The Space Between Nothing & Something

Wednesday at sundown marks Tisha B’Av, the 9th of the Hebrew month of Av, a day of mourning, and a date that has become synonymous with calamity in Jewish history. This date marks the destruction of First Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and the Second Temple by the Romans in 70CE, as well as the fall of Betar which brought the devastating end to the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE. Centuries later, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain was decreed on Tisha B’Av in 1492, and the mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka death camp began on the eve of Tisha B'Av in 1942. It is a day to sit with grief, memory, and the strange, enduring pattern of destruction that has gathered around this date.

Last year was my first time observing Tisha B'Av.

I remember reading Eichah for the first time. Lamentations.

My breath choked in my throat. Have people just been quietly reading this every year? It is awful to read and your heart can't help but break.

What stopped me wasn't simply the destruction of Jerusalem.

It was the image of Jerusalem herself—a desecrated woman. Ashamed. Grieving. Turning away.

I remember thinking:

What have we done?

How did we lose something so holy?

We had it.

We built the Mishkan. We built the Beit Hamikdash. We created a finite home for the Infinite. A place where the Divine Presence rested among us in a way that could almost be seen, almost be touched.

What a gift.

And then it was gone.

Since then, during these Three Weeks I find myself grieving not only the Temple, but every place in my own life that I thought would be home.

Dreams.

Versions of myself.

Those plans we quietly believe will last forever.

There is a particular kind of grief that comes with watching something sacred collapse.

It leaves you standing with empty hands... humbled, lost,

asking questions no one can answer.

And yet this year another thought has been accompanying the grief.

What happened after.

After the smoke.

After the silence.

After the crater.

The Jewish story did not end with the destruction of the Temple.

In many ways, it became the story we now know.

Without a central Temple, Judaism became something we carried instead of somewhere we visited.

We built homes that became miniature sanctuaries.

We turned dinner tables into altars.

We filled exile with prayer, learning, memory and ritual.

Across continents and centuries, our ancestors risked everything to preserve this relationship with Hashem—not because they knew they would survive, but because they believed this intimate relationship with and promise to the Creator was worth carrying.

Sometimes I wonder if exile has been, in part, the story of

discovering what could never be destroyed.

My grandparents were fiercely secular.

Religion was something they rejected.

But being Jewish?

That they held onto with everything they had.

By the time it reached me, there was enough space for new questions to emerge.

What does it actually mean to be a Jew?

What is our story?

What were my ancestors protecting so fiercely, at the risk of their lives,

so that I call myself a Jew today?

What gifts have been waiting for me inside this inheritance?

I don't know that I would have asked those questions had everything remained intact.

Not because the destruction was good.

It wasn't.

Tisha B'Av asks us not to rush past grief, not to justify it, not to tidy it into a lesson too quickly.

We sit on the floor because some losses deserve to be fully mourned.

But even while we mourn, Jewish time quietly reminds us of something else.

The finite was never promised to us.

Everything in this world changes.

Bodies change.

Homes change.

Families change.

Even the Temple—built with such holiness—was ultimately part of this finite world.

The only constant has always been Hashem.

The Infinite.

The One who remains when everything else falls away.

Perhaps this is what exile has been teaching us all along.

Not that loss doesn't matter.

Not that destruction isn't devastating.

But that there is One place we can rest that cannot be destroyed.

And somehow, this has always been His way.

Again and again throughout our story, something magnificent begins with an empty space.

Creation begins with a void.

The Exodus begins with slavery.

The return begins with exile.

New life begins after the seed breaks open beneath the earth.

Maybe faith is learning to sit inside the crater before you can imagine the garden.

To trust that Hashem already knows what can be built there, even when all you can see is absence.

Tisha B'Av invites us to sit in that space between nothing and something.

To resist filling it too quickly.

To mourn what has been lost.

And to remember that even there—even on the floor, even in the ashes—we are never alone.

The Infinite has not left the room.