Rabbi Ezra Schwartz
It is forbidden to study Torah on Tisha B’Av. Yet, for many people, Tisha B’Av has become a day when more Torah is studied than on an ordinary day. Shuls have long explanatory kinos. Anyone interested can tune in to the many top notch kinos programs on line. There are multiple programs, videos, shiurim, programs focused on particular, too-often-neglected mitzvos, etc, to watch on Tisha B’Av afternoon. This is all very positive. Our Tisha B’Av today is a far more educational and religious experience than the Tisha B’Avs observed just a few decades ago.
However, with all the educational opportunities, we can lose sight of what we should really be doing. We should really feel sad. It’s not enough to understand what happened in the past. We have to connect with those events and genuinely become despondent. Some Tisha B’Av programming accomplishes this. But if the programming available to you doesn’t get to this goal, do it yourself. Find the Holocaust movie, the film about October 7 or a documentary about one of the bloody events of our past, and watch them. Connect with these sad events. Cry.
Rabbi Ezra Schwartz is a Rosh Yeshiva at Rabbi Issac Elchanan Theological Seminary, where he hold the Harry Rabin Chair in Talmud and Jewish Law. He also serves as the Associate Director of the Semikha Program and teaches halacha at GPATS.
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Rabbi Jonathan Muskat
Tisha B’Av is a day devoted to mourning the destruction of the Batei Mikdash and reflecting on the many tragedies that have befallen the Jewish people. A central halachic and emotional theme of the day is to avoid diverting our minds from this national mourning.
The morning carries the most intense expressions of grief, reflected in halachot such as sitting on the floor, refraining from wearing tallit and tefillin, and, as the Rema notes, avoiding work (melacha) until chatzot. However, the obligation to mourn does not end at midday. The Gemara (Taanit 30b) teaches that anyone who does work on Tisha B’Av will not see a sign of blessing from it. The Magen Avraham explains that while work may technically be permitted after chatzot, one should not become so absorbed in it that it distracts from the day’s purpose. Exceptions are made for avoiding significant financial loss (davar ha’aveid), but even then, one should act with restraint.
Ideally, both the morning and afternoon should be dedicated to activities that promote mourning and reflection. This includes reading kinnot, studying about the Churban, and engaging with meaningful content, such as lectures or videos, that connect us emotionally and spiritually to our national loss.
The goal is to internalize the causes of these tragedies and use the day as a springboard for personal and communal growth. The afternoon is not a time for distraction, but a continued opportunity for introspection and inspiration.
Rabbi Jonathan Muskat is the rabbi of the Young Israel of Oceanside, a rebbe at Shulamith High School, and a pastoral health care liaison at Mount Sinai South Nassau.
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Rabbi Elli Fischer
How should one spend the afternoon of Tisha B’Av?
This is a highly personalized question for which there’s no single answer. The best I can do is share some ideas about what I think is appropriate (and inappropriate).
My friend Chaim Saiman has pointed out something quite ironic: aside from the five inuyim (afflictions) that Tisha B’Av shares with Yom Kippur, there are two prohibitions that apply only to Tisha B’Av and its season: studying Torah and listening to music. And yet, in recent years, music and Torah study have become salient elements of how Tisha B’Av is observed. There are (appropriately-themed) learning programs all afternoon, and in recent years, no Tisha B’Av is complete without a hartzige kumzitz. The kumzitz probably originated with summer camps and programs that had to keep their charges occupied for a long, hot afternoon while also providing meaningful experiences.
As for the learning, Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik may have been the first – and certainly represents a watershed – in the emergence of “explanatory Kinnot.” When I was growing up in Baltimore (decades before live streaming), I was fortunate to be able to attend Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Weinreb’s explanatory Kinnot.
But that only got me through the morning. I don’t recall how I spent my afternoons in those years, but these days I live in Israel and can tune in to one of any number of explanatory Kinnot live streams in the U.S. My preferred choice is Rabbi Daniel Yolkut’s Kinnot, on Facebook (from Cong. Poale Zedek in Pittsburgh).
I am often asked to give a shiur or two in the afternoon, which occupies a chunk of it. (I never got into the lashon hara videos. Forgive me.)
Not long ago, I came across a custom recorded in a teshuvah from R. Chaim Or Zarua (13th century Ashkenaz). He writes that if a man is killed as a martyr, his wife may never remarry, so that the legacy of those who died al kiddush Hashem is not forgotten. This custom was evidently observed for centuries – until after the Holocaust, when survivors did the exact opposite – marrying and rebuilding fam
ilies as soon as they possibly could. I have been meaning to delve into the history of this fascinating yet undoubtedly grim practice, and the afternoon of Tisha B’Av seems like it would be an appropriate time for that.
I should also point out that my kids are all halachic adults by now. When they were younger, my wife and I had to figure out how to entertain them in a meaningful way. (I believe that Operation Thunderbolt, a film that dramatizes the Entebbe Raid, was viewed on Tisha B’Av afternoon for many years.) We also had to “tag team” so that neither of us would exhaust ourselves with the kids.
There have been years when I had a headache and slept for much of the afternoon. In recent years I take caffeine pills dry, so that I can focus on more meaningful endeavors.
As for those kumzitzes, I find them somewhat inappropriate, especially if the “play list” is basically the same play list as every other kumzitz throughout the year. I might feel differently if the kumzitz was more distinctively about Tisha B’Av themes. Beyond the music, I think that Tisha B’Av is not meant to be an overly social occasion. As we read in Eicha (3:28): “Yeisheiv badad vayidom – let him sit alone and be silent.”
Rabbi Elli Fischer is a translator, writer, and historian. He edits Rav Eliezer Melamed’s Peninei Halakha in English, cofounded HaMapah, a project to quantify and map rabbinic literature, and is a founding editor of Lehrhaus. Follow him @adderabbi on Twitter or listen to his podcast, “Down the Rabbi Hole.”
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Rabbi Yitzchak Sprung
Let’s start with the end in mind: on the 9th of Av, our goal is to mourn the destruction of the Temples, understand how these are not only literal tragedies but are also symbolic of the brokenness of the world writ large, and to channel our pain and sense of sadness into personal repentance and world-fixing.
But this is hard to do on any given Sunday, let alone on a Sunday that denies our general sense of comfort, instant gratification, and general preference for food, drink, and relief from headaches.
So we will need to make a plan or it will not be realistic. Here are some things that we can do:
1) Do Tisha B’Av specific teshuvah. We can do the mitzvah of teshuvah at any time. But on Tisha B’Av we have the opportunity to consider how our decisions impact the Jewish people and the Jewish future. Especially as we are in a time of crisis, we can use this time to make plans for how we are going to better do our part as members of the Jewish people. Are our lives geared toward bettering the position of the Jewish people and the world? If the answer is “not as much as they could be,” write down three things you’re going to do to make a bigger difference.
2) Watch the online kinot that will stream throughout the day or watch old clips. These are fabulous. Then repeat step one.
3) If you have the energy, study some Torah appropriate to Tisha B’Av. Study Eicha, read Rabbi Soloveitchik’s Into the Whirlwind, or attend a class on the laws of mourning. Easier said than done, but, as before, repeat step one.
4) Make time for chesed. On Tisha B’Av, we try not to work as this would distract us from the true purpose of the day. But someone needs to put out the kinot books, organize food for break fasts, volunteer for security, and visit the sick. If step one (or suggestion one) is to think about fixing the world, this suggestion is just to get right to it.
There’s a lot more we could be doing, but this is a start. No doubt, your shul website has some further ideas. Hopefully this helps.
Rabbi Yitzchak Sprung is the Rabbi of United Orthodox Synagogues in Houston, Texas (UOS). Visit his Facebook page or UOSH.org to learn about his amazing community. Find Rabbi Sprung’s podcast, the Parsha Pick-Me-Up, wherever you listen to your podcasts.
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Rabbi Steven Pruzansky
Start with the Chofetz Chaim’s premise (in his Mishna Berurah, Orach Chaim 554:51): “It is appropriate that the Beit HaMikdash should be mourned for its destruction at least one day a year.” Aveilut requires that we not distract ourselves from the object of our grief but rather engage in activities that enable is to remember, contemplate, lament, and long for its rebuilding. Since we have been without the Beit HaMikdash for more than 19.5 centuries we must do things that intensify the grief rather than just run out the clock on the fast.
What is most fitting is to study the stories of the Churban and other catastrophes of Jewish history – and then remind ourselves of the great privilege we have to be the eternal, chosen nation of Hashem and that notwithstanding the tribulations that we have experienced, Hashem has kept us alive, enabled us to thrive, and restored us to our homeland. Both the suffering and the salvation were prophesied to us in antiquity.
Many institutions show inspirational movies in the afternoon. These are not prohibited per se but they should ideally focus on dimensions of the Churban and other tragedies and not simply present other problems in Jewish life – whether shalom bayit, lack of tzniut, or even lashon hara. Those are all important, but we need to consider whether those enhance our feeling of Churban, exile, and loss or are simply ways to bring other issues to the public using the mourning of Tish’a B’Av as a facilitator.
Most meaningful – and challenging – would be individual meditation or public deliberation on the meaning of galut (exile) in an era when we can rapidly and voluntarily end the exile ourselves rather than prolong it for our own reasons. That would not only make Tish’a B’Av quite memorable but it might also make it the last one we mourn as together we merit rebuilding the Beit HaMikdash in Yerushalayim.
Rav Steven Pruzansky is Rabbi Emeritus of Congregation Bnai Yeshurun (Teaneck, NJ), Senior Research Associate at the Jerusalem Center for Applied Policy (JCAP.ngo), and author of the Chumash commentary “The Jewish Ethic of Personal Responsibility” (Geffen).
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Rabbi Reuven Taragin
As we know, the mourning of Tisha B’Av eases a bit after chatzot. Unlike the morning, which we spend sitting on the floor focused on reciting kinot (one should ideally do so until chatzot (Rema 559:3)), after chatzot we stop reciting kinot and sit on chairs.
Though all the formal halachot (as opposed to some of the minhagim) of Tisha B’Av (such as the five forms of suffering, which include abstaining from eating and drinking, washing, anointing, wearing leather shoes, and marital relations) continue until the end of the day, we return the parochet to the Aron Kodesh, don tallit and tefillin, and are allowed to prepare for after the fast.
The Vilna Gaon (O”C 555:1) explains that, though the Beit HaMikdash was lit on fire at that time (after chatzot; see Taanit 29a), the mourning is less intense because we were spared. We mourn the Beit HaMikdash, but are consoled by the fact that Hashem took (the bulk of) his wrath out on the building, not us.
In addition to continuing to fast and observe the other prohibitions, after chatzot is a time to reflect on the meaning of Tisha B’Av and its message for our future. We should not mistake the relaxation of the intensity of our mourning as the end of the fast and reflection.
If anything, this relaxation and completion of the kinot, along with the commemoration of past events, offers us a valuable opportunity to reflect on the future, encouraging us to consider our actions and their consequences.
Similar to the taaniyot described in the gemara, the afternoon is a time for self-examination and reflection. What are the sins we continue committing today? How do they cause us suffering? How can we improve the future by improving ourselves? (See Rambam, Hilchot Taaniyot 5:1)
May this reflection, and our commitment to self-improvement, merit Hashem returning the rest of the Jewish people to Israel, blessing us with peace in the Land, and returning His Shechinah to the Beit HaMikdash speedily in our days.
Rav Reuven Taragin is the Dean of Overseas Students at Yeshivat Hakotel and the Educational Director of World Mizrachi and the RZA. His new book, “Essentials of Judaism,” is available for purchase at rabbireuventaragin.com.
