B’Av: real grief that already contains the seed of comfort.

Jewish thought often describes the Messiah’s work in two aspects. Mashiach ben Yosef suffers and is slain, as the Talmud reads Zechariah 12:10 (“they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him”).²⁹ Mashiach ben David gathers the exiles, rebuilds, and reigns. Benei Avraham understands Yeshua’s first coming as the path of Mashiach ben Yosef: rejected, suffering, hidden among the nations, raised by Hashem. His return will be the revelation of Mashiach ben David. On Tisha B’Av we stand in the space between the two.

From Fast to Feast: The Promise of Restoration

The prophets never let mourning have the last word. Zechariah, asked whether to keep weeping in the fifth month, answered:

Thus saith Hashem of hosts; The fast of the fourth month, and the fast of the fifth, and the fast of the seventh, and the fast of the tenth, shall be to the house of Judah joy and gladness, and cheerful feasts; therefore love the truth and peace.

The Rambam closes his laws of fast days with this verse, ruling that in the days of the Messiah all these fasts will be annulled and become days of festival and joy.³⁰ Isaiah describes the same reversal for those who mourn: Hashem will “appoint unto them that mourn in Zion… beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness” (Isaiah 61:3). Yeshua opened his public ministry in Nazareth by reading from this same chapter (Luke 4:16–21), and taught, “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted” (Matthew 5:4).

The rebuilding is promised in concrete terms:

In that day will I raise up the tabernacle of David that is fallen, and close up the breaches thereof; and I will raise up his ruins, and I will build it as in the days of old… And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be pulled up out of their land which I have given them, saith Hashem thy God.

The apostles quoted this prophecy at the council in Jerusalem (Acts 15:15–17). Jeremiah, the prophet of the destruction, also foretold its undoing: the voice of the bridegroom and the bride would again be heard in Jerusalem’s streets, with thank offerings in the house of Hashem (Jeremiah 33:10–11), under a righteous Branch of David (33:15). The regathering of the Jewish people to the land is, for us, part of Hashem’s faithfulness (Ezekiel 36–37), though we do not read headlines into prophecy.

John’s vision of the new Jerusalem answers Lamentations: where it says “she weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks” (Lamentations 1:2), the Revelation says:

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

The resurrection of the dead (Daniel 12:2), the gathering of Israel, and the nations going up to Jerusalem to worship the King, Hashem of hosts (Zechariah 14:16), complete the picture. When this will be, no one knows. The Talmud warns against those who calculate the end, and Yeshua said that of that day and hour no one knows, “but the Father” (Mark 13:32).³¹ Tisha B’Av is not a day for date-setting. It is a day for honest grief and stubborn hope.

Keeping Tisha B’Av

Each household will keep the day according to its custom and health. Some general guidance:

• Prepare in the weeks before. Let the Three Weeks and the Nine Days slow you down. See our calendar for the dates of 17 Tammuz, the Nine Days and Tisha B’Av in any given year.
• Eat a simple final meal on the afternoon before, and begin the fast at sundown.
• Read Lamentations on the evening of the fast, slowly and aloud, by low light, sitting low.
• Spend the morning with the kinot or with the sad passages of Scripture: Lamentations, Jeremiah, Job, and the Gospel accounts of Yeshua weeping over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41–44; Matthew 23:37–24:2; Luke 21:20–24).
• Search your heart for causeless hatred. Seek out someone you have wronged or who has wronged you, and take a step toward reconciliation.
• Let the afternoon turn toward comfort. Put on tallit and tefillin for Mincha, rise from the low seat after midday, and pray Nacheim. Read Zechariah 8 and Isaiah 61.
• Break the fast gently at nightfall, and remember that the next Shabbat is Shabbat Nachamu, “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people,” and that Tu B’Av, a day of joy, follows within a week.

The Talmud teaches, from Isaiah 66:10: “Whoever mourns for Jerusalem will merit to see her joy.”³² That is the heart of Tisha B’Av. We do not mourn because we have given up. We mourn because we have not forgotten, and because we believe the One who promised.

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.