Teaching Team
The Ninth of Av Part 1
On this date in the year 586 BCE the siege began on the first Temple in Jerusalem.
Now on the seventh day of the fifth month, which was the nineteenth year of King Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard, a servant of the king of Babylon, came to Jerusalem.(2 Kings 25:8)
Although we are nearing the end of the three weeks of mourning the worst is still to come as we remember the complete destruction of the Temple on the Ninth of Av which begins Monday night. In the next three days I will present excerpts from an article I wrote on the Ninth of Av for Messiah Magazine Issue 91. Here is part one:
Being told “no” is seldom a pleasant experience, especially when that answer is preceded by great hopes and expectations. It can take a long time to heal emotions after the sting of rejection is felt. Such is the case in parasha Shelach. Here the children of Israel are given an answer that proves to be almost more than they can handle. They are told that because of their sin they will not enter the Promised Land.The Israelites would be destined to wander in the wilderness for forty years and would never see the land of milk and honey. They were to die in the dessert. How things had changed since that miraculous trek through the Sea of Reeds. Words of praise and hope from the song they composed and sang that day still echoed in their heads.
Nevertheless, HaShem had a very good reason to do this. He knew that this generation was not ready to enter the Promise Land. They had clearly demonstrated this through the episode of the spies. A period of training and testing was needed to refine the Israelites and get them ready to live in Israel. His ways are not ours.
The day the Israelites received this news would be remembered for generations to come. Through meticulous calculations, the sages derive that this day fell on the Ninth of Av.
"The Holy One, blessed be He, said to them: “You have wept without cause, therefore I will set [this day] aside for a weeping throughout the generations to come.”
The Tragedies of the Ninth of Av
Many tragic things are said to have happened on this day, such as the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, the beginning of World War I, as well as the advent of that horrific and gruesome event, the Holocaust. Although these are all painful events in Jewish history, the Ninth of Av is most infamous for the destruction of the Temple.
The destruction of the first Temple is recorded in Jeremiah 52:12 as happening on the “tenth day of the fifth month,” the 10th of Av. Yet, in the book of 2 Kings it is written that this event happened on the “seventh day of the fifth month.” The sages reconcile the difference in dating by explaining that the destruction began on the outer walls and those of the courtyard on the seventh, while the entire Temple was not completely destroyed until the tenth. It was decided then that the Ninth of Av would be the memorial of this catastrophe.
In 70 CE the second Temple was also destroyed on the Ninth of Av. Of the two destructions, the second has clearly had the most impact on Israel’s history. Whereas the first destruction lasted only for a few hundred years, the second has lasted now for almost two thousand. Rabbi Feuer gives a sense of the grief this has caused:
"What are we lacking? The answer is that we have everything—except the Holy Temple! We have been driven from our ancestral home, banished from the “family residence.” In spiritual terms, we are homeless!"
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Visitor Feedback:
I may be reading the calendar wrong, but doesn't the fast begin on Monday night, lasting through Tuesday night?
***Yes, you are correct. Thanks for pointing that out! I corrected the typo.
Sarah Croswell | July 23, 2007 9:57 AM