Tisha be-Ab cannot become a festival merely because Jews recovered power. It changes when mourning teaches a sovereign society what to do with that power.

Yesterday was Tisha be-Ab. Today is Ereb Shabbath.

The fast is over. The shoes are back on, the chairs are upright again, and the choreography of mourning has been completed for another year.

This is precisely the moment when I want to ask what, exactly, we completed.

We know how to do Tisha be-Ab. We know when to stop eating. We know where to sit. We know which pleasures to suspend, which greetings to avoid, which texts to recite, and approximately how miserable we are expected to look while reciting them. We have inherited a remarkably detailed behavioral language of grief.

But I am not persuaded that performing the behavior of mourning is the same thing as mourning.

Mourning ordinarily has an object. It is a human response to a loss that remains alive inside us. What we often perform on Tisha be-Ab is the inherited appearance of that response: an annual completion of the actions associated with grief, whether or not we are actually confronting the loss, its causes, or what the loss now demands of us.

That may be worse than forgetting.

Forgetting at least leaves an absence that can be discovered. Performative mourning gives us the moral satisfaction of remembering without requiring memory to produce anything.

The Rambam’s account of the destruction fasts is almost aggressively practical. The point is not fasting for its own sake. The fast is supposed to awaken the heart, open the paths of repentance, confront us with the resemblance between the failures of our ancestors and our own conduct, and lead us to do better. If the behavior does not open into changed conduct, then the means has detached itself from its purpose.

The strange thing is that our tradition does not describe Tisha be-Ab as an eternal monument to Jewish suffering. Zekharya says that the fasts commemorating the destruction will become occasions of joy and gladness. And the promise does not float alone in a vague messianic mist. It appears beside commands to speak truth, administer true justice, reject schemes against one another, and love truth and peace.

The transformation of the fast is tied to the transformation of society.

The Gemara makes the historical contingency explicit. When there is peace, the fasts become days of joy. Under persecution, they remain obligatory fasts. In the condition between persecution and peace, the lesser fasts are treated differently; Tisha be-Ab remains especially severe because catastrophes were multiplied upon it.

The commentators do not give us one simple definition. Rashi describes it as a condition in which the nations no longer exercise dominion over Israel. Rabbenu Hananel ties it to the standing sanctuary. The Rashba speaks of Israel dwelling on its land. Elsewhere on the same page, the Gemara describes the biblical fasts as contingent upon the building of the sanctuary.

These are not interchangeable definitions. Their disagreement places present Jewish life in an awkward category.

We are not where we were.

Millions of Jews live in an autonomous Judaean society. We possess institutions, an army, a government, courts, universities, infrastructure, and enormous technological and economic power. Foreign empires do not appoint our governors. Jewish public life is no longer merely a memory or a tolerated minority arrangement inside somebody else’s civilization.

We are also not where the prophetic promise points.

There is no sanctuary. There is no comprehensive peace. And there is no honest way to describe our society as having fulfilled the demands for truth, justice, and human welfare that surround the promise that mourning will become celebration.

This is why static inheritance of traditional mourning forms is inadequate. Tisha be-Ab cannot mean exactly the same thing in a powerless dispersed community and in a sovereign society exercising military, legal, economic, and administrative power. The dead do not become less dead because the state was established. Exile, persecution, dispossession, and civilizational loss are not retroactively cancelled.

But power changes obligation.

A people can be the victim of history and an agent within history. Most peoples that survive long enough become both. The moral danger begins when we preserve victimhood as our permanent self-understanding after recovering the capacity to act: when the memory of powerlessness becomes a shield against examining what we do with power.

Tisha be-Ab can then become a fetishization of Jewish suffering. Not the honest preservation of pain, but the ritual production of an identity in which suffering always happens to us and moral agency always belongs to somebody else.

That........

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