Tisha B’Av 2025 B"H For many years, Tisha B’Av was the fast day I struggled with the most. I knew the facts. I knew we were commemorating the destruction of the Beit Hamikdash—the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. I understood it was the day that marked the start of our long and painful exile from our land. But emotionally, it always felt… distant. How do you mourn something you’ve never experienced? How do you weep over ruins you never walked upon?
That all changed during a short trip to Iceland—a land of fire and ice, a place of pristine beauty and surreal landscapes that almost seem otherworldly. Iceland has fewer than 400,000 citizens and feels geographically and culturally detached from the troubles of the Middle East. Yet, even in this remote corner of the globe, I encountered a painful reminder of how deeply embedded hatred toward Israel has become.
Wherever I walked, graffiti smeared with slogans like “Free Palestine” and “Globalize the Intifada” confronted me. These weren’t just empty slogans; they were pointed, coordinated attacks on the very legitimacy of the State of Israel. And this wasn’t limited to fringe radicals—casual conversations revealed the same narrative. One kind taxi driver, not knowing I was Jewish, casually brought up his sympathies for the “poor people of Gaza.”
At first, I couldn’t understand it. What does Gaza have to do with Iceland? Why would someone 3,000 miles away from Israel adopt such a deeply hostile stance?
And then it hit me.
This is the ripple effect of a world in which truth has been rewritten, and history has been forgotten—or intentionally distorted. The lies work because the foundation upon which truth was built—the Temple, our sovereignty, our sacred center—was destroyed 2,000 years ago. We became exiles. And in exile, our voice was muted and our story hijacked.
Today, Israel is painted as a colonizer, and the Jewish people are treated as foreigners in our own land. And the only reason this inversion of history is possible is because of what happened on Tisha B’Av. The destruction of the Beit Hamikdash didn’t just level stone; it opened the door to centuries of exile, persecution, and distortion.
So no—Tisha B’Av is not a history lesson. It’s not about the past. It’s about now.
We mourn because we see the consequences of a Temple destroyed not only in rubble, but in headlines.
We mourn because antisemitism no longer wears a swastika—it wears hashtags and humanitarian language.
We mourn because our children on college campuses are being taught that we are the oppressors, not the oppressed.
We mourn because if we forget Jerusalem, there will be no one left to remember it.
And if we don’t tell our story, someone else will rewrite it.
Tisha B’Av is our refusal to be silent. It’s the day we stand up and say:
We remember.
We belong.
We will return.
So as we fast this year, let’s not do it out of guilt or habit. Let’s fast with a purpose. Let’s fast for the hostages still in Gaza. Let’s fast for our children’s clarity and courage. Let’s fast because when Jerusalem is forgotten, Iceland remembers lies. And only by holding onto the truth can we hope to redeem the future.
אם אשכחך ירושלים – If I forget you, O Jerusalem…
Let us never forget. And let us never let the world forget either.
