Amongst Jews from the Yemen the custom on Tisha b’Av is that an elder of the community will rise to his feet immediately before the traditional reading of the book of Lamentations and declare that whoever has not witnessed the rebuilding of the Temple is to be regarded as having witnessed its destruction in his own lifetime.

 The drama and solemnity of this announcement (so obviously in keeping with the sombre intensity of Tisha b’Av) should not altogether deflect attention from the need for it.  It is a means to an end – a way of tackling a problem which faces every community at this festival.  The principal events which we are called upon to mourn on this day are so distant from us that an effort of the imagination is called for if we are to feel very much about them.  Like the Yemeni Jews, and other traditionally-minded communities, we may seek by one means or another to minimise that distance.  Alternatively, we may direct our memories to other events closer to us; recent massacres and pogroms have been given prominence in the collective memory at some stages in our history, and among communities nowadays which mark Tisha b’Av it is quite usual to find commemoration of the Holocaust virtually excluding all the other events with which the day can be associated.

 The reason that I was insistent on opening up the Shul on the eve of Tisha b’Av was not that I wanted to promote any particular aspect of Jewish history as a special focus for the grief of this day.   After all, the most traditional meditation on the destruction of the first and second Temples can miss the point of the fast of Av, and the most untraditional commemoration of quite different events can perfectly reach it – and vice versa.  There is, in my view, a simple but vital notion capable of giving meaning to any communal commemoration of Tisha b’Av.  It is one which was likely to be most explicitly present in the observance of the festival within a community which has not marked it in recent years.

 It is this.  However much or little spontaneous emotion we actually feel within ourselves as individuals as we sit by candlelight in this darkened shul, and irrespective of whether our feelings are more stirred by this memory or that, we are here.   There is no getting over how remarkable that is.   As a people we have suffered blows which, at the time, seemed more than sufficient to bring Jewish history to a close.  Our experience has been, from one point of view, calamitous; almost all our national and religious institutions have been destroyed.   And yet, while all the more successful nations amongst which our earlier disasters unfolded have ceased to exist in any recognisable form, and mark no feast days to remember their victories, we are still here to recall our defeats.  We may be in few in number – as a people, as a community, or as individuals in shul on Tisha b’Av - but when we meet in this way to wrestle with the strange form which Jewish existence has taken, we prove once again that we will not let it go.

 The first word of the book of Lamentations, “eichah”, which is the exclamation “how?”, therefore has a double sense.   On one hand it gives voice to our shock at the failures which the book so graphically depicts.  On the other hand “eichah” expresses the realisation that our continued recalling of our history, and through it our history’s continuation, is a phenomenon so improbable, so uniquely bizarre, as to justify wonderment and speculation.

David Herling - August 2003