"Eicha yashva badad, hair rabati am, haitai k'almana - Lonely sits the city, once great with people. She that was great among the nations has become like a widow". Read more...

Like a number of Conservative Jews, I first learned the “script” of Tisha B’Av at summer camp (in my case, Ramah Poconos). After a pre-fast meal and as the sun began to set, we filed into the Beit Am Gadol (meaning, fairly literally: the Large Communal Space). At the front, by the stage which usually hosted camp plays, a choir of staff, and perhaps campers from older groups, sang mournful Hebrew songs as everyone gathered. The lights in the room were turned down, and instead the vast, hanger-like space was lit with candles. Read more...

The Jewish Calendar does not change, we do. As we observe Tisha B’av with fasting and lamentations this Thursday, I am flooded with the memories of other places that I have been when this summer sacred fast day occurred, memories of Camp where, as the lone summer sacred day – we cannot say holiday – the whole camp was Tisha B’av. Read more...

The fast of the Seventeenth of Tammuz, this year falling on July 9, 2020, is one of four fasts connected to the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E. Read more...

This week on the Jewish calendar, we mark Tisha B’Av, (the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av), a day of national mourning.  Commemorating the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem and the scattering of our early ancestors into exile, Tisha B’Av has become the saddest day of the Jewish year.  Throughout the ages, Tisha B’av has also become a sponge, absorbing millennia of Jewish suffering and calamities.  Read more...