I recently listened to an interview with Rachel Goldberg-Polin, the Jewish mother and educator whose son Hersh was taken hostage on October 7, 2023, and later murdered in captivity. Long before that unthinkable loss, Rachel was a schoolteacher facing a much smaller problem: how do you make a room full of teenagers care about Tisha B’Av, the ninth of the Hebrew month of Av and the saddest date on the Jewish calendar, falling this year in late July, when they’ve never heard of it and have no reason to feel anything about it at all? Her solution was one question. She’d ask her students: where were you on September 11th?
If you’re old enough to remember it, you don’t even have to think. It’s just there. The classroom. The kitchen. The car radio. Somebody’s face when they told you. The sky that morning, blue in a way that felt almost rude given what was happening underneath it. Some dates don’t behave like normal dates. They split time in half. There’s before, and there’s after, and you live the rest of your life on the after side of the line. Every hand in Rachel’s classroom would go up. Kids who hadn’t said a word all semester suddenly had a story. Pain makes ancient history feel like your own. Once her students understood that a single date could hold that much weight, she could finally teach them why Tisha B’Av holds that same weight for the Jewish people, generation after generation.
Everybody assumes the Temple in Jerusalem fell because Rome was strong. Rome was strong. But the sages who wrote the Talmud were not satisfied with that answer, and neither should we be. They dug for the real cause, and what they found wasn’t a foreign army. It was a party.
The story goes like this. A wealthy Jerusalem host was throwing a lavish event and sent a servant to hand-deliver the invitations. One was addressed to a man named Kamsa. The servant got it wrong and delivered it instead to Bar Kamsa, a man the host despised. Bar Kamsa, thrilled at what looked like an olive branch, showed up. The host saw him, marched over, and ordered him out. Bar Kamsa begged to stay. He offered to pay for his own meal. Then half the party. Then the entire party. Just don’t humiliate me in front of everyone, he said. The host had him dragged out anyway, in front of the room, in front of the city’s most respected rabbis.
And those rabbis just sat there. Watched the whole thing. Said nothing.
Humiliated past the point of reason, Bar Kamsa went straight to Rome and told the empire the Jews were plotting a revolt. It was a lie. But it was the spark. Within years, Jerusalem was under siege and the Second Temple, the center of Jewish worship and national life, was ash.
The sages didn’t put the blame on Rome. They put it on sinat chinam, hatred without a cause, and on every rabbi in that room who watched cruelty happen in real time and stayed comfortable in his seat. Scripture had already told them exactly what that silence was:
That verse doesn’t just say don’t hate. It says when you see wrong done, open your mouth. Silence isn’t neutral. God calls it sin. The men at that party weren’t the ones who threw Bar Kamsa out. They were the ones who let it happen. Scripture doesn’t let either group off the hook.
So no, Tisha B’Av isn’t just about the Temple. It’s about being able to answer the question: where were you the last time cruelty happened in front of you, and you decided it was safer to stay quiet?
Where were you on September 11th? You know instantly. Now ask yourself the harder one: where were you the last time you had the chance to speak up and chose comfort instead? Answer that honestly, and you’ve understood Tisha B’Av better than most people who fast on it.
