Rebuilding from the Ashes: Tisha B'Av and How to Repair Our Broken World Today

Photo by Edward Kucherenko on Unsplash

Tisha B'Av is a container for grief—grief that is both ancient and immediate. When we read the Mishnah Ta'anit (an early rabbinic text) and its catalog of catastrophes, the Mishnah list disasters, and reveals a pattern: when injustice, cruelty, and spiritual rot go unchecked, societies fall. People suffer.

There were five events that happened to our ancestors on the seventeenth of Tammuz and five on the ninth of Av," the text tells us. "On the seventeenth of Tammuz: The tablets were shattered; The daily tamid offering was cancelled; The walls of the city were breached; And Apostomos burned the Torah, and placed an idol in the Temple. On the ninth of Av: It was decreed that our ancestors should not enter the land, The Temple was destroyed the first and the second time, Betar was captured, And the city was plowed up. When Av enters, they limit their rejoicing.”

Remembering is essential. But today we must ask: Where do we see people struggling under the weight of systems that no longer serve them? Whose voices are we missing, and whose stories deserve more of our care and attention?

Tisha B'av is about the loss of sacred spaces and the heartbreak of losing our way, and the sacred task of finding our way back to what matters most.

This essay moves from ancient voices of grief to contemporary patterns of suffering, asking how Jewish wisdom about destruction and repair speaks to our current moment.

Entering the World of Lamentations

To understand this day fully, we must enter the world of the Book of Lamentations—Eicha in Hebrew, meaning "How?"—the text we traditionally read on Tisha B'Av. It's a collection of poetic cries: voices of anguish, of disorientation, of people trying to make sense of unbearable loss.

These are distant stories and emotional landscapes that invite us in. The book asks the eternal question: "How?" How did this happen? How do we continue? How do we make meaning from destruction?

On this day of collective mourning, we turn to Eicha to help us feel—to bear witness—and to deepen our compassion for those who suffer today. The ancient voices speak with startling relevance to our contemporary moment, as if the authors were describing headlines from our own time.

The Cry of the Unseen

May this not happen to you, all who pass along the road—Look about and see: Is there any agony like mine, which was dealt out to me when GOD afflicted me on this day of wrath?

These words from Lamentations 1:12 give voice to someone abandoned, someone whose suffering has become invisible to those who pass by. The speaker pleads with passersby not to ignore their pain, begging simply to be seen and acknowledged.

This ancient cry resonates powerfully in our own time. Who today is crying out, unheard? The pattern repeats across centuries: people in pain, calling out to those who pass by, asking only to be witnessed.

We hear these voices in families separated at borders, in people deported without due process, in communities where neighbors disappear without warning. The ancient cry of the unseen echoes in every person whose humanity has been reduced to a case number, whose story has been lost in bureaucratic machinery.

Collective Grief for the Innocent

The emotional intensity deepens in Lamentations 2:11:

My eyes are spent with tears, my heart is in tumult, my being melts away over the ruin of my poor people, as babes and sucklings languish in the squares of the city.

This is collective grief—the speaker's body reacting viscerally to witnessing the suffering of innocents. Notice how physical this response is: spent eyes, churning heart, melting being. The body itself rebels against witnessing such pain.

The image of children languishing "in the squares of the city"—in public spaces where they should be safe—speaks directly to our contemporary moment. How do we grieve for children in detention? For those trapped in war zones or on the streets without shelter?

The verse forces us to confront our own capacity for feeling when confronted with images of children who suffer in our world's public squares—whether those squares are detention facilities, refugee camps, or city streets where the vulnerable have nowhere to turn.

Naming Systemic Injustice

Lamentations laments and it analyzes. In chapter 3, verses 34-36, the text names systemic injustice with prophetic clarity:

Crushing under His feet all the prisoners of the earth. To deny a man his rights in the presence of the Most High, to wrong a man in his cause—This the Lord does not choose.

Here the ancient text moves beyond individual suffering to identify patterns of oppression. The image of "crushing under feet" suggests deliberate, systematic dehumanization. The phrase "prisoners of the earth" expands the scope beyond any single nation or people.

This biblical analysis of systematic oppression speaks directly to our contemporary systems of mass incarceration, immigration enforcement, and bureaucratic cruelty. The text connects such practices to mass incarceration, to ICE raids, to the deportation of people with legal status, to any system that crushes human dignity.

Our tradition sees injustice not only as wrong, but as spiritually unbearable, as something that violates the very order of creation.

The Persistence of Hope

Yet even in the depths of Lamentations, hope persists. The same chapter that names systematic oppression also declares:

To recall my distress and my misery was wormwood and poison; whenever I thought of them, I was bowed low. But this do I call to mind, therefore I have hope: The kindness of the LORD has not ended, His mercies are not spent. They are renewed every morning—Ample is Your grace!

This is not naive optimism but the persistence of hope in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The speaker acknowledges being "bowed low" by suffering but chooses to "call to mind" something else—the possibility of renewal.

It's the recognition that even in our darkest moments, there remains room for renewal, for action, for the possibility of repair. This hope becomes the foundation for everything that follows.

Contemporary Churban - Destruction

The ancient voices of Lamentations help us recognize a troubling truth: the destruction we remember today is not sealed in history. Churban—the Hebrew word for destruction, especially of sacred spaces—is also happening now, quietly, bureaucratically, violently.

We see it in ICE detaining legal residents and tearing apart families. We see it in detention centers where people produce goods under conditions that echo historical forms of forced labor.

We see it in bombs falling on civilians, in refugees dying at sea or in deserts, in displacement from climate disaster, conflict, and systemic neglect. The patterns that Lamentations identified—the crushing of prisoners, the denial of rights, the abandonment of the vulnerable—repeat across centuries.

Tisha B'Av challenges us not to look away. Not to normalize what is unbearable. The day demands that we sit with the full weight of suffering—both ancient and contemporary—and ask what our tradition requires of us in response.

Rebuilding from the Ashes

But Tisha B'Av doesn't end with destruction. In Jewish thought, ashes aren't just about destruction—they're about potential. Ashes can fertilize new growth. This day of mourning contains within it the seeds of renewal and repair.

The questions become: What grows from the ashes of our broken systems? How do we plant seeds of justice in the soil of our grief? What would it look like to rebuild—not just restore, but build something better?

We see glimpses of this rebuilding already happening: communities organizing to protect vulnerable people, people building networks of care around those the system abandons, creating sanctuary where there was only fear.

These are not just acts of charity but acts of sacred construction, building the world that our tradition envisions. They represent the move from mourning to action that Tisha B'Av ultimately calls for.

Turning Toward Repair and Return

Jewish tradition doesn't end in grief. Even in Eicha, there is a thread of resilience. The book concludes with a prayer that speaks directly to our moment: "Hashiveinu Adonai eilecha v'nashuvah, chadesh yameinu k'kedem"—"Return us to You, and we shall return. Renew our days as of old."

This is a prayer for moral and spiritual return—teshuvah in Hebrew, which means both repentance and return. But what do we want to return to? Not to some idealized past, but to timeless values: Justice. Compassion. Courage.

The verse calls us not to restore what was, but to renew what should be—the eternal principles that transcend any particular moment in history. It's a call to build forward, not backward.

From Ashes to Beauty

We don't just mourn what was destroyed. We ask: What wants to be born from these ashes? What is ours to build?

We sit in ashes not to despair—but to feel, to witness, to wake up. And then, to begin the sacred work of rebuilding what has been broken.

The prophet Isaiah understood this transformation. In words that speak directly to our day of mourning, he envisioned a time when God would

provide for the mourners—to give them an ornament instead of ashes, the festive ointment instead of mourning, a garment of splendor instead of a drooping spirit. They shall be called terebinths of victory, planted by GOD for glory's sake.

This is the promise that emerges from the depths of Tisha B'Av: that mourning can be transformed into action, that ashes can become the soil for new growth, that even in our broken world, beauty and justice remain possible.

The question is not whether we can eliminate all suffering—the question is whether we will plant ourselves like strong trees in the work of repair. Whether we will allow our grief to become the foundation for a more just and compassionate world.

The ashes of Tisha B'Av call us not to despair but to hope, not to paralysis but to action, not to resignation but to the sacred work of tikkun—repair. In a world where people still cry out unseen, where innocents still languish, where systems still crush the vulnerable, the ancient call remains urgent: to turn our mourning into movement, our grief into the determination to build something better from the ruins of what has been destroyed.