The fire reached the Temple on the ninth of Av in the year 70. The Roman legions under Titus had been at the walls of Jerusalem since the spring. By August they had broken through three lines of defence, burned the lower city, and pressed up the slope to the Mount itself. The ancient sources argue about whether the order to burn the sanctuary was given or whether a soldier acted alone in the chaos. The sanctuary burned either way. The gold of the roof melted and ran between the stones. The smoke was visible for miles.
What happened next, over the following two thousand years, is one of the more remarkable acts of collective memory in human history. The tribe that lost its Temple did not simply mourn it once and move on. It built the anniversary of that fire into the marrow of the calendar. Every year, on the ninth of Av, the fast begins at nightfall. For twenty-five hours there is no food, no water, no leather shoes, no bathing, no marital relations. The synagogue is dimmed. The ark curtain may be removed or darkened. The congregation sits on low chairs or on the floor. And then the reader opens the Book of Lamentations and begins: Eichah yashvah vadad ha'ir rabbati am - How deserted lies the city, once so full of people.
The record
The Roman historian Josephus, who was present at the siege as both a participant and a later chronicler, describes the destruction of the Second Temple in his Jewish War (Book VI, chapters 4-5), written around 75-79 CE. He records that the Temple Mount was set alight on the tenth of Av by the Jewish calendar - a discrepancy of one day that troubled later rabbinic authorities. The Babylonian Talmud (tractate Ta'anit 29a) addresses this directly: Rabbi Yochanan records that "the Gentiles entered the Temple on the seventh of Av" and that it burned for the rest of the seventh and through the eighth before being finally consumed on the ninth. The tractate explicitly states that both Temples - the First, destroyed by Babylon in 586 BCE, and the Second, destroyed by Rome in 70 CE - fell on the ninth of Av. The establishment of a single date of communal mourning for both catastrophes is itself a deliberate act of calendar theology. Josephus's Jewish War is preserved in multiple manuscript traditions and is available in the Loeb Classical Library edition (Harvard University Press).
Lamentations is a short book - five chapters, 154 verses - but it is not a small one. It was composed in or shortly after 586 BCE, in the immediate aftermath of the Babylonian destruction of the First Temple and the exile of the Jerusalem population to Babylon. The tradition attributes it to the prophet Jeremiah, though modern scholarship is divided on authorship. What is not divided is the power of the text. The first four chapters are acrostics - each verse beginning with the successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet, from alef to tav. The form is almost unbearably deliberate: grief contained within the full sweep of the alphabet, as if to say, we have gone through every letter of what can be said and we are still here, still speaking. The fifth and final chapter breaks the acrostic. It has twenty-two verses, one for each letter, but it does not follow the sequence. The form is abandoned at the end. Scholars read this as intentional: the orderly structure of language cannot hold what must finally be said.
The record
The laws and customs of Tisha B'Av are codified in the Shulchan Aruch, the authoritative sixteenth-century code of Jewish law compiled by Rabbi Joseph Karo and published in Safed in 1565. The fast's observances are treated in Orach Chayim, sections 549-561. The fast is classified as a "public fast" of the highest order - stricter in its prohibitions than the minor fasts but carrying some distinctions from Yom Kippur in its specific mourning practices. The Shulchan Aruch specifies that Torah study is restricted on Tisha B'Av itself (since Torah study brings joy, which is inappropriate on the day), with exceptions for texts appropriate to mourning, including Lamentations, the Book of Job, and the mournful passages of Jeremiah. The tradition of reading Lamentations publicly in the synagogue on Tisha B'Av night is attested in the Talmudic period and is mentioned in the responsa literature of the Geonim (sixth to eleventh centuries CE). The Shulchan Aruch is available in critical Hebrew editions from Machon Yerushalayim and in partial English translation by Rabbi Eliyahu Touger (Moznaim Publishing).
The rabbis who fixed the calendar did something shrewd and honest with Tisha B'Av. They did not limit it to the memory of 70 CE. Over the generations, the ninth of Av accumulated catastrophes the way a river accumulates silt - slowly, until the weight of it is considerable. The First Temple's destruction in 586 BCE was set on the same date as the Second's. Then tradition placed the episode of the spies - when the generation of the desert wept over the Land and the entry was delayed forty years - also on the ninth of Av (Babylonian Talmud, Ta'anit 29a). The expulsion of Jews from England in 1290, the expulsion from France in 1306, the expulsion from Spain in 1492 - all fell on or very near the ninth of Av, or were later absorbed into its observance. The Warsaw Ghetto deportations to Treblinka began on the eve of Tisha B'Av 1942. The date became, in the rabbinic imagination, not merely a historical accident but a structural feature of Jewish time: the day when calamity is most likely, the fracture line in the year. The proper response to a fracture line is not to walk around it. It is to stand on it and look down.
The fast ends at nightfall on the tenth of Av. People eat. The leather shoes go back on. The Torah study resumes. There is no triumphalist conclusion to Tisha B'Av - no note of rescue, no sudden reversal of fortune. What there is instead is the Talmudic teaching (Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 9b) that the Second Temple was destroyed not by military defeat alone but by sinat chinam - causeless hatred between Jews. The fast does not end on a verdict of who was to blame. It ends on the question of what we owe each other. That is the tradition's characteristic move: face the catastrophe, name its internal cause, and walk back into the world still in the tribe, still responsible.
Every year the ninth of Av comes around and Jewish communities around the world dim their lights and sit on the floor and read a book of laments that is nearly three thousand years old. The fire happened. The fire is not the last word. Both facts are held at once, and the holding of them - uncomfortable, unresolved, year after year - is the practice.
