Late in 2025, I stood in the Roman Forum in the heart of Rome, studying the carved images of defeated Jews in the Arch of Titus with a snarl curling my lips. I had a sense of physical revulsion at seeing the manifest triumphalism of the man and the empire responsible for the destruction of the Temple, of Jerusalem, and of Jewish sovereignty for eighteen hundred and seventy eight years.
Perhaps even more revolting was the knowledge I had of the countless Jewish lives - the 35,000 Jewish captives forced to build the colosseum a short distance away, the hundreds of thousands killed and exiled by Titus and later by Hadrian sixty years later, the privation, desolation, exile, torture, rape and murder that followed unrelentingly year after year, decade after decade, century after century - millions impacted by this man, celebrated on that triumphal arch.
This was in no way abstract to me. Everything that followed the destruction of the Temple has been a straight-line consequence of it. My own ancestors, whom I have been privileged to be able to trace through Poland, Bohemia, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, indeed back to the conquered hills of Judea, experienced those consequences. My grandparents, like those of many of my readers, stepped beyond the horrors of the Shoah bereft of everyone and almost everything. The Nazis were the proximate and responsible perpetrators, but the loss of sovereignty and unity and homeland was the on-ramp, the foundation.
And as our tradition tells us, we, collectively, held some of the responsibility for destruction and exile, through the baseless hatred and civil strife we perpetrated upon each other.
If there is one lesson that our own recent experience drives home, it is that we are most vulnerable when we are divided, and we are most resilient when we build together, stand together, pray together and create together.
Wednesday evening, as I read the scroll of Lamentations (Eicha) aloud for gathered family members at the outset of Tisha B’Av, I thought about the Tisha B’Av I spent living in the Old City of Jerusalem. On that day, about 35 years ago, I sat listening to Eicha in front of the Kotel, then looking at the massive stones tumbled off of the Temple Mount by the conquering Romans and I first came to the realization I shared above: all of the terrors of the last two thousand years fell upon us as those massive stones tumbled and our oppressors laughed at their handiwork, not least the ways in which their invasion magnified our own fatal divisions.
But I also considered another idea as I observed the fast yesterday. I considered what we are capable of. Based on the constitutional blueprint for living and for society in our Torah, we built a land and society that gave the world civil courts, sworn witness testimony, equality before the law. We started as an agrarian society which mandated specific assistance for the weak and needy by individuals even BEFORE they met the needs of the priests and levites or the taxes of the king. We observed the first inklings of empowerment for women in inheritance law, torts, and damages. We built a magnificent edifice that if only briefly became the center of monotheistic belief for the known world.
We built something with so much potential for light and strength that the mightiest empire the world had ever seen insisted on not only conquering it, but destroying the threat it posed to their world spanning cruelty. And even though they eventually succeeded (only for a time, even if 1878 years long), it was a very costly endeavor. Imagine how much potential for light we had, that the enslaving, despoiling, dominating, torturing Romans determined that they HAD to destroy our Temple and our sovereignty.
Now, that strength and light is built on many things. Yes, it was built on the outsized physical threat that apparently endangered Roman interests unless numerically overwhelmed. But it was also built on the influence of ideas. In fact it is little known, but in the 20 years leading up to the Bar Kochba rebellion, there were numerous uprisings in Jewish communities in the empire, and an especially large threat of promised aid from the Parthians.
It was built on the world’s first system of public education, public welfare, and universal literacy. These were among the gifts of the Jews. But it was also built on the premise that there is value in standing up to what seems overwhelming, understanding the responsibility each of us has to bear that standard.
When I see the malign, hateful, false and dangerous rhetoric being spewed by the seemingly obsessed mayor of that small city nearby, and the slavering mobs that follow him and his acolytes, I realize a few things:
- They must be awfully concerned about what we are capable of accomplishing.
- We outlasted every adversary and will outlast them too.
- We have a responsibility to bring learning and helping and goodness and light to this world no matter how much darkness surrounds us.
- We have the wisdom and experience of every moment we spent in exile to draw upon.
- We have a hundred times more strength,resilience and resources than we as a people have ever had, if we can only learn how to unite and deploy them.
So, for the first time I’m looking at the Tisha B’Av we just experienced (may it be our last), and I’m looking forward to the Tu B’Av minor festival of love we will celebrate in a few days. Today I am confident about our potential and our future. May we merit to be the generation who fully manifests it.