They made him dig his own grave.
Let that sit for a moment. A 24-year-old Israeli man named Evyatar David, kidnapped from the Nova music festival during Hamas’s October 7 massacre, has now been in captivity for 666 days. And recently, in a propaganda video meant to manipulate world opinion, his captors forced him to dig the pit where he might be buried, starved, emaciated, trembling. They filmed him doing it.
This is not a metaphor. This is not a headline from a distant past. This is now.
There are some truths too terrible to dress up with commentary. And yet, we live in a time when moral clarity has become a luxury. “What about Gaza?” is the immediate reflex, hurled like a defense mechanism to avoid the unbearable reality of Jewish suffering. But today is Tisha B’Av, the ninth of the Hebrew month of Av, the most sorrowful day on the Jewish calendar. We remember the destruction of the Temples, the expulsions, the pogroms, and the desecrations that have stalked the Jewish people for centuries.
Today, we don’t look away. Today, we sit with the grief.
So here is the question this Tisha B’Av demands:
What does the Bible teach us about confronting evil that dehumanizes, and how do we keep our own humanity from being consumed by it?
The Book of Lamentations (Eikha), traditionally read on Tisha B’Av, opens with one of the most haunting verses in Scripture:
Jerusalem, once majestic, is now abandoned. The Temple, once a house of holiness, reduced to rubble. But Eikha is not just history. It is a mirror. And what it reflects is not just pain, it is desecration.
Desecration is what happens when holiness is violated. And according to the Bible, every human life bears the image of God. When a person is tormented, degraded, starved, and filmed digging his own grave for the sake of propaganda, that is desecration. And just like the Temple’s destruction, it must be mourned as such.
But the Bible doesn’t only command us to mourn destruction, it tells us what brings it about in the first place.
In the days leading up to the destruction of the First Temple, the prophet Jeremiah stood at the gates of the Temple and called out:
The prophet isn’t talking about ritual observance. He’s talking about justice. He’s talking about cruelty. The Temple was destroyed not just because the nation sinned, but because the nation tolerated injustice.
Today, the world is tolerating it again. When a terror group parades a starving Jew in front of the world and dares to blame the Jewish state for his condition, and the world nods in false balance, that is injustice. When terrorists steal humanitarian aid meant for children and gorge themselves on it while their hostages suffer from scurvy, that is injustice. When a man can be forced to dig his own grave and the response is “yes, but…” that is injustice so callous it begins to rot the soul.
This is the challenge of Tisha B’Av. It’s easy to read Lamentations and mourn the past. But Eikha demands something harder: moral clarity in the present. The clarity to name evil as evil. The clarity to hold grief without deflection. And the clarity to remember that God does not dwell in buildings or politics or institutions, but in the image of every human being. Desecrate that image, and the Temple burns again.
And yet, even in its darkest moments, the Bible insists on a thread of hope.
The final verse of Eikha pleads:
This is not nostalgia. It is defiance. A refusal to let despair write the last word. The Jewish people, even in sackcloth, do not surrender to grief. We carry it. We confront it. And then we build.
So if today you see us sitting on the floor, reading ancient laments with tears in our eyes, understand this: we are not reenacting history. We are responding to it. We are remembering a Temple, and a man. We are mourning destruction, and resisting it. We are staring into the abyss, and declaring that desecration will not win.
And tomorrow, when the fast ends and we rise again, we will rise with fire in our hearts. Because we still believe in the God who hears the cry of the oppressed. We still believe in the sanctity of life. And we still believe that graves dug in darkness will not bury the light.
If you’re looking for even more ways to commemorate the 9th of Av, please take a few minutes to watch this video on the meaning of the day.
