The city once full of people. One night was set aside on the calendar for weeping — and that same night, century after century, kept giving cause to weep. This is what the day brought upon the Jewish people, told scene by scene.
The spies returned from the land with fear, and the whole camp wept through the night for nothing. The Sages taught: that night was the Ninth of Av. You wept without cause, it was said, and so I have made this a night of weeping for all the generations.
For four hundred and ten years the House that Solomon built stood upon the mountain — the heart of a people, the meeting place of heaven and earth. Pilgrims filled its courts three times a year. No one imagined it could fall.
Babylon breached the walls and set the House aflame. In the courtyard, the Sages taught, blood still stirred beneath the stone — Zechariah the prophet, slain there generations before for his rebuke. Only when the full reckoning was spoken did it grow still. The fire caught late on the ninth and burned through the tenth of Av.
A servant carried the invitation to the wrong man. Shamed before the guests and cast from the hall — though he offered to pay for the whole feast — he found the Sages watching, and saying nothing. Their silence, he judged, was consent. Over Kamtza and Bar Kamtza, the Sages taught, Jerusalem was destroyed.
The city held food and firewood enough to outlast a siege of twenty-one years. To force the people into war, the zealots burned it all. The wealthiest woman in Jerusalem went out for bread and found none. And Rabbi Tzadok, who had fasted forty years to turn the decree, was sustained by the juice of a single fig.
Carried out of the sealed city in a coffin, Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai stood before the Roman general and hailed him as king — and that very hour word came that he had been named emperor. Granted a request, he did not ask for Jerusalem. He asked for a house of study, and its teachers. One Judaism ended; another was born.
Herod's Temple rose gold above the city — its stones so bright, it was said, that no one who never saw it ever saw a beautiful building. Rome came days before Passover, the courts swollen with pilgrims, and built a wall around the wall. Four legions. Sixty thousand men. No one could leave.
Famine and faction hollowed the city from within; a torch finished it. Whether a lone soldier acted against orders or on them, the tradition and the historian disagree — the House burned all the same. The same golden stones that once blinded the eye were left black against the sky.
The vessels of the Sanctuary were paraded through Rome — the great Menorah lifted on the shoulders of the victors. The arch they raised to mark the triumph still stands in Rome to this day, the plunder carved into its stone where anyone can see it.
In Betar they planted a cedar for every boy and a pine for every girl, to raise the wedding canopy from their branches when the children married. A princess's carriage broke; her escort cut down a cedar; the people rose against them. Rome heard rebellion — and marched, to make an end.
The dead could not be counted. Rome's own historian records five hundred and eighty thousand fallen by the sword, and nearly a thousand villages laid waste. The Sages told it in the language of grief: the blood ran to the sea a mile off, and the horses waded through it up to their nostrils — that a nation was drowned in its own blood.
When Rome forbade the Torah, they wrapped Rabbi Chanina ben Teradyon in the scroll he taught from and set it alight, laying wet wool on his heart to draw out his dying. His students cried, what do you see? He answered: the parchment is burning — but the letters are flying up. So it would be, again, in the fires of a thousand years of exile.
A mother watched seven sons killed one by one, each refusing to bow, and told the youngest to carry word to Abraham: you bound one — I have bound seven. Four hundred boys and girls, taken by ship for Rome's shame, understood what waited, and gave themselves to the sea instead. The tradition names them all as martyrs — never as a model to follow.
The Roman governor drew a plow across the Temple Mount, marking the place as never to be rebuilt. Judea was renamed. Jerusalem was raised again as a foreign city — Aelia Capitolina — that its own people were forbidden even to enter.
The Sages came to the ruin and saw a fox slip out from the place of the Holy of Holies. They wept — Rabbi Akiva laughed. If the prophecy of ruin has come true so exactly, he said, then the prophecy of return is just as certain. And they answered him: Akiva, you have comforted us.
The second House fell — though its generation studied and gave charity — because of baseless hatred, hidden so well that no one recognized it in themselves. The first exile had a stated end, for its sin was open; this one was given none. And so it is said: if it came down through baseless hatred, it will be rebuilt through baseless love.