I miss Jerusalem, even when I’m standing in it. I know that sounds like a strange thing to say, missing a city while walking its own streets. But as Tisha B’Av approaches I keep returning to the same feeling, as though I could walk among its stones and still never quite arrive at Jerusalem itself. Maybe this is what Simmel’s concept of the stranger describes, a position neither fully inside nor fully outside, distance and closeness lived at the same time. Maybe that’s why I ask myself the same question every year, what am I actually missing, the stones, or the peace the stones once held.

In the beginning there was a contraction. Ein Sof, the Infinite, drew its own light into a single point, tzimtzum, so that room could open for the world. In the emptiness that withdrawal left behind, chalal panui, creation became possible. But that first movement was itself a kind of concealment, the Divine pulling back and making itself unseen. Then, in that empty space, the partzufim appeared, the different faces of divine light, different configurations, a passage from one face to another, an attempt to reconstitute itself.

The vessels came in this same moment, the kelim. Light needs a vessel to flow through, but as the Ari taught, the first vessels couldn’t hold that light. They shattered. Sparks fell downward, scattered into matter, everywhere. Birur, the gathering of those sparks, is what happens in every mitzvah, every act of goodness, a little more light returned to its place. This is close to what Halbwachs said about memory, no spark gathers itself alone, gathering is always a shared effort of a group, never a single generation’s alone.

Read through this frame, the churban stops being a historical event and becomes a repetition of that same shattering. The Temple was itself a vessel, the place where the Shechinah could dwell in the world. When it was destroyed, that presence broke too, scattered into sparks, dispersed into galut. But reading Tisha B’Av only as a mystical repetition leaves something out, because it also works as a social mechanism. For Halbwachs, no memory is purely individual, every memory takes shape within a group’s frame, we remember what the group deems worth remembering, we forget what the........

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