Imu Shalev: Welcome to Into the Verse, where we share new and unexpected insights about an upcoming holiday… diving deep into the verses to uncover the Torah’s own commentary on itself.

At least, that’s what we do here most of the time. Today, though, instead of going deep into the verses, we’re going to be taking a giant step back. 

Hi, I’m Imu Shalev, and Tisha B'Av is just around the corner. I think Tisha B'Av is one of the most spiritually challenging days on the Jewish calendar.  

In fact, I have hard data to support that claim: Aleph Beta gets more traffic on Tisha B'Av than any other day of the year. More than erev Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur, or Pesach. More than Purim. More than Chanukah. 

I think Tisha B'Av sparks such a thirst for learning because it’s so hard to do this day right. How do you mourn tragedies that happened thousands of years ago? And yet, many of us have a sense that this day should move us, not just be marked, but deeply felt. 

Which is why, every year, no matter what else he’s working on, Rabbi Fohrman always puts out a new Tisha B'Av course. He doesn’t do that for any other holiday. But hopefully it’s our way of helping some of you find that foothold into what Tisha B'Av can be. And so, ten years later, we have a pretty amazing collection, if I do say so myself, of Tisha B'Av offerings and we wanted to tell you about them. 

So what we have for you today  is a conversation between myself, Rabbi Fohrman and one of our editors, Tikva Hecht, who worked with us on the new Tisha B'Av course we’ll be releasing this year. It starts off as a reflection on our favorite courses, but quickly evolves into a deeper discussion on the nature and meaning of Tisha B'Av.  

I hope it that inspires you to visit the site on Tisha B'Av, but more importantly, I hope it provides you with, a meaningful lens, a way of thinking about Tisha B'Av that might make this day a little less daunting and whatever journey into the verses you take this week a little richer. By the way, links to all the courses mentioned are in the episode description. Ok that's it, please enjoy! 

Rabbi David Fohrman:  Okay guys, so Imu and Tikva, so I have a question for you. Imu, you know we've worked together on a lot of these courses, and Tikva we've worked together on just one of these courses, but you've seen the others. I'm curious as, if you have any favorites and why? What resonates with you?

Grappling with Loss

Imu:  It's a great question. It's like which of your children is your favorite? So maybe I won't answer that, but I'll answer instead what I'd recommend if you haven't seen any of our courses, what's a great place to start. I think that the course that we did a few years back, "Grappling with Loss" is just a beautiful, beautiful course that begins with some really difficult questions. How do we deal with the fact that there is loss and tragedy in the world? The thing that gets that course started is a difficult verse in Isaiah where it talks about how God is "יוֹצֵר אוֹר וּבוֹרֵא חֹשֶׁךְ," God creates light and dark. "עֹשֶׂה שָׁלוֹם," He creates, He makes peace, "וּבוֹרֵא רָע," and He creates evil. "אֲנִי יְקוָה עֹשֶׂה כׇל אֵלֶּה," I am the God who does all these things. (Isaiah 45:7)

So God proudly says, I make evil. You can lay suffering and tragedy at God's doorstep. So how do you deal with that? How do you deal with a God who claims loss. It's I think a haunting, beautiful look at Isaiah, at Genesis. Then you did a really beautiful job taking us to an unlikely science fiction movie, the movie Arrival. It actually gives a beautiful metaphor for how God experiences this world and maybe how we might experience this world after death. You can't really give an answer to these questions intellectually, and you did a lovely job of giving not an answer, but an experience. And that experience has imparted wisdom with me that has really stayed with me and really changed my life. 

Rabbi Fohrman: Thank you. Yeah, I'd recommend that too. To me, I have very close feelings for that one. I remember working it out with you, Imu. We had these great, incredible brainstorming sessions and then, you know, we thought we had a course. And, well, we started, you know, but then we had this thing. We said oh my gosh, but this is like 12 hours. How do we whittle this down? So we whittled it down again and whittled it down again until we just had this little tiny sliver and it was one of those things where you cry for all the things that got left on the cutting room floor. But this was a very special sliver.

This haunting notion of Isaiah talking about God as the creator of evil really touches on this theodicy question, this question which is so maddening and touches so many nerves for us. It was very special to be able to do something that felt meaningful at that level.

So I second that recommendation. If you're just starting here, maybe start with something else because this is pretty heavy. But if you're up for a second video, watch this one and then write in and let us know what you think of it. 

The Beginning of The End

Rabbi Fohrman: Tikva, what about you? 

Tikva Hecht: I have a real soft spot for the new course, the one we made this year. I think it looks at a really interesting historical moment, the splitting of the kingdom of Israel. If you think about biblical narrative,  it’s all uphill until King Solomon. Then you have the reign of Solomon. The temple is built. There’s peace. It really feels like this is the actualization of the promise. And then as soon as Solomon passes away and his son, Rechavam, takes the throne, there’s a dispute, and the kingdom splits. It’s downhill from there and we end up with the destruction of the temple and exile. So I think it’s really interesting just on that level, trying to take a step back and understand that very sudden, downward spiral. It’s a really great, insightful course just for that reason. 

But what I really like is that it doesn’t just tell a historical story. It actually asks this really interesting theological question about God’s relationship with Solomon. Most of us know Solomon as this incredibly wise king, but what’s lesser known is that God actually gives him that wisdom. God visits him in a dream and offers him anything Solomon may want. He asks for wisdom, and God gives it to him. It seems like God is really looking out for Solomon, but when you put that in the larger context of the story, yes, in his lifetime he got this wisdom, but in the grand scheme of things, he didn’t get the legacy that he wanted. You think, if God had come to Solomon in that dream and said in a generation the kingdom will split, what can I give you, what kind of wisdom do you want? You can imagine Solomon saying, I want the wisdom to save my kingdom. I don’t just want it for my lifetime. I want it for my legacy. Suddenly that whole story of the dream just becomes full of dramatic irony, and you kind of wonder is God toying with Solomon? And it’s not just about Solomon. Rabbi Fohrman, you frame the whole question in this really personal way, making it a question each of us can ask: if Solomon didn’t get the guidance he needed, what about me? Is God out there somehow maybe giving me guidance? Is that something we can expect? 

Guilt vs. Mourning  on Tisha B’Av

You know, Rabbi Fohrman, talking about this, it reminds me of a question I’ve been meaning to ask you for a while. I don’t know if you remember, when we were working on this, you were saying how personal the question of God’s guidance is to you, and I responded, oh, that’s really a good Tisha B'Av question, because isn’t that what Tisha B'Av is all about – we look back at these terrible tragedies, the split in the kingdom, the temples being destroyed, the exile, and ask ourselves what went wrong? How were so many mistakes made? Is it sinat chinam, baseless hatred? Is it avodah zarah, idolatry? And then say ok, what can we do better? How can we get back on this road to redemption? But at the same time, doing that reflection is really discouraging, because you look back and you think, wow,  there was failure after failure, and even these great people, like Solomon, were not able to overcome every obstacle in their path, to avoid the worst case scenarios at times. It just kind of makes you think, what chance do I have? What chance do any of us have? So it feels like we really do need some guidance, we really do need some help. Can we find that in our everyday lives? 

So that’s how I frame the question to you. And you did not like that. I don’t know if you remember, but you really did not like it, and you said, no, if we frame it that way it makes Tisha B'Av sound like it’s all about guilt – what went wrong, what could we do better, how are we going to be better – and you said, it’s not about guilt, it’s about mourning, and they’re very different things. That just really stuck with me, so that’s what I wanted to ask you about. Because it made me realize that for me guilt and mourning really do conflate on Tisha B'Av, and I was wondering how you disentangle them. 

Rabbi Fohrman: So you know, when we were talking about this off camera a couple of weeks ago, I think I mentioned to you that my experience of it was very, very different. You know, In my mind, guilt and mourning are two really very different kinds of things. They're similar, I suppose, in some respects in that they're both uncomfortable emotions, right. They're both things that you want to avoid.

I lost my dad when I was young, just before Bar Mitzvah. I remember mourning was a very uncomfortable feeling. You know,  it was my mom, my sister, and me, and we were three wheels from a four-wheel car.  And I remember avoiding those emotions, because they were so overwhelming, and I just didn't want to be there, in a way that I think a lot of us avoid guilt. I mean, these are two really strong feelings that we sometimes just do anything to get away from.

And I think, because they feel similar, like the sort of pit in your stomach, anguish kind of similar, it's easy for us to conflate them. Yet I think the fundamental experience of mourning is mourning, right. And that's because when we experience loss, the human thing is to mourn for that loss, and you might say, well what's the religious value of feeling loss? The only thing that our religion is about is self-improvement and learning what we're supposed to do.

But I think that's actually too narrow a view of religion. That's not the only kind of avodah (service) that we're supposed to do, this conventional, narrow work on yourself: I'm going to say less lashon hara (improper speech) or I'm going to daven a little bit longer, I think that's not the only thing God wants from us. Experiencing mourning, it's something that's human and that's meaningful and that shows that you understand that you've lost something. 

So I really stand firmly that mourning is mourning, and if you read the kinot, what we say on Tisha B'Av, the kinot are about that. The kinot aren't really about so much what we've done wrong. We're not trying to do teshuvah. We're not asking God to forgive us for our sins. If anything, interestingly enough, the kinot do the opposite. Some of them are even accusatory towards God. Like, how could you have done this? 

That goes all the way back to Eichah itself, the very first kinah, which is in the Bible in the Book of Lamentations. There is anger at God. Where Jeremiah talks about God acting as an enemy and as putting bows in His quiver, and how could you have done this and "דָּרַךְ קַשְׁתּוֹ כְּאוֹיֵב" - He has drawn his bow like an enemy (Lamentations 2:4)

So to me It's almost the opposite of guilt. It's almost like part of mourning is that you're excused when you're mourning to have thoughts about God that are not comfortable, and God is able to say, I get it. You're going through a really hard time, and you can say that about me. I'm not going to take it personally. You've got to work that through and we've got to work that through in our relationship.

Personal vs. Communal Grief

Imu:  That distinction makes a lot of sense to me that Tisha B'Av is not really a day about guilt and teshuvah (repentance). It's a day about experiencing mourning. But there's another way that guilt for me gets in, which is that it almost feels like Tisha B'Av is a day where I'm supposed to suffer and mourn events that happened thousands of years ago. 

I try desperately to imagine destruction in this day and age, and the Khmelnytsky Massacres in that day and age, and it feels inauthentic. Then I'm sort of even resentful that I'm asked to feel really bad about these events that didn't happen to me as if, like, why? Why is that part of our religion? Is today “feeling bad day?” So how would you respond to that, to guilt for not being able to conjure the suffering, and also a little bit of resentment for being asked to feel sad for the sake of feeling sad? 

Rabbi Fohrman:  Again, you know, speaking as somebody who lost my father early on in life, I know that mourning can be a touchy thing. Especially when you feel like okay, I have something to mourn about, and here's somebody shedding what seems to be crocodile tears. So I think that a sensitive person can feel, like, look for me to feel bad for something that I didn't experience, you know, what's the value in that? It's like going into a shiva house and trying to pretend that I can understand when I don't really feel that way. Inauthentic grief isn't a good thing. 

I think to that I would say that the kind of grief that you're dealing with here is not grief over a personal loss, but communal grief over a national loss. And communal grief is a whole different ball of wax. We are all members of a community, and the nature of communities is that they do transcend time, they're like bodies. You know, what if I got stopped for speeding and when I showed up in court, a year-and-a-half later for going 109 miles an hour in a school zone. My defense is “officer, you know, I really understand how terrible that was, but that person wasn't me.” And then the judge says, “it says you on the license.” I say yes, that's true, but scientifically every cell in my body has actually died, and other cells have regenerated since then, and not one cell, or very few cells, that were in my body at that time are still alive today. I'm an entirely new person.”

You know, the judge wouldn't be amused. I wouldn't get off because the body is a community of cells. It's not that there's a din (judgment) on each individual cell. Communities transcend the loss of individual members. Communities transcend time.

We live in this very fragile golden age. Who knows how long it'll last in America? The golden age of Spain, pales by comparison. I think on Tisha B'Av it's a moment to identify with brothers and sisters across time without respect of time. We talked about that a little bit in one of our other Tisha B'Av courses dealing with suffering, the notion of sort of transcending time and space somehow, and part of that is this identification with losses that have happened in our time and in previous generations. 

So I think the idea is yes, we didn't go through the Crusades and yes, we may not have even gone through the Holocaust, but we are part of a community that did, and if we can get in touch with that, we're tapping into something deep . To have a living, breathing community which has not died, it's a special thing to be a part of that, and I think it's almost a strange kind of uplifting aspect of Tisha B'Av that transcends the sadness, but that we connect to that being part of something larger through sadness.

Identifying with Individuals

Tikva:  You know, listening to you, I really like the way that sounds, but if I’m honest with myself, I don’t know if I know how to feel that way, it’s very enviable to me, I would like to. Do you have a way that you do that, either on Tisha B'Av or before Tisha B'Av in order to feel that connection?

Rabbi Fohrman:  To me, part of it is identifying, if you can, with stories of individuals throughout time and feeling yourself connected to them. Maybe it's cheating. I've just said community, community, community, but who's there in community? Community doesn't matter unless there's individuals in the community. So at some level there's this strange, mysterious interaction between community and individual, community and individual which is almost like an alternating current. 

I think one of our most popular, so to speak, if you can call it popular, Tisha B'Av courses is one that we did on Rachel. I think we called it "Rachel's Tears". "Rachel's Tears" is on the story of Rachel and her relationship with Leah, dealing with this terrible kind of rivalry between these two sisters, and taking that into Jeremiah in this beautiful, poetic portrayal of Rachel crying for her children.

Out of all of that, not only do I think we get a better understanding of what it means that Rachel was crying for children, what it means for Rachel and Leah to have been struggling. But we actually get a portrait of Rachel. What do we know about Rachel? We have just a couple lines here and there, right? Who was this woman that Jacob falls so madly in love with? What eternal influence did she have on our people? What made her tick?

To me, it's so hard to get answers to some of those questions, and yet the Bible, through its system of encoding meaning and resonances in Biblical texts that resonates with other texts, through Jeremiah resonating with Genesis, all of a sudden there's this portrait of Rachel that just begins to spring to life.

It feels like oh my gosh, I kind of feel I'm connecting with this person, with Rachel, with the mother of our people and understanding something of her life and her struggle in a powerful way. To me, that's a special kind of way of being able to connect across centuries. 

Imu:  Yeah, for me, a lot of that resonates. I think that maybe a challenge that we have is, when you're mourning things that you've learned about, and you already know that the Temple was destroyed, and you already know that this massacre happened, it's hard to kind of get back there, except through narrative, going back through the texts themselves and expanding the story. I think it's the experience of the narrative. It's going on the highs and experiencing the lows.

Tikva: That also really changes in a big way what we’re doing when we look back. It’s not about the failures, it’s not about making this laundry list of what went wrong. When you try to get into the narrative, every one of these stories becomes a whole universe to itself, with all the richness and complexity of life. Rabbi Fohrman, it makes me think about what you were saying about Rachel. I think Rachel is one of those characters it’s really easy to judge, or Leah – I feel like everyone has one of the sisters they’re sympathetic towards and one they’re tougher on – but what I like about your approach is you’re saying, I’m not here to judge them, I’m here to get to know them, I want to enter into this story, and to be there with them and when you do that it’s really going to expand what these stories can mean for you. 

Tragedy in the Bible

Rabbi Fohrman:  I'll second that. Much of the richness of life comes from tragedy, and that's why great literature always focused on tragedy, and the Torah is no different.

You know, you look at the Torah and it's just, one calamity after the other. it's just these completely dysfunctional relationships. You would think, what an awful idea for a book. Here's this God, redeems us from Egypt and there's this great moment of triumph and it's, you know, The Prince of Egypt, everybody's singing Mariah Carey's "Do You Believe" song, going off into the sunset, only to have everything completely fall apart after that. And yet that becomes our book. That story of dysfunction and of tragedy and of loss and how you work through that is where the richness comes from.

Imu:  One of the things you said really got me thinking. Tanach really does end in tragedy. Sort of the Tisha B'Av tragedy is how, at least the Book of Kings ends, which is the narrative portion of much of Navi (Prophets). Are we just like the rest of the year, excerpting the parts that we like the best and just reading the happy times, but failing to read the whole book? I'm curious what you make of that. Does that have any meaning or relevance for you on Tisha B'Av?

Rabbi Fohrman:  You know, you point out that Tanach ends with the tragedy of Tisha B'Av, which it sort of does. You know, that's the end of the narrative portion of Tanach. I mean, I suppose it continues a little bit in the Book of Ezra so you have a little bit of the hardscrabble rebuilding and the enterprise of the Second Temple starting to come together, although it comes together in an unsure way. So what I would really say is not so much that Tanach ends on a down note, but it ends on a tentative note, almost on a cliffhanger.

What will be with the Second Temple? What will be with the future? It is this great, tantalizing question that the Torah kind of leaves you with.

It's not just Tanach, it's Chumash as well. Think about how the Five Books of Moses ends, it also ends with this tantalizing question which is there's been this quest, this journey all the way to the land. Then you get to the land and you're not quite there and the book ends, and ends with the death of Moses, and ends with, what's going to be? What's going to be the next chapter?

It feels like there's this intentional, sort of mournful, note. The death of Moses, in the case of Chumash. The loss of the Temple and the possibility of rebirth, but question mark around it, in the case of Tanach. That is the way these books end, and I think it's suggesting that the ending isn't really the ending.

An Unfinished Story

My father, alav hashalom, was a great storyteller. We would walk home from shul up these stairs in San Francisco. He'd keep me going with these stories, almost like these Arabian Nights stories. When stories were a little bit scary sometimes, he would say “you know, David, it's always scary in the middle but it works out at the end.” And then after a pause he said, “you know, and if it doesn't work out at the end, it means it's just not the end yet.” I think that's the Torah, and that's Chumash. You know, who says God's story is over? You know, it did end. This canonical section of the Bible, which we call Tanach, ends at a certain point, but God's story doesn't end. It's an unfolding story and it's almost as if Tanach invites us to be part of the story, ending with that kind of cliffhanger. This goes back to the idea that we're supposed to identify with Jewish history. We are part of this. I think the avodah (service) of Tisha B'Av is not to look at Jewish tragedy with bystander eyes. You're supposed to be part of this. You're supposed to feel like I am part of this nation. I live in a different time. but I don't experience this as a bystander. I experience this at some level with the eyes of a participant, albeit the participant who's graced to live in a golden age.

Longing for Redemption

Tikva: This reminds me of another one of the Tisha B'Av courses you did, I don’t know, a few years ago I think, that opens by asking this question about how it’s possible to still be mourning on Tisha B'Av, after all these years wouldn’t the wounds have healed a little bit? And to explore that question, you look at the figure of Jacob, who we’re told continues to mourn for Joseph, all those years while Joseph was in Egypt, Jacob does not get over it and he just continues to weep for him. And one of the things you suggest is maybe that undying yearning that Jacob has for Joseph, it keeps the connection alive and maybe even, somehow giving Joseph strength – he doesn’t know about it, but on an existential level there’s a bond there that was never broken. What I love about that course is that it shows how closely linked grief and hope are. Some wounds, it’s worth holding space for them, because they also keep open the possibility of, I guess change. And I don’t mean change in the guilty way we were talking about before, you-better-do-better now, but I think in a very genuine way, if you can see yourself as a participant and not just a bystander, then maybe part of the natural byproduct of that is that these stories are not going to stay on the page or on the screen, they’re going to come into your life, and you will integrate them, and take lessons from them and see insights and see how they resonate with your life. But again, in this very genuine way that speaks to the connection and the fact that this is your story. 

Rabbi Fohrman:  Yeah, I think so. I think, if you even think about the methodology which the Torah uses to tell its stories, which is something which we highlight over and over and over again in Aleph Beta, this idea of resonance. The present isn't just the present. The present is intimately connected with the past, and I daresay even with the future.

God lives in a world outside of time and the story He tells in His book is a story that links time in very mysterious kinds of ways. There are these echoes that link events and you know, I think that in our own life, as our story continues the story of the Bible, and the story of Jewish history, there's resonances in our lives, too. I think those are something that's part of what gives our lives meaning.

Baseless Hatred

Tikva: Thank you so much, thank you very much for answering this and thank you both for going on this tangent with me. Rabbi Fohrman, I think we were up to you. If someone was coming to Aleph Beta for the first time on Tisha B'Av, which course would you recommend they start with?

Rabbi Fohrman:  I'd recommend probably starting with either "Baseless Hatred" or "Rachel's Tears". "Baseless Hatred" was our second year course. It deals with, I think one of the themes that we overwhelmingly associate with Tisha B'Av which is this notion of sinat chinam and baseless hatred. This course says, you know, what really is baseless hatred? It sort of challenges the notion that any hatred could be baseless. People don't hate people literally baselessly.

It then tries to search for a more adult explanation of what baseless hatred really is, and I think really makes it more relevant. As long as hatred is baseless, we can sort of comfort ourselves with the saccharine notion that at least we're not that awful that we hate people baselessly, and yet once you start thinking about it, we probably have a lot more baseless hatred in our lives than we'd care to admit.

So it's grappling with what this thing really means and coming to a more mature and revelatory understanding of what that is and how it might actually play out in our lives. I think once you see how it plays out in your lives, you realize it's a subconscious process that once you become aware of, you can short circuit in really productive ways, and really takes a lot of needless, baseless hatred out of your life once you realize the kind of traps that are kind of laid out for us that we can avoid.

So to me, "Baseless Hatred" would be a great place to start.

Reflecting on Ten Years of Tisha B’Av Courses

Tikva:  Can I ask another question? You guys have been doing this for 10 years, making these courses. How does it come together for you? If you would have to say how your Tisha B'Av has changed from 10 years ago to today, is there an overarching theme or thread that you can identify?

Rabbi Fohrman:  To me, the only theme is feeling more a part of it. I think if you would have talked to me 10 years ago, before these courses, I really think I would have talked more about seeing Tisha B'Av as a bystander, but these courses feel like I'm not a bystander anymore. Like the view that you get of Rachel is you're there. You just feel like you're in it. As you see the events unfold more and more richly, it transforms your relationship to the event.  It makes you feel like, you know, I wasn't there, but I feel connected to it now.

I think at some level that is the mission of Tisha B'Av,  the lasting legacy of Tisha B'Av is not just that I was sad, but I was sad for the sadnesses of our people, and that is meaningful because I feel connected with them. If I can take joy in the joys of my people and feel sad in the moments of sadness throughout time, then I'm part of it. So to me, that's one of the changes. I'm curious for you guys.

Imu:  Rabbi Fohrman's answer is, as always, far more mature and rich than the one I'm about to give. But I think, for me, going into Tisha B'Av, my expectation and the way I was taught is I would expect every text we see to point out the flaws and the evils of the Jewish people, how we perpetuate those evils, and how we need to change our ways. Here's the horrible avodah zarah, foreign idol worship violations that we did, and here's all the misdeeds that we've accomplished. And I, by not going to minyan enough, and by not being as punctilious in my Sabbath and kashrut observance, I am perpetuating the destruction of the Temple. That's what I expected to see. Not as glibly as that, but I expected it to be about wrongdoings and corrections.

But over and over and over, without ever trying to make this the case, almost every single one of our courses comes down to treatment of others and how that can be healed or avoided. So in our Kamtza and Bar Kamtza course, that was obvious, the struggle there. We did a course on Eichah and Eden which ended up being about conflict. Our course on Hezekiah is really about not including others in the grand endeavor of service of God.

This year's course on Solomon is also about making peace with your brothers. All over there is this theme of the grand peace, of being able to somehow be whole with your nation, with your God, with others. That seems to transcend the more narrow, small view of “here are the sins that you're doing.”

The message of that feels to me like what God wants, first and foremost, is a united nation and maybe even united nations. That's the starting place. That's a meta-theme that sticks with me.

Rabbi Fohrman:  It's beautiful for me to hear you guys' reflection on this. These have been real labors of love for me to work on them with you. It's a privilege to be able to come back to them and it's wonderful to hear how they've resonated with you in these ways and certainly resonated with me, too.

And to the listeners out there, whether it's your first time at Aleph Beta or not, I do encourage you to spend some time with us on Tisha B'Av. Ultimately, we worked on these courses for you, for your kids, for your parents, for your family to enjoy, to discuss, and to bring a new side to your Tisha B'Av experience. I'd be more than privileged for you to check out what's there and to see whether some of these things resonate with you. If they do, I'll consider myself very gratified.

Imu:  I’ll just echo Rabbi Fohrman and say I hope as well that these videos can aid you in exploring some of these texts, and bringing these stories to life in a relevant way, a way that makes you feel like a participant, not just a bystander, this Tisha B'Av. That's the hope. And here's the selfish part, the selfish request is if they do indeed matter to you, please tell us about it. We just set up a new voice message feature, that makes it really easy for you to share your reactions and thoughts with us. There’s a link in the description, you just click it, click the record button and you’re set. We’d really love to hear from you. We put these pieces together, but they aren’t meant to be end points. They’re meant to be starting points for your own explorations and reactions, and it really moves us to hear where they take you. Ok, thank you for listening and I really hope you have a profound and meaningful Tisha B'Av.

Credits:

This episode was recorded by Rabbi David Fohrman, Tikva Hecht and Imu Shalev. 

It was edited by Tikva Hecht.  

Our audio editor is Hillary Guttman. 

Our editorial director is Imu Shalev.