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Through the year
Three weeks that narrow into nine days that narrow into one. What is actually being mourned, what the practices are, and an honest answer to why a day about a burned building is still on the calendar.
Next year
Fast of 17 Tammuz — the Three Weeks begin
Thursday, July 22, 2027
Dawn to nightfall.
Tisha B’Av
Thursday, August 12, 2027
Begins the evening before, at sunset. Ends at nightfall.
A public fast is never kept on Shabbat, so both fasts above move to the Sunday in years where they would fall on it — the dates shown already account for that. Exact start and end times for San Jose are on the times page.
Two buildings and everything that followed from losing them.
The First Temple, built by Solomon, was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and the population deported. The Second, rebuilt seventy years later and vastly expanded by Herod, was burned by the Romans in 70 CE at the end of a four-year revolt. Both, the tradition holds, on the ninth of Av.
The Mishnah gathers five events onto the date, and later history added more:
Later expulsions are traditionally associated with the date too — England in 1290, and the deadline of the Spanish expulsion in 1492. Whether the correspondence is exact in every case is argued over; that Jewish communities kept noticing the date is not.
Underneath the list is a single claim that is easy to miss: the Talmud says the Second Temple was destroyed because of sinat chinam — baseless hatred between Jews — in a generation that was learned, observant and charitable. The tradition, given the chance to blame Rome, blames itself. That is what the day is actually about, and it is why it has not been retired.
On the seventeenth of Tammuz the walls of Jerusalem were breached; three weeks later the Temple burned. The period between is called bein hametzarim, between the straits. Practice through it, in Ashkenazi custom:
Sephardi practice is markedly different: most of these begin only in Av, some only in the week of Tisha B’Av itself. Neither community is being lenient or stringent at the other’s expense; they are following different traditions, both fully established.
From the first of Av, Ashkenazi practice tightens. The Talmud puts it plainly: when Av enters, we reduce joy.
Shabbat is untouched. The Shabbat inside the Nine Days is a full Shabbat, meat and wine included, with no visible mourning at all — public mourning is set aside for Shabbat entirely. The Shabbat immediately before Tisha B’Av is called Shabbat Chazon, after Isaiah’s vision read as the haftarah.
Late on the afternoon before, the seudah hamafseket: a meal eaten sitting on the floor or a low stool, alone rather than in company, traditionally bread and a hard-boiled egg dipped in ashes. It is a deliberately bleak twenty minutes and it does the work of moving you into the day.
From sunset to nightfall the following night. The same five restrictions as Yom Kippur: no eating or drinking, no washing for pleasure, no creams or oils, no leather shoes, no marital relations. Work is technically permitted but discouraged until midday, and people who can take the day off do.
If fasting would harm your health, you do not fast. Tisha B’Av is a rabbinic fast and carries more room than Yom Kippur does — a person who is ill is exempt outright, and the questions around pregnancy and nursing have real and often lenient answers. Ask a rabbi in advance, and take a doctor’s instruction seriously.
The lights are lowered. People sit on the floor or on low stools. Eichah — Lamentations, five chapters written in the ruins — is read aloud in a melody used for nothing else, followed by kinnot, elegies. Nobody greets anybody; the customs of a mourner apply to the whole community.
No tallit and no Tefillin — they are ornaments, and a mourner does not wear them. They are put on at the afternoon service instead, which is the reverse of every other day of the year. More kinnot are said, and the low stools stay until midday.
Torah study is limited to what fits the day: Lamentations, Job, the relevant chapters of Jeremiah, the Talmud’s account of the destruction, the laws of mourning. Chabad custom adds the study of the Temple’s structure — the Rambam’s laws of the Chosen House, or Ezekiel’s blueprint — on the afternoon of the fast. Learning the dimensions of a building you want rebuilt is a strange and rather good way to spend a mourning afternoon.
From midday the mourning eases: people sit normally again, tallit and Tefillin are worn at Mincha, and the prayer Nachem — asking for comfort for the mourners of Zion — is added. The fast ends at nightfall.
The seven Shabbatot that follow carry seven haftarot of consolation from Isaiah. The first is Shabbat Nachamu, from the words nachamu nachamu ami, comfort, comfort my people. Seven weeks later it is Rosh Hashanah, and the calendar has walked you from the lowest day of the year to the start of the next one.
This is a fair question and it deserves a straight answer rather than a sermon.
The easiest objection is that Jerusalem is a functioning city with a Jewish government in it, and mourning a destroyed one looks like a costume. The tradition’s own answer is not that the objection is stupid — the prophet Zechariah is asked almost exactly this question, by people who had just come back from Babylon, and it is answered rather than dismissed. His answer is that the fasts will become festivals, and that until then they stand.
What people actually find in the day, in roughly ascending order of usefulness:
And if you find the whole thing alien — if you sit through Eichah feeling nothing at all — that is an extremely common experience and is not a verdict on you. Come anyway, sit through it, and see what the second time is like.
There is an old tradition, quoted in the Talmud Yerushalmi and taken up strongly in Chabad, that the messiah is born on Tisha B’Av. It is deliberately placed: the day of the deepest loss is the day something begins. The Rebbe returned to it constantly, and the practical form it takes is a firm instruction not to let the day end in despair — and to give extra Tzedakah on it, traditionally the value of the meals not eaten.
Times, and what we hold here for the fast, are on the times page and the calendar. If you would rather not sit through it alone, come and sit through it here.
302 days to go
Tick each as you go. Ticks stay on this device only.
Ask when and where Lamentations is read this year, or tell us you are coming. We will reply.
The other twenty-five-hour fast, and why it is a different kind of day.
What we do, and how to keep in touch with what is happening there.
Saying Kaddish here, and how a Minyan works.
Where the seven weeks of consolation after Tisha B’Av are heading.
Anything on this page that is a question about your situation — a fast you have been told not to keep, a kitchen you are not sure how to handle, a custom your family does differently — is a question for a person, not a page. Ask Rabbi Mendel, or call the office. Nobody will think less of you for asking; the questions on this list are asked every single year.