For nearly 2,000 years, Jews have fasted on Tisha B’Av to mourn the destruction of the First and Second Temples, the loss of Jewish sovereignty, exile from Jerusalem, and a long chain of national tragedies.
Jewish tradition also teaches that the fast will not last forever. The prophet Zechariah envisioned a day when the fasts commemorating Jerusalem’s destruction would become days of “joy and gladness and cheerful festivals.” Many rabbis have understood that era to arrive with the rebuilding of the Temple.
No one knows when that day will come.
Yet the last century has witnessed changes that generations of Jews scarcely dared imagine.
The Jewish people returned to their ancestral homeland. The State of Israel was reborn (1948). Jerusalem was reunited under Jewish sovereignty (1967). For the first time in nearly two thousand years, Israel is home to the world’s largest Jewish population (2012).
Israel has also become increasingly accepted by its Arab and Muslim neighbors, establishing diplomatic relations with Egypt (1979), Jordan (1994), the United Arab Emirates (2020), Bahrain (2020), Morocco (2020), Sudan (2020, pending implementation), and Kosovo (2021). Meanwhile, the United States (2018), Guatemala (2018), Honduras (2021), Kosovo (2021), Papua New Guinea (2023), Paraguay (2024), and Fiji (2024) have moved their embassies to Jerusalem, while other countries (Slovenia and Nauru) are considering doing the same.
Last year (2025), more than 75,000 Jews ascended the Temple Mount – a modern record that would have been unimaginable only a generation ago.
The Golden Gate in Jerusalem’s Old City exterior wall (photo: First One through)
The Temple remains unbuilt and Tisha B’Av remains a day of mourning.
But it does raise a question that previous generations could scarcely have imagined asking: Will this be the last Tisha B’Av fast?
Perhaps Jews a century from now will still be asking the same question. Or perhaps they will look back and realize that ours was among the last generations to mourn the destruction rather than celebrate the restoration.
For almost two thousand years, that possibility seemed unimaginable. Today, it no longer does.
There is something profoundly human about gathering related things into a single vessel.
We do it with photo albums, where a lifetime of moments is gathered into one book. We do it with museums, where centuries of artifacts are brought together under one roof.
The Jewish calendar does the same with time.
Tisha B’Av is not merely the anniversary of the destruction of the First and Second Temples. Over centuries it became the vessel into which Jewish history poured its sorrows – from the destruction of the Temples to the expulsions from England and Spain, to catastrophes that culminated in the Holocaust. Generations found in Tisha B’Av a place large enough to hold them all.
The Nuremberg Chronicle showing the destruction of Jerusalem
The Temple Mount in Jerusalem became another vessel. Of place.
For much of history, Jerusalem was known as the city of the Jewish Temple. But over time it gathered far more meaning. It became the location of the near sacrifice of Isaac, the destination of pilgrimage, the focus of exile, and the direction toward which Jews have prayed for thousands of years.
Other faiths also poured meaning into Jerusalem. Christians revere it as the place of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. Muslims honor it as the destination of Muhammad’s Night Journey. Layer upon layer, century upon century, Jerusalem became more than a city. It became a vessel carrying humanity’s deepest convictions, hopes, and conflicts.
Temple Mount at dawn (photo: First One Through)
And then there is a unique people.
The Jewish people became a vessel unlike any other. Across thousands of years they carried covenant, exile, learning, persecution, survival, and hope. They preserved ancient language, sacred texts, melodies, customs, and memory across continents and generations. They became the vessel through which memory survived when kingdoms fell, empires vanished, and even the Temple itself lay in ruins.
Every vessel carries something. Some carry water. Some carry treasure. Some carry ashes. The greatest vessels carry what cannot be touched: memory, identity, covenant, and hope.
And that is what the Jewish people, Jerusalem, and Tisha B’Av have become. Three vessels in one elaborate story.
Every generation poured something more into those vessels: not only grief, but hope.
Within them rests the hope captured in the Israeli national anthem, Hatikvah: that the Jewish people will live as a free people in their own land, with Jerusalem at its heart.
And on Tisha B’Av in particular, the vessel holds one additional hope above all others: the rebuilding of the Beit HaMikdash. Not because Jews long merely for stones and walls, but because it represents the restoration of wholeness – between God and humanity, a people and their land, memory and redemption.
Every Tisha B’Av, Jews gather into one day the grief of centuries, turn toward one city, and renew one hope. As they do, they recognize that this is more than a story of three fused vessels. It is that together they carry one enduring promise.
For many people, Jewish holidays are family traditions: apples and honey on Rosh Hashanah, a Passover Seder, Hanukkah candles, or a sukkah in the backyard. Yet beneath these customs lies the deeper reality that every major Jewish holiday is connected in some way to the Temple in Jerusalem.
The Temple was not simply a house of worship. It was the spiritual, national, and legal center of Jewish life. Pilgrimages, sacrifices, priestly service, national assemblies, and the calendar itself revolved around Jerusalem. Even after the Temple’s destruction in 70CE, the holidays preserved its memory and continue to point toward it.
Rosh Hashanah marks the Jewish New Year and the sounding of the shofar. In Temple times, witnesses testified before the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem to establish the new month, and the shofar echoed through the Temple courts. Today, Jews still pray that God’s kingship will once again be recognized from Zion.
Yom Kippur is inseparable from the Temple. The High Priest entered the Holy of Holies only once a year to seek atonement for the nation. Modern synagogue services painstakingly recount the Temple ritual, preserving the memory of the day’s most sacred service.
Sukkot was one of the three pilgrimage festivals when Jews ascended to Jerusalem. The Temple hosted the joyous water-drawing ceremony (Simchat Beit HaShoeva), accompanied by music, dancing, and water libations on the altar. Rabbinic tradition describes it as one of the greatest celebrations ever witnessed.
Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah conclude the festival cycle begun at the Temple with Sukkot. While Simchat Torah developed later, it celebrates the Torah that was publicly taught and read in Jerusalem.
“Ki mitzion tetze torah” (כִּי מִצִּיּוֹן תֵּצֵא תוֹרָה). “For instruction shall come forth from Zion, The word of God from Jerusalem.” – Isaiah (Chapter 2, Verse 3)
Hanukkah commemorates the rededication of the Second Temple after it was reclaimed from the Seleucid Greeks. Every candle recalls the restoration of Jewish worship in Jerusalem.
Tu BiShvat, the New Year for Trees, determined agricultural laws whose tithes and first fruits were ultimately brought to the Temple.
Purim is the only holiday without a direct Temple ritual, yet its story ensured the survival of the Jewish people who would rebuild and worship in the Second Temple. Jerusalem itself celebrates Purim a day later, preserving its ancient status as a walled city.
Passover was the greatest pilgrimage festival. Hundreds of thousands ascended to Jerusalem to offer the Passover sacrifice before gathering in homes throughout the city for the Seder. Even today Jews conclude the Seder with the words, “Next year in Jerusalem.”
Tens of thousands of Jews at the Kotel Plaza in the Old City of Jerusalem during Passover, as they cannot ascend to the Temple Mount today
Shavuot celebrated the first fruits brought to the Temple in elaborate processions from across the Land of Israel. Farmers entered Jerusalem carrying decorated baskets while choirs sang Psalms of thanksgiving.
Tisha B’Av mourns above all the destruction of both the First and Second Temples. It is the day on which Jews sit on the floor, recite Lamentations, and remember the loss of Jerusalem’s spiritual heart.
Even holidays with no formal Temple ceremony ultimately orbit Jerusalem. They celebrate the survival of the Jewish people, the covenant, the Land of Israel, and the hope of restoration.
Jerusalem is not merely Judaism’s holiest city; it is the organizing principle of the Jewish calendar itself. The cycle of holidays begins and ends with memories of Temple worship, pilgrimages, offerings, repentance, thanksgiving, and national gathering in one place.
For centuries Jews prayed facing Jerusalem, broke a glass at weddings to remember its destruction, left part of a home unfinished in mourning, and ended the Passover Seder and Yom Kippur with the same aspiration: “Next year in Jerusalem.”
The Jewish calendar is more than a record of sacred time. It is a map whose destination is Jerusalem, carrying the memory of the Temple from one generation to the next.
Every graduation marks the end of one chapter and the beginning of another.
Parshat Devarim, read each year during the Nine Days before Tisha B’Av, opens at precisely such a moment. The Jewish people stand on the banks of the Jordan River. After forty years in the wilderness, they are finally ready to enter the Land of Israel. Moses is delivering his final address. One might expect him to unveil a military strategy, an economic vision, or a blueprint for nation-building.
Instead, he teaches history.
For three chapters, Moses reviews the defining moments of the previous forty years: the appointment of judges, the sin of the spies, the years of wandering, and the victories over Sihon and Og. This is not nostalgia but preparation. Before Israel can build its future, it must first understand its past.
Moses sees the promised land from afar, 1902 by James Tissot (1836-1902)
That lesson feels especially relevant for this year’s Jewish college graduates.
Like the Israelites, they are crossing into a new world. They are leaving the structured environment of school and entering workplaces, neighborhoods, and communities where they will make their own decisions and assume new responsibilities.
The past few years have given many Jewish students an education that extended far beyond the classroom. They witnessed campuses wrestle with antisemitism. They watched administrators make revealing choices. They saw professors, classmates, elected officials, employers, and civic leaders respond in different ways when Jewish students felt threatened or isolated.
Whether those responses inspired confidence or disappointment, they were lessons.
Moses understood that the moments just before entering a new chapter are precisely when history matters most. The question is not simply, What happened? It is, What have you learned that should shape the future you are about to build?
For today’s graduates, those lessons should inform more than career decisions. They should influence how they participate in civic and Jewish life.
Who has earned your trust through actions rather than slogans?
Which institutions proved resilient under pressure?
How will you respond if antisemitism appears in your workplace?
What kind of community do you want to help build?
Graduation should also mark the beginning of Jewish adulthood. That means becoming more than an occasional participant. Join a synagogue by becoming a dues-paying member. Vote in local, state, and national elections. Volunteer and mentor younger students. Strengthen the institutions that strengthened you, and build the ones you wished had existed.
The Jewish calendar reinforces this idea. Before we reach the season of renewal – before Elul, Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur – we pause for the Nine Days and Tisha B’Av. Before looking ahead, we look back. Before rebuilding, we reflect.
That is exactly what Moses was doing on the edge of the Jordan.
Every generation has its own Jordan River.
Before crossing into tomorrow, Moses offers one final piece of advice: study yesterday. Not to dwell on it, but to be equipped by it. History is not simply something to remember. It is something to carry forward as you begin writing the next chapter of your own story – and of the Jewish people.
As the Israelites prepare to enter the Land of Israel in Matot-Masei, the tribes of Reuben and Gad ask for permission to settle east of the Jordan. Moses agrees – but with one condition. They may not enjoy the security of their own homes until they first help the other tribes secure theirs.
The message is striking. Before you settle comfortably into your own inheritance, help your community establish theirs. It is not charity but community responsibility.
Every tribe had a rightful place in the land. Every family deserved the opportunity to build a secure home. The community could not be considered settled until everyone had the chance to settle.
Thousands of years later, most of us no longer inherit farmland. We build our lives through careers instead. Our “land” is our livelihood.
That is where another Torah command offers a practical model.
Earlier in the Torah, God commands farmers:
“When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the corners of your field… You shall leave them for the poor and the stranger.” (Leviticus 19:9–10)
The mitzvot of pe’ah and leket required every farmer to leave part of the harvest behind. Generosity was built into the act of production itself.
Jean-François Millet’s The Gleaners, 1857
Today, our field is no longer measured in acres but in calendars. So what if we left the corner of our workweek instead?
Imagine reserving part of every Friday to help someone establish a livelihood. Mentor a college student wondering how to begin a career. Introduce an unemployed neighbor to someone in your network. Coach an underemployed professional preparing for interviews. Spend an hour helping someone discover opportunities they cannot reach alone.
The greatest barrier facing many young adults today is not a lack of talent. It is a lack of access – to mentors, relationships, introductions, and guidance. A single conversation can redirect a career. One introduction can change the course of a life.
Matot-Masei teaches that we are responsible for helping others reach a place of security before we simply enjoy our own. Pe’ah teaches us to leave part of what we produce for others.
Together they suggest a modern mitzvah: leave the corner of your workweek to help others.
The harvest is no longer wheat for many of us. It is knowledge, experience, influence, and opportunity. So perhaps one of the holiest things we can do is use part of ours to help someone else build a future of their own.
Parshat Pinchas is remembered for an act of zeal. It should also be remembered for an act of deception.
After the crisis at Baal Peor, God commands Moses to strike Midian. The reason is revealing:
“For they harassed you through their deception…” (Numbers 25:18)
The Torah could have focused on the immorality or the idolatry. Instead, it draws attention to the strategy that made both possible: deception.
Every nation prepares for open threats. Armies train for invasion. Citizens recognize rebellion. A visible enemy can be confronted.
Deception follows a different path.
It works quietly. It conceals its destination. It persuades people to take one reasonable step after another until they arrive somewhere they never intended to go.
That was Midian’s strategy.
The process began with attraction. Attraction became relationships. Relationships became shared experiences. Shared experiences became participation. Participation became belonging. By the time many Israelites bowed before Baal Peor, their loyalties had already been reshaped.
The decisive battle had taken place long before anyone recognized it as a battle.
That is why the Torah emphasizes deception. Sexual seduction was the instrument. The objective was the covenant itself.
Samson and Delilah by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640)
Every generation encounters this challenge.
Ideas, values, and habits rarely replace one another overnight. They gain influence gradually. Each accommodation feels insignificant on its own. Only over time does the cumulative effect become clear.
For Jews living in free societies, the challenge often comes through competing identities. Career, politics, entertainment, consumer culture, and the endless demands of the digital world all seek our time, attention, and allegiance. None requires abandoning Jewish life. Each simply asks that it occupy a little less space than it did yesterday.
The Torah’s answer is equally deliberate.
After the crisis ends, Parshat Pinchas turns immediately to building the future: counting the next generation, dividing the land, appointing Joshua, and establishing the rhythm of communal worship. The response to deception is not withdrawal from society. It is strengthening the institutions, practices, and commitments that preserve a people’s identity.
Military threats test a nation’s strength. Deception tests its memory.
One attacks from without. The other reshapes from within.
Parshat Pinchas reminds us that a people must guard against both with equal vigilance.
Parashat Balak contains one of the most unusual narratives in the Torah. For almost the entire portion, the Jewish people disappear from the story.
Throughout the Torah, we experience events through Moses, the Israelites, or God speaking directly to His people. This week is different. The Israelites continue their journey completely unaware of the drama unfolding around them. Instead, the Torah lifts us to the mountaintops of Moab, where King Balak and the prophet Balaam stand overlooking the Israelite camp below.
For the only time in the Torah, we see the Jewish people entirely through the eyes of outsiders.
That perspective is striking. The story told reminds us that long before anyone attempts to destroy a people, they first seek to define them.
Balak does not look upon Israel and see the descendants of Abraham returning to the land God promised their forefathers. He does not see a nation recently liberated from slavery or a people carrying a covenant that would shape the moral foundations of civilization. Looking down from the mountain, he sees only a threat. Once he reaches that conclusion, everything else follows naturally. A dangerous people deserve to be weakened. A dangerous people deserve to be cursed.
Before there is violence, there is narrative.
Balak understands that words have power. If Israel can be portrayed as an illegitimate menace, hostility becomes easier to justify. He therefore summons Balaam, believing that the right words can reshape reality itself.
But the Torah teaches exactly the opposite lesson.
Each time Balaam opens his mouth to curse Israel, God compels him to describe what he actually sees rather than what Balak wishes were true. The curses become blessings. The accusations become admiration. Instead of condemning Israel, Balaam proclaims, “How goodly are your tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel.”
The battle in Parashat Balak is ultimately not over land or military strength. It is over definition. Who has the authority to describe the Jewish people? A fearful king looking down from a distant mountain, or the God who entered into covenant with them?
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn’s “Balaam’s Ass”, 1626
That ancient struggle continues today.
Many of the loudest voices speaking about the Jewish people insist on defining them for themselves. Jewish history is recast as though the connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel were a modern political invention rather than the foundation of Jewish civilization. Jerusalem is detached from the people who have been praying toward it for thousands of years. The descendants of ancient Israel become foreign colonizers in the very land where their national story began.
“European Jewish Zionists claimed to be descendants of the ancient Palestinian Hebrews and to be merely “returning” to their ancient land.” – Columbia University professor Joseph Massad, July 2022
The same impulse appears in discussions of antisemitism. Increasingly, others claim the authority to determine what Jews should consider antisemitic while dismissing the experience of Jewish communities themselves. The people who are the object of hatred are told they cannot define the hatred directed against them.
The pattern is remarkably familiar.
Balak first decided the Israelites were a threat and concluded they deserved condemnation. The false identity justified the action.
The Torah overturns that process.
The only outsider whose words are remembered for eternity is the one whom God compels to abandon prejudice and speak truth. Balaam climbed the mountain intending to curse Israel, but he remained a prophet. He still recognized that there was a Judge above him. When God commanded him to bless, his own desires gave way to a higher truth.
Today’s loudest critics acknowledge no such authority beyond themselves. They do not seek God’s judgment but the approval of crowds, political movements, or academic fashions. Their words may echo through universities, international institutions, social media, and the halls of government, but they carry no weight in Heaven. They resonate only among fellow travelers who have already chosen contempt over truth.
Three thousand years ago, God refused to allow those who hated Israel to define Israel. That remains the enduring lesson of Parashat Balak. The Jewish people are not who their enemies say they are. They are who God says they are.
“Now the days were the days of the first ripe grapes” (Numbers 13:20).
At first glance, the verse appears to be little more than a calendar note. The spies entered Canaan during harvest season. Naturally they found grapes.
But the Torah rarely includes details without purpose.
The Israelites had spent generations hearing about a land flowing with milk and honey. They stood at the threshold of that promise. The spies were being sent to verify it. They entered the land at the very moment when its abundance would be on full display. The nation was waiting for proof.
And the spies returned carrying exactly that proof: an enormous cluster of grapes from the Valley of Eshkol.
Panel showing two Israelite spies carrying enormous grapes from map by Jan Jansson, 1631
Yet the sages make a curious observation. According to Sotah 34a, the ten spies who delivered the negative report carried the produce. Joshua and Caleb carried nothing.
Why not?
The question becomes even more intriguing when we remember that this is not the first time representatives of the tribes returned carrying evidence.
Centuries earlier, Joseph’s brothers returned to Jacob with Joseph’s coat dipped in blood. They never explicitly claimed Joseph was dead. They simply presented the evidence and allowed Jacob to reach the conclusion they intended.
Perhaps the spies were doing something similar.
We often read the giant cluster of grapes as proof of the goodness of the land. But what if that was not how the spies intended it to be understood?
The Torah’s report moves almost seamlessly from the fruit to the inhabitants:
“Indeed it flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit. Nevertheless, the people who dwell in the land are strong…” (Numbers 13:27-28)
Look at these grapes, the spies may have been saying. Ordinary men do not live in a place that produces fruit like this. The same land that yields giant grapes yields giant warriors.
Seen this way, the grapes were not simply a sample of the harvest. They were evidence enlisted in support of a conclusion they sought to impart: fear.
This possibility sheds new light on the teaching in Sotah. If the fruit was being used to support the spies’ narrative, Joshua and Caleb’s refusal to carry it becomes understandable. They were not rejecting the grapes. They were rejecting the interpretation attached to them.
The parallel to Joseph’s coat becomes even deeper when we consider who these men were.
Joshua descended from Joseph through Ephraim. Caleb descended from Judah. The descendants of Joseph and Judah became the two spies who stood apart from the majority.
Joseph’s brothers brought a coat. The spies brought grapes. Neither group needed to invent evidence. The objects were real. What mattered was the narrative attached to them.
The brothers used a coat to tell a story about Joseph. The spies used grapes to tell a story about the Land. In both cases, the evidence itself did not contain the conclusion. The conclusion came from those presenting it.
Perhaps that is the deeper lesson connecting these two stories. Facts matter, but facts rarely arrive without interpretation. The same coat could become evidence of tragedy or merely separation. The same cluster of grapes could become evidence of giants or evidence of God’s promise.
The challenge is not simply to examine the evidence before us. It is to recognize the narrative that accompanies it and to ask whether the story being told is the only one the evidence supports.
When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan attacked Israel this week, most English-language reports focused on his accusations of genocide, his attacks on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and his warnings about regional instability.
But Arabic and Turkish media focused on a different line.
According to Turkey’s own state-run Anadolu Agency, Erdoğan declared:
“We know very well what the ultimate objective of the delusions of the Promised Land is, and God willing, we will never allow it.”
It is a line he has used for years. It’s a headline phrase across the Arab world. Al Jazeera highlighted it. Egypt’s Al-Ahram highlighted it. Al-Quds Al-Arabi highlighted it. He uses it as a charge that Israel is coming for Turkey itself.
Yet the English-language media ignored it.
That omission matters because Erdoğan was no longer criticizing Israeli policy. He was ridiculing a foundational Jewish belief.
The Promised Land is not a policy of Benjamin Netanyahu. It is not a platform of the Israeli government. It is a central element of Jewish faith, history, and identity dating back more than three thousand years. It appears throughout the Hebrew Bible and has been part of Jewish religious life through centuries of exile.
Calling that belief a “delusion” is no different than mocking Christian belief in the Resurrection or Muslim belief in the divine revelation of the Quran.
There is a word for dismissing the core religious beliefs of Jews as uniquely illegitimate: antisemitism.
Yet English-language audiences were shielded from that reality. Readers were told Erdoğan was criticizing Israel. They were not told he was deriding one of Judaism’s foundational beliefs. That this is a Muslim war against the Jews.
For years, Western audiences have been told that criticism of Israel must be distinguished from hostility toward Jews. But when a foreign leader publicly mocks a core tenet of Judaism and the press translates it into a story solely about Israeli policy, the distinction is being used in reverse. Anti-Jewish rhetoric is sanitized and repackaged as ordinary criticism of Israel.
Arabic readers saw what Erdoğan actually chose to emphasize. English readers did not, guided on a narrow path to direct the public.
Parshat Beha’alotcha opens with the lighting of the Menorah.
The Haftorah from Zechariah returns to the same image but adds a remarkable detail. The prophet sees a golden Menorah fed by two olive trees, one on each side, supplying a continuous flow of oil.
Confused by the vision, Zechariah asks what it means. The answer contains one of the most famous lines in the Bible:
“Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit, says the Lord of Hosts.” – Zechariah 4:6
The vision came during the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the Second Temple. A small Jewish community had returned from Babylonian exile and faced the daunting task of restoring both a city and a nation.
Many readers focus on the famous verse. The prophet, however, devotes considerable attention to the two olive trees.
Rashi, following the Talmud, identifies the two olive trees with Joshua the High Priest and Zerubbabel the governor. One represented the spiritual leadership of the nation. The other represented its political and civic restoration.
The symbolism is powerful.
The Menorah stands between spiritual leadership and political leadership. Between the Temple and the city. Between faith and statecraft.
The vision’s message was not that politics would save the Jewish people. Nor was it that spiritual life alone would rebuild Jerusalem.
The Temple could not stand without a city. A city could not fulfill its purpose without the values embodied by the Temple.
That lesson echoed throughout Jewish history.
Kings and prophets, priests and governors, rabbis and communal leaders each played different roles in sustaining Jewish life. Sometimes they cooperated. Sometimes they clashed. Yet Jewish continuity depended on both the preservation of spiritual purpose and the institutions capable of carrying that purpose into the world.
Today, Israel’s state emblem places a Menorah at its center, flanked by olive branches. The design was inspired by the Menorah depicted on the Arch of Titus in Rome, commemorating the destruction of Jerusalem nearly two thousand years ago. Yet the image also echoes Zechariah’s vision of a Menorah being reestablished in Jerusalem, standing between olive trees.
A people of faith needs security, institutions, and leadership. A nation needs purpose, values, and a mission greater than itself.
Zechariah’s vision does not place the Menorah beneath a single olive tree.
It stands between two.
The light of Israel emerges from the meeting point of spiritual purpose and national life.
First One Through 