The Lessons of Tisha b’Av for a Divided Moment

We have been here before. At moments when threats to Jewish freedom were on the rise, we did not always meet the danger united. We turned on one another. Then, Jews branded fellow Jews as heretics. Today, they are called “kapos,” “self-hating Jews,” “Holocaust enablers,” and other epithets that do not merely express disagreement but cast people beyond the boundaries of the community itself. Such language makes honest argument impossible, replacing debate with condemnation and binding us to cycles of internal division. We have seen where that path can lead. Nearly two thousand years ago, it ended in destruction and diaspora. What future will we choose this time?

Tisha b’Av asks us to remember destruction. But Jewish tradition has never understood remembrance as nostalgia or despair. We mourn in order to ask what kind of people we must become so that destruction is not repeated.

The rabbis teach that the Second Temple was destroyed because of sinat chinam—baseless hatred. We too often reduce that phrase to an appeal to “be nicer.” But the Talmud tells a much harder story.

It describes Jerusalem under siege. As the Roman army surrounded the city, Jewish zealots burned the food stores that could have sustained their own people, forcing war rather than allowing for potential compromise. Their ideological certainty became more important than the survival of the community itself.

Our tradition could have told a story in which only the external enemy was responsible. Instead, it insisted on something far more uncomfortable: that a community under threat must also examine how it treats itself.

That lesson feels painfully relevant today.

Antisemitism is real, dangerous, and growing in a variety of forms and across the ideological spectrum. Jewish communities have experienced fear, intimidation, and violence in ways that demand vigilance. We cannot minimize those threats or wish them away.

But Tisha b’Av reminds us that external threats do not absolve us of responsibility for how we treat one another. Fear cannot become an excuse for dehumanization. Political conviction cannot become license to see any human beings as disposable.

We are living through a moment in which the language we use about one another has grown increasingly corrosive. Jewish public servants, journalists, students, clergy, and advocates are denounced not only by those who hate Jews, but sometimes by fellow Jews — dismissed as “bad Jews,” accused of betrayal, branded with slurs designed to strip them of their place within the Jewish people. Some are derisively called “Palestinians,” as though that identity were itself an insult; others are labeled “kapos,” invoking one of the most painful chapters of the Holocaust to condemn Jews whose politics differ from our own.

These words do not simply wound individuals. They erode the fabric of our people, transforming disagreement into exclusion and replacing argument with humiliation. The rabbis did not remember the destruction of Jerusalem as the triumph of ideological purity. They remembered the devastation wrought when factions became so consumed with proving one another wrong that they lost sight of their shared responsibility for one another. The zealots believed they alone could save the Jewish people. In burning the city’s food stores and rejecting every path that might preserve life, they became agents of destruction from within.

The warning is as urgent now. We should debate vigorously — Jewish tradition has always treasured argument. But our arguments must strengthen our collective capacity to confront real threats, not deepen the fractures our adversaries are eager to exploit.

That challenge extends beyond our own community. The Jewish story in America has always been intertwined with the story of American democracy. We have flourished not because democracy is perfect, but because constitutional rights, the rule of law, and a culture of pluralism have let minorities live with dignity and security. When democratic norms erode, when political violence is normalized, when conspiracy theories flourish and some people are deemed less deserving of rights than others, Jews become less safe—alongside everyone else.

Our future is bound up with our neighbors’. Authoritarianism rarely announces itself as a threat to only one group; it divides, scapegoats, and weakens the institutions meant to protect us all. This is why fighting antisemitism cannot be separated from fighting anti-Black racism, anti-Muslim hate, anti-Asian violence, xenophobia, and every effort to deny others’ equal dignity. The same forces that traffic in antisemitic conspiracy theories traffic in racism and extremism too. Protecting Jews has never been served by abandoning everyone else.

Tisha b’Av demands two kinds of courage: to confront those who threaten Jews from outside, and to resist the internal division and certainty that we matter more than our collective future.

The zealots believed they were saving the Jewish people. The rabbis remembered that they helped destroy Jerusalem.

May we defend the dignity of every member of our community, even amid deep disagreement. May we strengthen the democratic institutions that safeguard freedom for Jews and all people. May we stand against antisemitism while standing just as firmly against every form of hatred — choosing, this year, not the path of the zealots, but the harder, sacred work of preserving both our people and the society in which all people can flourish.

Rabba Rori Picker Neiss is the senior vice president and rabbi in residence at JCPA. Read her full bio.