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Over the last ten months, we have set empty chairs at the Shabbat table, added appeals for the hostages’ release to the Grace After Meals, and adapted many other rituals and liturgies to acknowledge the pain and suffering of this time. In doing so, we have marked sites of difference between our Jewish reality in the wake of October 7 and various celebrations on the Jewish calendar.  

But now, we have arrived at Tisha B’Av, the anniversary of the hurban —the destructions of the two Jerusalem Temples and the rampant, brutal losses they entailed—and instead of encountering dissonance, we seem to find sameness. We find ourselves thinking: what happened once, twice, and throughout Jewish history has happened again. The rabbis set the stage for this sort of analogical thinking in the Talmud, where they identify five Jewish tragedies with the Ninth of Av (bTa’anit 26a-b). In bundling these tragedies together, the rabbis suggest we understand them according to the same theological paradigm of sin and punishment. Moreover, the rabbis set a precedent of commemorating all Jewish calamities on this day, preventing mourning from submerging the entire Jewish calendar, as it might, were we to commemorate each one separately. Kalonymus ben Yehuda of Speyer makes exactly this point in “Were That My Head Were Water,” a kinah (dirge) for Tisha B’av written in response to the Crusades: 

And upon the great of the wonderful community of Mainz,
swifter than eagles and stronger than lions,
they too consented in unison to sanctify the awesome One Name.
For them, I will scream a piercing scream with bitter soul,
as if for the destruction of both Temples, razed today…

Take this to heart, and compose a bitter eulogy.
Their murder is worthy of mourning and placing ash,
equal to the burning of the House of our God, the porch and the Palace,
because it is improper to add a day of breach and conflagration,
and wrong to advance the date; rather, to postpone it.
Therefore, today [Tisha B’Av], I will arouse my grief
and lament…

(trans. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, in The Koren Mesorat HaRav Kinot, 2010) 

Though the Rhineland Massacres he is commemorating occurred in the spring, Kalonymus explains that he is lamenting them on Tisha B’Av because it is inappropriate to add new days of national mourning. Terms like “as if” and “equal” connect the burning of “the House of our God” in late antiquity with the attacks on the communities of medieval Ashkenaz.  

There are, however, two ways that Kalonymus disrupts the continuity between the events he is grieving and the razing of the Temples in the already distant past. First, by highlighting the righteousness of the 1096 martyrs, Kalonymus rejects the paradigm of sin and punishment that characterizes biblical and rabbinic attitudes towards the destruction of the Temples by the Babylonians and then Romans. (This is in keeping with other Hebrew Crusade Chronicles, which reverse the conventional paradigm and insist that God is in the debt of these pure souls.) Second, while Kalonymus marks this contemporary trauma through ritual observance of Tisha B’Av, he nonetheless pens a specific kinah dedicated to the 1096 martyrs, creating new language to commemorate this specific loss.  

Centuries later, in his comments on Kalonymus’s kinah, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik draws a straight line between the khurban, the Crusades, and the Holocaust by telling the story of a survivor who returns to Vilna on Kol Nidrei night in 1945, and finds it devoid of its Jewish life: 

His mother was a pious Jewess and of course attended shul on Yom Kippur. When it came time [to recite] Yonah [on Yom Kippur afternoon], she used to leave the shul for half an hour and feed her cat at home. The cat would wait for her, and after feeding the cat, she would return to shul. This man, who knew the cat, spent Yom Kippur of 1945 at the home where his parents had lived, and at 4:30 in the afternoon, there was a scratching at the door. It was the same cat waiting for him to feed her the way his mother had. This visit had a traumatic effect on him. At that moment, he felt the full magnitude of the Holocaust. Indescribable despair and bleakness overwhelmed him.  

This story also illustrates how accurately Lamentations captures the devastation of the Hurban. When a place is desolate and devoid of human beings, it is tragic; but when animals prowl there, the pain is almost unbearable. As the verse in Lamentations (5:18) says, “For Mount Zion is desolate.” It is tragic that Mount Zion is desolate and deserted; but, not only are people absent, the verse continues, “foxes prowl over it.” The fox and the cat walk around. All [the man] saw was the ruins of the synagogue and the cat prowling amidst the ruins. The only link between past and present was the cat. This is the same picture painted by Kalonymus, the author of this kinah. He certainly was familiar with Speyer, Mainz, and Worms when there was vibrant Torah study, liveliness and enthusiasm in the yeshivot and noise and bustle in the streets. And now, he visits the same places and all he sees is “the cat” and he asks, “Where are the Torah scholars? Behold, her place is desolate.” (The Koren Mesorat HaRav Kinot, 2010) 

Soloveitchik argued that Tisha B’Av should serve as the repository for all national Jewish mourning, including the Holocaust. In a 1977 meeting, he tried to convince Menachem Begin—the newly elected Prime Minister of Israel—to move Holocaust commemoration from Yom HaShoah to Tisha B’Av. Unlike Kalonymus, however, Soloveitchik saw no need to write anything new, and went so far as to prohibit the practice. For him, ancient and medieval kinotwritten by authors with supreme spiritual gravitas—accurately capture the depths of contemporary tragedies. 

As we prepare for the fast of Tisha B’Av this year, both Kalonymus and Soloveitchik remind us that there are good reasons to make sense of violent tragedies befalling the Jewish people by analogizing them to earlier moments of Jewish history and commemorating them on one day through the same basic rituals. As Yehuda Kurtzer argued soon after October 7, it is helpful remember that this horror contains familiar echoes. Jews, as it were, have muscle memory when it comes to events like October 7. Yagel Harush’s Kinat Be’eri epitomizes the weaving together of past and present tragedy to create a single tableau, assuaging contemporary pain by invoking tropes of ancient sorrow. It opens: 

Eicha How did Be’eri / turn into my tomb
The day of my light / to the day of my gloom
Its songs silenced/ trampled fruit and leaf
My eyes well with tears / from the depth of my grief

(https://tzohar-eng.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Tzohar-Tisha-BAv-2024-Eng.pdf) 

In lamenting the destruction of Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7, Harush employs language and images reminiscent of Eichah (Lamentations), which is traditionally read on Tisha b’Av, while still paying homage to our 21st century milieu. The line, “My eyes well with tears / from the depth of my grief,” which recurs several times in the poem, conjures Eicha 1:16: “For these things do I weep, My eyes flow with tears.” The motif of tears evokes a well, which is the literal meaning of be’eri and is further underscored by the translation’s use of “well” as a verb. Falling tears also evoke the prayer for rain recited on Shemini Atzeret, the day of the October 7 attacks.       

As poignant as this composition is, however, there are important limits when it comes to analogizing Jewish tragedies and commemorating them as one. Even a single tragedy is susceptible to radically different, if not conflicting, meanings, with significant consequences for the mode and date of commemoration, to say nothing of Jewish politics and theology. The establishment of Yom HaShoah as a national holiday in the early years of the State of Israel was the product of a bitter compromise between ex-partisans, who wanted it to fall on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, namely, the eve of Passover, and religious groups who would not agree to anything approximating eulogy in the month of the Exodus.  

Their disagreement speaks to the larger battle over the ultimate interpretation of the Holocaust, specifically for the Israeli psyche: does the meaning of the Holocaust lie in resistance or in absolute victimhood? Did the Holocaust irrevocably alter Jewish life and belief or was it simply another bend in the lachrymose cycle of Jewish history? If this is true for one tragedy, the complications are compounded when we consider subjecting multiple tragedies to the same interpretation and commemoration. Analogies blur the unique dimensions that characterize each individual tragedy, and that appropriate methods of commemoration help to excavate.  

James Loeffler has pointed out the risks of drawing analogies between October 7 and cataclysms like the Kishinev pogrom or the Holocaust. Such analogies elide the reality of 21st-century Jewish power, more than 75 years after the establishment of the State of Israel. When we imagine ourselves—whether in Israel or North America—as the powerless victims of yet another catastrophe, we lose sight of our political and moral agency. Indeed, in a New York Times op-ed, Jonathan Dekel-Chen, the father of a hostage and an Israeli historian, argues that comparing October 7 to the Holocaust is a way for the Israeli government to wash its hands of responsibility for the attacks.  

In short, in likening October 7 to the Holocaust or in commemorating it on Tisha B’Av, we are taking a cluster of associations—senseless evil, the eternality of antisemitism, divine judgement, and Jewish powerlessness—and assigning them to this day. Analogies are powerful in their ability to shape and determine the meaning of events. However, in our impulse to locate analogies to October 7, we should be precise and responsible about noting which features are similar and which are different. To be clear, this means sacrificing some of the solace we derive from asking, in the words of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything is Illuminated, “What does it remember like?” This exercise of comparison and contrast may come at the expense of the power and grandeur that Jewish memory holds for us.  

For the immediate future, there will be many days and dates that remind us of October 7, 2023. Soon, Tisha B’Av will remind us that we are obligated to mourn this latest massacre of Jewish innocents, in the same way we have done for other ones, stretching back generations. In the late fall, Simchat Torah will ask us how and when to resume dancing—whether for the Torah or for the Nova Festival—after violence disrupts joy. Next spring, Yom Hazikaron will situate October 7 in a broader narrative about the State of Israel, still vulnerable, but with immense reserves of power and success that prior generations of Jews lacked. The period stretching from Yom HaShoah through Yom Haatzmaut will remind us that in the middle of the 20th century, Jews re-entered the arena of history, with the awesome responsibility that entails. And of course, the date of October 7, this year and into the future, will serve as a marker for the world, and will help us recall that Israel is part of the family of nations.  

It will take time and compromise to settle on the most salient meaning of October 7, for Israelis, for Jews worldwide, for Palestinians, and for the rest of the world. How we commemorate October 7, and the analogies we deploy to make sense of it, will inevitably shape this process. We must make sure to undertake this task with intention, precision, and responsibility.