Jewish memory does not ask us to erase disagreement. It warns us not to destroy the bonds and institutions that allow us to survive it.

As Tisha B’Av begins, Jews around the world turn again to the destruction of the First and Second Temples and to the calamities gathered into the Ninth of Av.

But Jewish memory is more than an archive of grief.

It is a warning system.

It directs our attention not only to the armies outside Jerusalem’s walls, but also to the breakdown within them. Rabbinic tradition remembers zealots burning storehouses of wheat and barley during the Roman siege. The Talmud later associated the destruction of the Second Temple with sinat chinam—baseless hatred.

These teachings do not erase Rome’s responsibility for conquest and destruction. They insist that external danger does not release a people from responsibility for what it does to itself.

That is the hard lesson of Tisha B’Av: a people can face real enemies from outside and still deepen its vulnerability from within.

Today, our shared storehouses are not filled with wheat and oil. They hold public trust, habits of civil speech, legitimate institutions, mutual responsibility, and the conviction that people with profound differences can still share one country.

Generations fill those storehouses.

A few reckless matches can burn them.

The danger is contempt, not disagreement

For decades, I have worked with couples who arrive convinced that conflict is destroying their relationship.

Again and again, disagreement is not the deepest wound. The deeper wound is what disagreement has become: accusation, contempt, humiliation, withdrawal, threats—and the belief that one person must lose for the other to feel safe.

In every close relationship, there are three realities: you, me, and the bond between us.

I may overpower you. You may shame me, silence me, or walk away. Either of us may win the point. But when victory comes at the expense of the bond, the........

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