Every year on the ninth of Av we blame the victim. We hold ourselves accountable on the 9th of Av for the calamities that befall us. Every Av is an introduction to a process that begins with national repentance and becomes personal in Tishrei. We remember the destruction of the first and second Temples in Jerusalem, and our long exile from the land of Israel and we, the victims of Babylonian and later Roman aggression assume a major portion of the responsibility for the calamity.  

The prophets decry our violence and idolatry, and later the rabbis claim that our fractious enmity doomed us. The land between the river and sea had been promised to Abraham and his children, and with fits and starts, that promise had been fulfilled and lasted a thousand years. Its collapse can be explained politically and militarily, but what the Jews made of the destruction theologically and morally is something very different. Instead of blaming the enemy or God, we blamed ourselves. 

Since both destructions occurred in a similar time frame, they came to be commemorated by the rabbis on a single day, eliding the two very different destructions with one day of fasting, biblical recitation and medieval dirges. We asked ourselves how is it that the sovereignty promised to us as a people was lost?  When we asked who was to blame for the destructions of the 9th of Av, either in 586 BCE or in 70 CE our prophets and later our sages turned inward.      

Jeremiah says it clearly: Thus said GOD of Hosts, the God of Israel: Mend your ways and your actions, and I will let you dwell in this place. Don’t put........

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