This week, on the Ninth of the Hebrew month of Av, Jews all over the world will be mourning the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The day is marked by fasting and lamentation, a day which has for almost 2,000 years been regarded as the most tragic day in the Jewish calendar.

The question is asked, Why do we continue to mourn? After all, what’s done is done, and you can’t bring back the past.

The answer is that although the Ninth of Av is, to be sure, a day of looking back on painful events, it is not that only. For all the sadness, there is an optimistic note, as well. In fact, the Ninth of Av is also called moed, the Hebrew word for festival. How can a day of mourning be a festival? Because we believe that what’s done is not done; that the destruction of Jewish glory is not permanent. Indeed, it is an article of faith that the fasting and mourning of this day can bring back the Temple, can restore the splendor that once was the heritage of every Jew. From this mourning will come gladness.

However, before God will respond to our prayers for the restoration of the Temple (and with it the messianic era), we have to show ourselves worthy of it. For that, we need to understand why we lost the Temple in the first place.

Indeed, the question has been asked from the time of the destruction of the First Temple. As the prophet Jeremiah asked, “Why has the land been lost…and God said, ‘Because they have abandoned My Torah…’ ” (Jeremiah 9).

The Sages tell us that Jeremiah was not the first or only one to ask the question. Everyone was asking it; it was the great tragic event of the generation, and everyone wanted to know the cause. And yet, none of the sages or prophets could explain the cause of it, until God told the prophet: “Because they abandoned My Torah” (Nedarim 81a).

However, this answer itself only poses new questions. Why couldn’t anyone explain the cause? The Sages themselves declare elsewhere the reasons for the destruction of the First Temple—sexual immorality, violence and idolatry. It was no secret to anyone. Scripture is replete with the sins of that generation.

One answer is that the question referred to here is a deeper one: That generation was no less aware of its sins than we are of the bloodshed and immorality in our own time. What they were asking was, How did it get that way? How could it be that the people that received the Torah from the Creator at Mount Sinai, and who brought a new standard of morality to the world, could have descended to such a low state? In other words, where did we go wrong?

The answer to that question was not at all obvious. Only God Himself could know with certainty what the turning point was, where they had gone wrong. And more, that Torah is unlike other mitzvot. If a Jew fails to perform a mitzvah, he lacks that mitzvah. But if he lacks Torah, which is the very fabric of Judaism, the basis of the covenant between God and us, it’s a different world. As the Sages say, we are compared to the stars in the heavens and the dust of the earth. Either we are elevated above all else, or we are the lowest of the low, trodden underfoot like dust. With Torah, we are like the stars; without it, we are dust.

So, on the Ninth of Av, if we are sincerely searching for a restoration of Jewish greatness, of the spiritual splendor and closeness to God that once was our prized possession, it is to Torah that we must return. And if we do so, we will merit to see with our own eyes how mourning can turn into gladness. Into a festival.

This article was based on Rabbi Moshe Sherer’s essay on the subject in B’Shtei Eynayim.

by Rabbi Yisrael Rutman

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