Politically, the next 2-3 months may be one of the most important challenges the Jewish People have ever faced; and Tisha B’Av’s modern lessons are right in the midst of it (August 3. 2025).

Tisha B’Av is not just a time to mourn the historical losses of our ancient past; it should also be a time to examine the historical lessons of our modern history. Jews did not survive just by focusing on our past sufferings. We survived by learning lessons from the past that gave us hope, faith, flexibility and courage to face the future. 

A non-Jewish former Marxist philosopher Nicolay Berdyayev wrote: “I remember how the materialist interpretation of history, when I attempted in my youth to verify it by applying it to the destinies of peoples, broke down in the case of the Jews, where destiny seemed absolutely inexplicable from the materialistic standpoint . . . [Jewish] survival is a mysterious and wonderful phenomenon demonstrating that the life of this people is governed by a special predetermination, transcending the processes of adaptation expounded by the materialistic interpretation of history. 

“The survival of the Jews, their resistance to destruction, their endurance under absolutely peculiar conditions and the fateful role played by them in history: all these point to the particular and mysterious foundations of their destiny”. (Nicolay Berdyayev, The Meaning of History, p.86)

One aspect “demonstrating that the life of this people is governed by special predeterminations” is, according to Rabbi Jacob Chuli (born Jerusalem c.1689, died Istanbul 1732) that: “God always brings the remedy before the illness”. This idea, that God prepares the remedy prior to the malady, is a principle that helps us understand the amazing survival of the Jewish people. 

But, it also means that opposition and resistance to God’s modern remedies brings about catastrophes in the modern world just as much as traditional orthodox sins did in the ancient world.

One God inspired remedy to the catastrophes that befell the Jewish people in the 20th........

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