The Fast Days

The Jewish calendar includes several fast days, and nearly all of them revolve around one and the same wound: the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem — twice, centuries apart.

Why keep fasting

It is a fair question. These events are two thousand years old; Jerusalem has been rebuilt. What is the point of keeping up so ancient a mourning?

Tradition answers that what is at stake is not a building. What was lost with the Temple was a certain way of being together and a certain closeness. As long as whatever caused the fall has not disappeared, the fall does not wholly belong to the past.

Tisha BeAv

The ninth day of the month of Av is the most solemn. Tradition gathers onto it a whole series of catastrophes, as if a date could become porous and draw misfortunes to itself. On it we read Lamentations, sit low to the ground, and fast for an entire day.

The Sages offered an explanation for the Second Temple that has lost none of its force: it did not fall for lack of study or piety, but because of baseless hatred between people. A learned and observant people can come apart through nothing more than the way its members treat one another.

The other fasts

The 17th of Tammuz opens the Three Weeks that lead to Tisha BeAv. The 10th of Tevet recalls the beginning of the siege. The Fast of Gedaliah, the day after Rosh Hashanah, commemorates a political assassination that finished scattering what remained. The Fast of Esther, for its part, comes before Purim and has a different tone, since it leads to deliverance.

Fasting as memory

To fast is to inscribe a memory in the body rather than in words. A community can forget what it has read; it forgets less easily what it has lived through physically. These days are not meant to cultivate sadness — they are meant to keep a costly lesson from being lost.