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About Tisha B’Av

By Ardan Michael Blum

Important: Mishnah.net is an independent, noncommercial educational project written from a traditional Orthodox Jewish perspective. This article is intended for general study and does not provide halachic guidance. Questions of Jewish law or religious practice should be directed to a qualified rabbi. See the Mishnah.net legal and editorial notice.

Updated September 8, 2026 

Tisha B’Av, the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, is the principal communal day of mourning in the Jewish calendar. It is a day of fasting, prayer, and mourning centered on the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. 

The Temples were not merely buildings. The Beit HaMikdash was the sacred center of Jewish prayer, pilgrimage, and sacrificial service. Its destructions were bound up with military defeat, the fall of Jerusalem, the loss of many lives, displacement, and the end of forms of worship that cannot be practiced without the Temple.

The fast ordinarily begins at sunset on the eighth of Av and ends at nightfall after the ninth, about twenty-five hours later. When the ninth of Av falls on Shabbat, the fast is postponed until Saturday night and Sunday. Modern Jewish sovereignty and the rebuilding of Jerusalem have transformed Jewish life, but Orthodox communities continue to observe Tisha B’Av because the Temple remains destroyed and the redemption described in traditional sources is not understood as complete.

Five Calamities on One Day

According to Mishnah Ta’anit 4:6, five calamities are associated with the ninth of Av:

The Mishnah associates all five events with Tisha B’Av. For the spies and the First Temple, the Bavli explains how the ninth relates to the scriptural chronology. For the Second Temple, Josephus places the burning on the tenth day of Lous—identified as Av in this translation; this broadly accords with the rabbinic account that the fire began near the end of the ninth and burned mainly on the tenth. For Beitar and the plowing, the ninth is preserved as rabbinic tradition; surviving external evidence does not independently establish the Hebrew date.

These events did not occur in the same century or under the same empire. The first precedes the Temple. The next two concern different Temples and different conquerors. Beitar belongs to a later revolt against Rome, and the plowing became an image of desolation. The Jewish calendar gathers them into a common season of memory without making them historically identical.

A few terms help orient a new reader. The Mishnah, redacted by Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi around 200 CE, is the foundational written compilation of teachings from the Oral Torah. The Gemara is the later, edited body of rabbinic discussion built around the Mishnah and other tannaitic traditions. Each of the two Talmuds is organized around the Mishnah and a distinct Gemara; this essay chiefly cites the Babylonian Talmud, or Bavli. Halakha means Jewish law and religious practice. Teshuvah means return to G‑d through recognition, repentance, and changed conduct.

The First Calamity: A Future Refused

The first calamity is rooted in Numbers 13–14. Moses sent twelve men to explore the Land of Israel. All returned after forty days; ten emphasized powerful inhabitants and fortified cities, while Joshua and Caleb urged the people to trust G‑d and continue. The people wept, spoke of returning to Egypt, and refused to enter the land.

The Torah does not date that night to the ninth of Av. Ta’anit 29a derives the date by reconstructing the journey, the forty days of exploration, and the length of Tammuz in that year. The association with Tisha B’Av is therefore a rabbinic calendrical teaching.

The dangers described by the spies were real. The narrative’s concern is the response to those dangers: fear became a rejection of the future that G‑d had placed before the people. Tisha B’Av thus begins with a lost future before it turns to destroyed Temples.

The First Temple: Destruction Across Several Days

The biblical accounts preserve two dates. II Kings 25:8–9 places the arrival of the Babylonian officer Nebuzaradan on the seventh day of Av and then describes the burning of the Temple, palace, and houses of Jerusalem. Jeremiah 52:12–13 gives the tenth day before describing the same destruction.

Ta’anit 29a reconciles the passages by describing a catastrophe that unfolded over several days. The Babylonians entered the Temple on the seventh and desecrated it through the seventh and eighth. Near the end of the ninth, they set it on fire; most of the burning occurred on the tenth.

Rabbi Yohanan said that, had he lived when the fast was established, he would have chosen the tenth because most of the Temple burned then. The Sages fixed the ninth because they gave priority to the beginning of the calamity. The fast therefore concentrates a multi-day destruction into one communal day of mourning.

The Babylonian conquest was a political and military catastrophe. Jerusalem and the Temple were burned, sacred vessels were taken, much of the surviving population was deported, and some of the poor were left in the land. II Chronicles also describes killing during the conquest. The invaders remained responsible for what they did.

Within that history, the prophets addressed Israel’s covenantal responsibilities. Jeremiah 7 warns that the Temple cannot be treated as an automatic guarantee of safety while idolatry, bloodshed, and oppression persist. Yoma 9b later associates the First Temple’s destruction with idolatry, forbidden sexual relations, and bloodshed.

These are religious diagnoses directed toward Jewish self-examination, not military explanations of Babylonian power and not verdicts that individual victims deserved their suffering. Their practical question is what the living must learn and change.

The Second Temple, Sinat Chinam, and Communal Failure

Roman forces destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, during the revolt that began in 66. The siege of Jerusalem brought hunger, violence, death, enslavement, and extensive destruction.

Yoma 9b asks why the Second Temple was destroyed even though people of the period engaged in Torah study, mitzvot, and acts of kindness. Its answer is sinat chinam, commonly translated as baseless, causeless, or gratuitous hatred: hostility for which there is no adequate justification and which corrodes communal life. The Gemara does not give the phrase a formal lexical definition.

Disagreement itself is not the problem. Rabbinic Judaism is filled with machloket, serious dispute about law, truth, leadership, and justice. The warning concerns unjustified hostility and the humiliation, exclusion, and indifference it can produce.

The aggadic account of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza in Gittin 55b–56a gives this failure a human form. A servant mistakenly invites Bar Kamtza to a banquet hosted by an enemy. The host humiliates him publicly and expels him; the rabbis present do not protest. Bar Kamtza retaliates by approaching the Roman authorities. When a blemished imperial offering later creates a crisis, Rabbi Zechariah ben Avkolas rejects both offering it and killing Bar Kamtza. The narrative later blames his anvetanut—often translated here as excessive humility or scrupulousness—for the consequences.

This is an aggadic narrative, not a complete history of the war with Rome. Its moral focus is how humiliation, silence, retaliation, and failed leadership can widen a private conflict into a public disaster.

Other passages offer additional diagnoses. Shabbat 119b presents a series of teachings about Shabbat desecration, neglect of children’s Torah learning, failure to rebuke wrongdoing, the disappearance of trustworthy people, and disrespect for Torah scholars. Bava Metzia 30b says that Jerusalem was destroyed because people insisted on the strict letter of the law and did not act lifnim mishurat hadin, beyond what law alone could compel.

These sources are rabbinic moral diagnoses rather than one exhaustive historical theory. Maimonides, known as Rambam, explains in Laws of Fasts 5:1 that commemorative fasts are meant to awaken the heart and open paths of teshuvah. Their direction is first-person and present: What must we change?

Beitar, the Plowing, and What the Mishnah Preserved

Beitar was a fortified center and the last principal stronghold of Bar Kokhba’s forces during the revolt of 132–135 CE. Its fall to Rome in 135 marked the collapse of the revolt’s central political hope. The Mishnah assigns its capture to the ninth of Av; surviving external evidence confirms Beitar’s importance and fall but does not independently establish the Hebrew date.

The Mishnah ends its list by saying that “the city was plowed.” Ta’anit 29a connects the act with Turnus Rufus and the Sanctuary; Rambam, Laws of Fasts 5:3, describes Tineius Rufus plowing the Temple site and its surroundings. Burning destroys a building; plowing turns even its ground into an image of desolation, recalling Micah’s prophecy that Zion would be plowed like a field.

Yet rabbinic tradition did not allow Temple knowledge to disappear. The Mishnah was redacted after the Temple’s destruction, but it preserves Temple law and service in remarkable detail. Middot records the Temple’s arrangement and measurements. Yoma describes the High Priest’s Yom Kippur service. Tamid records the daily service, while Shekalim discusses the half-shekel and sacred funds. The order of Kodashim examines offerings and other sacred laws.

Prayer and study assumed central roles in Jewish life after the destruction, but “replacement” is incomplete from an Orthodox perspective. The Mishnah preserves Temple Torah as living Torah while Jewish liturgy continues to pray for the rebuilding of the Beit HaMikdash. That preservation resists erasure without substituting for the Temple itself.

Eikhah and Kinnot: Giving Grief a Voice

The destruction of Jerusalem is mourned through the Book of Lamentations, called Eikhah in Hebrew. Jewish tradition attributes it to Jeremiah, although the biblical book does not name its author. It is read publicly in the synagogue on the night of Tisha B’Av.

Eikhah has five chapters and shifts among literary voices. A narrator describes the ruined city; Jerusalem speaks as a grieving woman; the third chapter begins with an individual sufferer; and the fifth takes the form of communal prayer. The book confesses sin, describes cruelty, protests suffering, remembers mercy, and asks G‑d for restoration without reducing every kind of grief to one explanation.

“Return us to You, G‑d, and we will return; renew our days as of old.”

—Lamentations 5:21, author’s rendering

The biblical book has one more verse, which raises the possibility of continuing rejection and anger. In the synagogue reading, the preceding plea for renewal is repeated after the final verse, so that the difficult ending remains in Scripture without becoming the last words heard by the congregation.

Around Eikhah grew the kinnot, elegies recited principally on the morning of Tisha B’Av. Composed by numerous poets over many centuries, they give communal grief a liturgical voice.

Later Layers of Mourning

The destruction of Jerusalem and the two Temples remains the center of Tisha B’Av, but the kinnot also gather later Jewish catastrophes into the day’s mourning. In the Ashkenazi rite, Mi Yiten Roshi Mayim, composed by Rabbi Kalonymos ben Yehuda of Speyer, laments the Jews murdered in Speyer, Worms, and Mainz during the First Crusade in 1096. Those massacres occurred in Iyar and Sivan, not on the ninth of Av. The kinah draws their memory into an established day of communal mourning rather than creating another fast.

The Holocaust, or Shoah, added another layer, though Orthodox responses have differed. Many communities have added Holocaust kinnot, while others retain an inherited collection or understand older kinnot as also mourning the communities destroyed in the 1940s. There is no single collection used everywhere: Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, and local rites differ in their selections, order, additions, and melodies. Moroccan collections, for example, include kinnot about the expulsion from Spain and later disasters in North Africa. This wider historical memory does not displace Jerusalem; as the Orthodox Union notes, the destruction of the Temples remains Tisha B’Av’s primary focus.

When the Body Remembers

Tisha B’Av is observed through the body as well as through words. Mishnah Ta’anit 4:6–7 teaches that joy is reduced when Av begins, restricts haircutting and laundering during the week in which Tisha B’Av falls, and limits the final meal before the fast. Later halakha applies the meal restrictions when that meal is eaten after midday; the Shabbat case differs. The details and the periods of intensified mourning also differ among communities.

On Tisha B’Av, healthy Jewish adults abstain from five central forms of physical comfort: eating and drinking; washing or bathing apart from limited hygienic, ritual, or medical needs; applying oils or creams for pleasure; wearing leather footwear; and marital relations.

Because Torah study ordinarily brings joy, study is limited to somber material appropriate to the day, including Eikhah, Job, passages of Jeremiah concerning destruction, laws of mourning, and rabbinic accounts of the destruction. Other widespread mourning practices include sitting on a low seat until halakhic midday and refraining from ordinary greetings.

Work is not one of the five central prohibitions. Its practice depends on communal custom; many communities avoid work that distracts from mourning, particularly until halakhic midday, while necessary work and work required to prevent significant loss may be permitted.

These laws have important exceptions. Children below bar or bat mitzvah are not obligated to complete the fast, and a person who is ill may be exempt even when the illness is not life-threatening. Pregnancy, nursing, recent childbirth, frailty, and prescribed medication require individualized guidance; some rulings also change when the fast is postponed from Shabbat to Sunday.

Anyone with a health concern should consult a clinician about medical safety and a qualified rabbi about halakhic practice, preferably before the fast. Necessary medication should not be stopped or altered without medical advice. Anyone experiencing severe or rapidly worsening symptoms should seek urgent medical care and should not delay treatment while awaiting religious guidance. A general essay cannot determine what is safe or required for a particular person.

Tisha B’Av culminates the Three Weeks, the mourning period that begins on 17 Tammuz. Its customs intensify in stages as the fast approaches, with significant differences among Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and other communities.

Fasting and the related practices interrupt ordinary life so that the destruction of Jerusalem does not remain an abstract fact. The aim is not punishment of the body, but attention: memory is given time and physical form, making room for mourning and teshuvah.

Zechariah: From Mourning Toward Rebuilding

In the early Persian period, after Judean exiles had begun returning and while the Second Temple was being rebuilt, a delegation asked whether the practice of weeping and abstaining in the fifth month should continue. Zechariah 7 responds by asking whether the people had truly fasted for G‑d.

The prophet then recalls what G‑d requires: practice true justice, show kindness and compassion, do not oppress the widow, orphan, stranger, or poor, and do not devise harm against one another. Zechariah 8 adds truth and peace, and promises that the fasts of mourning will become occasions of joy and gladness.

Zechariah calls one of them “the fast of the fifth month.” Rosh Hashanah 18b identifies it with Tisha B’Av. The prophecy does not describe redemption as wages mechanically purchased by good behavior. It places the hope of restoration beside commands for justice, compassion, truth, and peace.

Rambam, Laws of Fasts 5:19, rules that in the Messianic era these fasts will be abolished and transformed into festivals of rejoicing. Tisha B’Av is therefore not meant to be permanent: it is observed while the Temple remains destroyed and redemption is incomplete.

Rabbi Akiva and the Fox

Makkot 24b closes with an image of hope after destruction. Rabbi Akiva and other Sages ascend toward Jerusalem. When they see the Temple site from Mount Scopus, they tear their garments. At the Temple Mount, a fox emerges from the place of the Holy of Holies. The others weep, while Rabbi Akiva laughs.

Rabbi Akiva is not laughing at the destruction. He explains that the fulfillment of the prophecy of ruin strengthens his confidence in the prophecy of restoration: if Zion became like a plowed field, then elderly people and children will once again fill Jerusalem’s streets. The account permits neither denial nor despair. The Sages mourn what they see, and Rabbi Akiva locates hope within the prophetic record itself.

What Tisha B’Av Asks

Tisha B’Av holds together two convictions. Classical Orthodox liturgy and halakha treat the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the Beit HaMikdash as a concrete part of redemption, not only as symbols; Rambam states that the Messiah will build the Temple and restore its service. At the same time, the prophets and Sages direct the living toward teshuvah, truthful speech, compassion, responsible leadership, protection of vulnerable people, and peace.

Ethical improvement does not replace the Temple, and longing for the Temple does not release anyone from ethical responsibility. Eikhah and the kinnot give grief a language; the fast brings memory into the body; rabbinic teachings turn remembrance toward self-examination; and Zechariah and Rabbi Akiva keep restoration within view.

Tisha B’Av refuses both forgetfulness and despair. The fast remembers what was lost; its prayers keep alive the hope of restoration.