In Summer 2023, graduate school brought me to different parts of Europe for a series of academic programs. I spent six weeks in the south of France for a language immersion program, which happened to overlap with the mournful day of Tisha B’Av. 

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Tisha B’Av, or the 9th of Av, is a fast day in the Jewish calendar that marks the destruction of Solomon's Temple by the Neo-Babylonian Empire and the Second Temple by the Roman Empire in Jerusalem. The fast lasts for 25 hours, and I planned to observe it in secret — feeling wary about antisemitism in France and even more about being an obnoxious American with special preferences. 

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But on the 8th of Av, my teacher clasped her hands and announced that we’d be eating together the following morning. My classmates — largely teens and students in their early 20s from across Europe — shared in myriad accents what they’d bring for breakfast: un jus d’orange, des croissants, un confit de fraises.

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Skipping this assignment wasn’t an option. I offered to bring some baguettes while hiding my dread about the fact that I was about to embarrass myself because of a siege in 70 CE. 

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Yet, my commitment to fasting, even in non-ideal circumstances, was rooted in my dedication to Jewish practice and a long series of de-assimilation experiments. 

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I grew up in a secular and nominally interfaith family that had been highly assimilated for many generations. In my early 20s, living in the Bay Area, I became curious about spirituality and yet cautious about cultural appropriation. I felt lucky that my inquiry into Jewish ancestral practices led me to a blessedly intact, flexible, multi-faceted tradition. I started going to Shabbat services and lighting candles. My “experiments” were always rooted in a sense of engaging with something that has been collectively meaningful to millions of people across thousands of years.

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What happens if I go to a place with other Jews and try to find some meaning in the words that, on the face of it, feel so distant from my own life?

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What happens if I put my body into the same state as the bodies of others who have lived out this tradition for thousands of years — if I forgo food and water while focusing my mind and my heart on the questions of Yom Kippur, of the 17th of the Tammuz, of Tisha B’Av?

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Through a year or two of these “experiments,” I’d found that observing fast days often felt like trying to follow a complicated recipe. I googled the start and end times of the fast and whether I could wear leather shoes. I was overcome with a kind of spiritual perfectionism by trying to recreate an experience so unfamiliar in my recent lineage. Yet, I hoped that by putting my body into a fasting state and fixing my awareness on the right subject, I too would have a meaningful experience unique to my tastebuds, my history, and my memories.

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The morning of Tisha B’Av, my classmates and I sat in a windowless classroom for our planned petit dejeuner. I’d already been fasting since sundown the night before, and my stomach rumbled. As I listened to the crunch of baguettes while pretending to pick at my food, I noticed the Canadian sixteen-year-old staring at me. Her eyes darted to and from my picked-at croissant, clearly uneaten, and I imagined her still-forming brain inferring some kind of lesson about bodies and how much one should eat. 

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Self-conscious, I took a few bites of my croissant. I felt guilty for the rest of the day — guilt for not being brave enough to say I was fasting, guilt for eating on a fast day, and guilt for whatever ways my silence was contributing to diet culture for this teen.

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I was sad, but I feared I was sad for the wrong reasons. As the sun set and I ate Camembert cheese with my host mom in her sweltering apartment, I reminisced on my 17th of Tammuz fast in Scotland just three weeks earlier. For that fast, I had skipped my seminars to sit on the banks of the North Sea and watch giant seagulls encircle each other in the cloudy skies over the deep charcoal rocks.  

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The 17th of Tammuz fast was meaningful, but not easy in the way of communal ecstasy or ancestral connection. Rather, I was angry — not at the Romans, but at the Scottish latitude. On account of my being so far north, this “minor” sunrise-to-sunset fast was only six hours shy of a full 25-hour fast. Moreover, I suspected I was the only one in this rural county fasting. I felt separate from the world — this locale, this secular community, and even my own family — by this experience I had chosen. 

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The tone of the day changed in mid-afternoon when I let my pain become a portal into connection — first through a call with a friend, and then to a sense of collective loss. I realized that struggling through an earth-based practice thousands of miles north of Jerusalem echoes the original loss of the Temple. It is the essence of Diaspora.

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I felt acutely the fraught negotiation between assimilation and Jewish practice, a ripple of that original grief of loss and displacement when the Temples fell. 

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I knew my ancestors in Inquisition-era Spain, in German pogroms, and in Brooklyn had each wrestled with a version of this question, this feeling of difference, the risk of standing apart. It’s a ripple that has touched almost every lineage of Jews across the world. 

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Somehow, finding connection through disconnection sustained me until sunset. 

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A few weeks later, still digesting those bites of my illicit Tisha B’Av croissant, I yearned for that hard-won feeling of a meaningful fast I’d experienced with the sea in Scotland. 

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And yet, the more I thought of it, my Tisha B’Av experience of silence, of hiding, was equally a path to connection with my ancestral experience. I remembered that my Sephardi ancestors went without a Jewish wedding or any major practices until they left Portugal for England in 1727. A Jewish observance is Jewish regardless of whether it’s luminous and collective or challenging and hidden away.  

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Feeling isolated and searching for meaning can feel just as deep as sitting in a synagogue while crying and praying. The meaning we get from ancestral practice comes not only from ecstasy, connection, or properly-placed grief but also from the ashes of grief and disconnection. Rooting myself in the arc of the destruction of the Temple in foreign lands was just another experiment in de-assimilation. 

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Now, when I teach meditation, I often tell people that on the other side of the experience of aloneness is the experience of oneness. The Temple, and Jewish practice more broadly, teach us about how death can feed life, and how grief — like joy and celebration — can be portals to connection across time and space.

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At The Well uplifts many approaches to Jewish practice. Our community draws on ancient Jewish wisdom, sometimes adapting longstanding practices to more deeply support the well-being of women and nonbinary people. See this article’s sources below. We believe Torah (sacred teachings) are always unfolding to help answer the needs of the present moment.

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Sources

Tisha B'Av and Tu B'Av: Letting Go and Building Anew, Sefaria.org

17th of Tammuz, Aish.com

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