October 7 trauma reconnects Israelis with a 2,000-year-old Jewish day of mourning
Thousands of synagogues prepare to feature lamentations about the Hamas atrocities, on Tisha B’Av, a fast day that commemorates historical – and now contemporary – tragedies
Cnaan Lidor is The Times of Israel's Jewish World reporter
Like thousands of Israelis, Adam Hajaj is still suffering from the Hamas onslaught of October 7, when terrorists abducted his cousin Rom Braslavski from the Supernova music festival in Re’im.
On Saturday, Hajaj told thousands of people about his family’s pain at the weekly rally for the hostages in Tel Aviv. But he began his speech by addressing events from almost 2,000 years ago, with the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem on the Hebrew calendar date of Tisha B’Av, a Jewish day of fasting and mourning that begins, this year, on Monday evening.
For many, the scope of the October 7 tragedy and the fears it has raised about the Jewish state’s viability call Tisha B’Av to mind and imbue it with new significance as a warning against division and gratuitous hatred among Jews.
The link between Tisha B’Av and October 7 is shaping up to be a major theme of the day of mourning this year. Thousands of synagogues across all denominations are expected to incorporate texts about October 7 in their Tisha B’Av ceremonies, causing some to predict the onslaught’s eventual canonization in Jewish liturgy alongside other catastrophes.
“I want to talk to you about the destruction of the Second Temple,” Hajaj told the audience on Saturday after introducing himself. Since October 7, it “feels much closer to home and relevant” to read the biblical Book of Lamentations, known in Hebrew as Eicha, Hajaj said.
That book, which is read in synagogues on Tisha B’Av, is about the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians. Both it and the destruction of the Second Temple by Rome centuries later in 70 CE are commemorated on Tisha B’Av, along with other ancient calamities.
“Unity, mutual assistance, courage — or another destruction by violence and hatred,” Hajaj said in describing the choice facing Israelis this Tisha
B’Av.
Israelis widely share the sentiment that Hajaj described as their society is still reeling from the October 7 onslaught in which Hamas murdered some 1,200 people and abducted 251, over 100 of whom are believed to still be held in Gaza. Thousands of Israeli troops are in the Strip working to find the hostages and dismantle Hamas, while thousands more prepare on other fronts for an escalation in hostilities with Iran and Hezbollah.
“Prayer, religious ceremony, and liturgy have emerged as one of the main avenues for dealing with October 7,” said Rabbi Dalia Marx, a lecturer on Jewish studies at the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. “Hundreds of prayers, rites, and religious texts from across denominations have been written about October 7, and we’re seeing it also on Tisha B’Av in the form of kinot,” she said, using the Hebrew word for lamentations.
Dozens of kinot for Tisha B’Av have been written in Orthodox communities alone about October 7, according to Rabbi David Stav, who heads the Tzohar rabbinical group.
To Stav, Tisha B’Av invokes October 7 not because of the onslaught’s death toll — the highest of any massacre of Jews since the Holocaust — but because “our identity is now once again linked to pain, loss, and tragedy that makes Tisha B’Av one of deeper meaning, prayer, and purpose to both mourn and inspire change,” he said.
This is part of the reason October 7 “will enter Judaism’s canon,” Stav told The Times of Israel, adding that thousands of Orthodox, Religious-Zionist synagogues would this year on Tisha B’Av feature kinot referencing or written about the onslaught.
The new kinot are meant to complement the ones in the biblical Book of Lamentations. In addition to that book’s text, many Jewish communities also read kinot about more recent tragedies, such as the massacres perpetrated in the First Crusade described in “Were That My Head Were Water,” a kinah by the 11th-century poet Kalonymus ben Yehuda, which is read in Ashkenazi synagogues on Tisha B’Av.
The canonization of kinot is, however, complex and multifactored, said Marx, the Jewish studies lecturer. Kinot about the Holocaust, the deadliest catastrophe in Jewish history, have not been canonized, she noted, party due to objections by the change-averse Haredi world. “A combination of factors is needed over time for a kinah to be canonized. It’s early to say whether this will happen with October 7,” she said.
Right now, though, there is “an undisputed grassroots sentiment across the Jewish world that views this Tisha B’Av through the lens of October 7,” Marx said.
In recognition of this sentiment, Tzohar published a 24-page booklet with kinot connected to October 7. Those texts are meant to complement this year’s readings in synagogue of the canonical Tisha B’Av kinot, which mostly deal with the time between the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition. Other groups have similarly come out with supplementary material for this Tisha B’Av.
The nasi, or president, of the World Mizrachi Movement, Rabbi Yosef Zvi Rimon, published a “Kinah for the Events of Swords of Iron,” the army’s codename for the ongoing war on Hamas. The Orthodox Union in the United States also published a “Tisha b’Av Lament for October 7” that mourns not only the massacres, but rising antisemitism in their wake (“The enduring hatred for the eternal nation continues to grow as our enemies plot to destroy and erase any trace of Israel,” the text notes).
One of the kinot in Tzohar’s booklet is titled “The Lament of Be’eri.” An original poem by musician Yagel Haroush, it ends with the line: “Let us water Be’eri from the well of our tears.” Another piece is the 11th-century song “Zion, Do You Not Ask” by Rabbi Yehuda Halevi of Spain.
“We cannot read this poem with its rich depictions of the landscape of Israel without thinking about areas of our beautiful land that have been evacuated of their residents,” the booklet states.
Tamar Biala, a writer and lecturer on Jewish studies, also cited the inevitability of thinking about October 7 on this Tisha B’Av as her motivation for noting the massacre in the framework of the Jewish date. “I could not imagine sitting in the synagogue without marking in religious language the pain and mourning over the terrible event and its ongoing aftermath,” she wrote in her blog on The Times of Israel.
Biala asked survivors of the massacre in two kibbutzim, Liora Ayalon of Kfar Aza and Nurit Hirschfeld-Skupinsky of Nahal Oz, to write kinot of their own for Tisha B’Av. Both kinot featured political criticism: Hirschfeld-Skupinsky noted how IDF surveillance soldiers who had alerted their superiors of Hamas’s preparations for an onslaught were ignored, whereas Ayalon lambasted leaders who “put their desires before all else” in her kinah.
The rawness of October 7, which many Israelis blame on the government and many others blame on the anti-government protests, may complicate its canonization, said Elazar Strum, a presenter of programs on Jewish traditions on TOV, an online Jewish news channel. “Tisha B’Av is certainly resonating with Israelis after October 7 in a big way but it’s a bit too raw, a bit too much in flux right now, to figure out how,” he said.
The onslaught and its aftermath ended the feeling that the Jewish world “had entered into a sort of Golden Era,” said Stav. Before October 7, it had become “difficult to really relate to past tragedies in any tangible and emotional way.” In mere hours, “October 7 changed that entire conception,” he said.
