If one had to choose a single day on the Jewish calendar that best explains the state of the world in 2026, it would not be Yom Kippur or Passover. It would be Tisha b’Av—the day the Jewish people mourn not merely what was destroyed, but why it was destroyed.

The rabbis never understood the destruction of Jerusalem as a military event. Rome did not destroy the Temple because it possessed superior weapons or superior generals. Rome simply arrived at the funeral. The Jewish people had already begun the work of destruction themselves. The Talmud’s message is uncomfortable precisely because it refuses to blame outsiders first. Before looking outward, Judaism commands us to look inward.

The sickness of a civilization begins long before its collapse. It begins when truth becomes negotiable, when ethics become subordinate to political expediency, and when societies choose spectacle over wisdom. Tisha b’Av is God’s annual reminder that moral decay always precedes political destruction.

The rabbis teach that the Second Temple was destroyed because of sinat chinam—baseless hatred. Yet we have trivialized that phrase into little more than a slogan. Baseless hatred is not simply people being rude to one another. It is an ethical disease. It is the inability of a society to recognize the humanity of those with whom it disagrees. It is tribalism masquerading as virtue. It is the worship of ideology over truth and personalities over principles.

The Jewish people have witnessed this disease before. We have watched great civilizations descend into madness while convincing themselves they were morally enlightened. Ancient Rome, Christian Europe, Enlightenment Europe, and twentieth-century Germany all believed themselves civilized. The Jews buried them all.

Today, America and much of the Western world exhibit the very symptoms that Jewish history has taught us to fear. Institutions are collapsing under the weight of their own hypocrisy. Universities have become incubators of fashionable ignorance. Political discourse has........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)