What Do We Carry After Destruction?
A Tisha B’Av Reflection From Paris
Today, Jews around the world are observing Tisha B’Av, perhaps the saddest day on the Jewish calendar. It is a day of fasting and mourning centered on the destruction of the First and Second Temples and the loss of Jerusalem as the center of Jewish national life.
The lamentations recited on Tisha B’Av also remember tragedies that took place later and far from Jerusalem. Among the kinot, the traditional elegies recited on this day, in Ashkenazi communities is Sha’ali Serufah Ba’Esh, “Ask, O you who were burned by fire,” written by Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg after cartloads of Talmudic and other Jewish manuscripts were burned in thirteenth-century Paris.
Earlier this week, I returned from my first visit to Paris. I expected to encounter a city whose history was visible almost everywhere, but I did not anticipate how personally Jewish that history would feel. As we sailed along the Seine past the Hôtel de Ville, I thought about the holy book burning believed to have taken place nearby at the Place de Grève. A history I had known mostly through texts suddenly belonged to the landscape around me.
That moment helped me understand something at the heart of Tisha B’Av. After Jerusalem fell and Jewish political independence disappeared, Jews across many lands had to sustain a shared Jewish life without a sovereign center. Torah became one of the primary ways we carried Jerusalem with us. Through study, prayer, law, family, education and communal practice, Jews continued to inhabit a common Jewish world.
Burning those manuscripts struck at more than a collection of books. The Talmud helped the Jewish people preserve its memory, educate its children, and remain connected across distance and generations. That is why its burning belongs within the mourning of Tisha B’Av. After Jewish public life in Jerusalem had been shattered, Torah became one of the chief ways the Jewish people held together.
Many manuscripts were lost, but copies and traditions survived elsewhere. Jewish communities kept copying the Talmud, studying it in new places, and adding layers of interpretation. They answered destruction by continuing to learn, write and teach.
On Shabbat, my family and I prayed at the Synagogue des Tournelles in the Marais. Sitting there with my children, I thought about the books burned nearby nearly eight centuries earlier. Hebrew filled the room, Torah was read aloud and Jews from different backgrounds had made the sanctuary their own. Communities and customs changed, and Jews arrived from new places, but each generation continued to teach the next.
I felt the pain of the history beneath the city, but also gratitude. The words others had tried to burn were still being studied, and the tradition they had tried to sever was still being passed from parents to children. I was there as a Jew born in Jerusalem, standing beside my children in Paris, part of a story that included destruction, dispersion, adaptation and return.
Later, at the top of the Arc de Triomphe, I thought about the distance between thirteenth-century Paris and the city before me. Nearly eight centuries after Jewish books were burned there, a Jewish father could walk through Paris with his children, enter a synagogue, hear Torah and know that this history still belonged to them.
Tisha B’Av does not ask us to treat survival as though it repaired every loss. It asks us to face what was destroyed and to recognize that the Jewish life built afterward, extraordinary as it was, was also shaped by what had been lost.
Today, we live in a Jewish reality earlier generations could scarcely have imagined. There is once again a sovereign Jewish state, while Jewish communities flourish throughout the world. In Israel, Hebrew and the Jewish calendar shape public life, while inherited texts and Jewish moral language shape the country’s public debate. In the Diaspora, communities study, teach, build institutions, educate children and sustain forms of Jewish life developed over centuries of dispersion.
For those of us at the Oshman Family JCC, the task is to strengthen the relationship between Israel and the Diaspora so they can shape a shared Jewish future. Neither can carry that future alone. A sovereign Jewish civilization needs learning, memory and moral discipline to guide the use of power. Jewish communities outside Israel need to turn concern into sustained commitment and action. Each has developed strengths that the other needs.
Tisha B’Av asks us to mourn what was lost and to consider what we have inherited. Jewish continuity depends on the choices made by each generation and on whether it succeeds in passing its knowledge, commitments and responsibility to the next.
That is the question I am asking on this Tisha B’Av: What have we inherited from those who refused to let the Jewish story disappear, and what will we pass forward?
