Imagine a French citizen halting their daily routine to mourn the destruction of a Gallic temple from the first century CE. Imagine a German, a Pole, or a Brit observing an official day of mourning over the loss of a pagan shrine they never wanted in the first place. Sounds absurd? Well, that is precisely the absurdity at the heart of the national consensus surrounding Tisha B'Av.
Because Tisha B'Av, in its origin and essence, is not a national day — it is a religious one. And despite every attempt to infuse it with collective or universal meaning, it remains a frozen gaze backward — at a world that no longer exists, and one that some of us may be glad is gone.
Maybe It Feels Strange Because It's Unnecessary
It is hard to find another case in which a modern nation mourns a catastrophe that occurred before the very concept of "nationhood" even existed. The expectation that secular or mainstream Israeli society should identify with the destruction of the Temple is particularly strange — not only because of the historical gap, but because the very substance of that "destruction" is no longer relevant.
The Temple — that site over which tears are shed — was a cultic institution where animals were sacrificed to appease God. Today, even most of the religious public does not genuinely seek to restore that model. Judaism itself, from the Pharisees onward, moved away from this pagan-like ritual and built in its place a tradition of prayer, study, and thought.
So what exactly are we mourning?
Even more puzzling is the clinging to the idea of "exile." This is one of the emptiest concepts in contemporary Israeli reality. The State of Israel exists. It has sovereignty, an army, a language, a government, a flag, and an anthem. Millions of Jews live here. We are not in exile — and perhaps precisely because of that, many struggle to connect with this mourning. It no longer feels like ours.
The attempt to charge Tisha B'Av with personal meaning — "mourn in your own way," "look inward" — respects emotion but misses the context. This is not a day of existential soul-searching, nor is it a Holocaust memorial day. It is a date with a very specific story: a Temple was destroyed, God hid His face, priests fell, a people was exiled.
And if you don't believe in that narrative — why would you mourn it?
Enough with Manufactured Unity
Perhaps the time has come to stop insisting on "shared mourning" at all costs. Not everything on our calendar has to represent us. We can choose to view this day as a day of religious history — without forcing it to become a national one. And instead of mourning what was lost — perhaps the better question is: what do we want to build in its place?
The transformation of a religious day of mourning into a national narrative is a powerful example of narrative engineering at the civilizational scale.
