On the Ninth of Av, I don’t wear sackcloth. I wear Roman glass.

Because their empire fell. And we endure.

This isn’t triumphalism. It’s a reckoning. A memory carried in our bones and eyelashes.

We whisper the Shema to our children at bedtime. We lit candles in closets in Spain. We sang lullabies in basements in the Warsaw Ghetto. We murmured Next year in Jerusalem even when it seemed impossible. And we meant it.

I am not only the ruins of a Temple — of stone and cedar and hammered gold. I am descended from the people who lived here. Who bled here. Who died here. Who didn’t just vanish in a puff of ash when the Romans came.

No. There was a slaughter.

The streets ran slick. With blood. With bile. With afterbirth. Mothers tried to cover their babies, but the swords found them anyway. Breasts hacked off in front of their children. Children held aloft, screaming, then sliced down the middle. Women raped while their babies wailed — and then raped again once the crying stopped forever

And after the screaming? Silence. Except for the footfalls of the soldiers picking through what was left to finish the job. It wasn’t abstract. It was not poetic. It was not a symbol. It was hell.

And only since October 7 have I begun to understand what that kind of destruction looks like. Smells like. Sounds like.........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)