The destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E., was the most traumatic and transformative event for the Jewish people to have ever taken place. According to rabbinic tradition, the Second Temple in 70 C.E. was destroyed by the Romans on the very same day, and this time the Jewish people were exiled from their homeland of Israel. From then on, the Romans promised, it would be known as Palestine. The name was derived from the Philistines, a people conquered by the Jews centuries earlier. It was a way for the Romans to add insult to injury.
Another long list of traumatic events suffered by the Jews are believed to have occurred around the same day, quite a few of which have been historically proved. Since then, from that day to the present time, Jews all over the world have fasted in order to commemorate specific events related to the Destruction. Today, we are almost at the end of the three weeks of mourning preceding the fast known as Tisha b’Av (ninth of the month of Av).
In order to commemorate these tragic events Jews gather on Tisha b”Av every year in their synagogue. There they fast, pray, and read the sad and depressing prophetic writings concerning the destruction of their Temple and land.
An anecdote is told of the great French leader, Napoleon Bonaparte. He once was traveling through a small Jewish town in Europe, where he entered a synagogue. There he saw an incredible sight. Men and women sitting on the floor and weeping, while holding candles and reading from books. It was a dark and gloomy sight to behold.
Napoleon asked why the people were weeping and wanted to know what misfortune had happened here, and why he had not heard about it. An enlightened Jewish French officer told him that nothing new and terrible had happened. The Jewish people had a custom to gather once a year on a day called the ninth day of Av, the day that marks the destruction of the Jewish people's Temple. After their second Temple was destroyed the people were scattered all over the world and sold as slaves. Some escaped and built their homes the world over. Somehow the Jewish people exist without their country and their Temple.
Napoleon inquired as to how many years they have been doing this and when he was answered, for more than 1,700 years, he exclaimed, "Certainly a people which has mourned the loss of their Temple for so long will survive to see it rebuilt!"
When the Jews recaptured East Jerusalem during the 1967 war, a war of aggression by the Arabs against the Jews – Israel begged Jordan not to join in, promising that Israel wouldn’t attack Jordan. The Jordanians ignored the Israeli pleas and wound up losing East Jerusalem to the Jews, who then reunited their ancient capital and gained access to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall of the old Temple. They incredibly allowed the Muslim Waqf to retain religious control of the Temple Mount. This magnanimity – another example of the Jewish cultural inclination to compromise rather than to fight - allowed the Muslims to retain a foothold in the old city of Jerusalem and, over the years, to enhance and expand their efforts, both at control and at refusing Jews access to the Temple Mount, the holiest place in the world for Jews.
What this fast itself also tells the world is that the Jews were in Jerusalem before the Babylonians, before the Romans, before the Christians and, most certainly, before the Muslims. When the Jews didn’t have it, it was an Arab backwater, unremarked upon in Arab literature or theology and largely ignored. What so many in the west don’t grasp is that the Jews alone are the indigenous people of the land, and that Judaism is based on an actual nation which practiced its religion in the historic kingdom of Judea.
