The Day Judaism Almost Ended
A note before we begin
Last weekend I was at a songwriting retreat with the wonderful Sue Horowitz. One prompt led me to write a blues song about the destruction of the Second Temple. The more I sat with it, the more I realized the song was really asking a bigger question.
This essay grew out of that question.
The Day Judaism Almost Ended
If you had stood outside Jerusalem in 70 C.E., you probably would have concluded that Judaism was finished.
The Temple was burning—the priesthood, the sacrifices, the whole architecture of Jewish practice, gone in one Roman campaign. Jews responded in different ways.
Some held on to the hope that one day the Temple would be rebuilt. They continued living Jewish lives while praying for that restoration.
Some could not imagine Judaism surviving without it.
And some—quietly, without waiting for permission—kept doing what they’d already begun outside Jerusalem: building schools, praying without an altar, arguing over text instead of offering sacrifice. They didn’t know they were the future. It didn’t feel visionary while they were doing it—it just felt like the only thing left they knew how to do. We just call it rabbinic Judaism now. It’s the Judaism almost every Jew alive today practices, whether we know its origin story or not.
That’s the part I keep sitting with this Tisha B’Av. What seemed indispensable turned out not to be the deepest source of Jewish life. The relationship was the point. The practice, the argument, the people who kept showing up to sustain it. When the container broke, the thing inside it survived because some people had already started building a new container before they needed one.
I find myself thinking about that this year as I watch institutions, communities, and movements wrestle with change. From the inside, reinvention rarely feels heroic. It feels uncertain. It feels like letting go of something that once worked and wondering whether what you’re building will be enough. The people shaping the future seldom know that’s what they’re doing.
Tisha B’Av asks us to sit in the loss for a day before Shabbat Nachamu’s comfort arrives, almost indecently soon after. Maybe that’s the point.
Comfort isn’t the absence of destruction. It’s discovering that even in the ashes, someone has already begun building the next chapter.
If you had stood outside Jerusalem in 70 C.E., you might have believed Judaism was ending.
In fact, it was becoming the Judaism we know today.
Grief
Hope
Tisha B’Av begins at sundown Wednesday, July 22, and ends at nightfall Thursday, July 23.
This is beautiful and very helpful to me right now. Thank you.
Another thoughtful teaching. Thank you.