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On the eve of Tisha B’Av in 1935 at Kibbutz Yagur, Yehudah Sharett (brother of Moshe Sharett, the second Prime Minister of Israel) felt that this day of mourning national destruction had to be acknowledged. He assembled excerpts from books of different traditions, intending to read them that evening in the kibbutz dining room. But his kibbutz comrades, for whom any contact with traditional Jewish rituals was anathema, ridiculed him, even commandeering his viola to play a lively and sprightly waltz. Sharett was no pietist; he, too, was a secular kibbutznik. But he later described what he endured that evening as “a harrowing drama, and an alarming testimony to a shameful detachment.” For him, the kinot, the dirges, of Tisha B’Av were not about religiosity, but an experience of the powerlessness of his people over the centuries, and no doubt thereby a heightening of the urgency of the secular Zionist project.  

A year earlier, the prominent labor Zionist leader Berl Katznelson penned this critique of secular obliviousness to the meaning of the day, in response to a Zionist youth group that trekked to a summer encampment on Tisha B’Av:  

What is the value of, and what is produced by a movement of liberation if it lacks rootedness, and is forgetful of the past? Instead of cultivating and embedding deeply in its adherents a sense of one’s source, and a knowledge of the sources, it blots out the memory of one’s point of origin, and cuts off the connecting cords through which the movement should draw its life-force.  

Both the Sharett and Katznelson pieces appear in the 1997 collection, Yalkut Tisha B’Av (A Tisha B’Av Anthology), published by the Jewish Festivals Archive housed at Kibbutz Beit Hashittah in the Bet She’an Valley. The Jewish Festivals Archive was a labor of love and principle initially undertaken by Aryeh Ben Gurion, who believed that the success of a Jewish state demanded knowledge of classical Jewish culture.  

The founders of Kibbutz Beit Hashittah fretted about ba’arut—ignorance. They worried that they were raising a generation that rejected the same religious traditions their elders had rejected, but without the intimate familiarity with the tradition that had informed the earlier generation’s refusal to live by its dictates. And so, to combat that ignorance, these elders published anthologies for all the special days of the calendar, including the 250-page Yalkut Tisha B’Av.  

Beit Hashittah had already learned that a secularized ritual can aid in the processing of loss. With 11 young men killed, the kibbutz had the highest per capita losses in the 1973 Yom Kippur War of any town in Israel. A kibbutz member tellingly described the horror of 11 simultaneous burials as being “like the destruction of the third temple,” a temple no one there longed for. 

They discovered that they needed ritual to assimilate, and live with, the devastating loss. For ritual’s role—whether religious or not—has this characteristic: It is an act that taps into the world of the unseen. People who engage in ritual affirm a commitment to a set of particular beliefs that connect them with a community extending far beyond their own setting.  

Dorit Tzameret, a member of the kibbutz, partly filled this need with a poem titled, “החיטה צומחת שוב” (“The Wheat Grows Again”). Here is an excerpt, translated by Elli Sacks:  

The fields spill out below, as far as earth meets sky, 
Beneath the olive trees and Mount Gilboa. 
At eve, the valley’s splendor hits your eye, 
The likes of which you’ve never seen before. 
 
It’s not the same old house now, it’s not the same old valley, 
You’re gone and never can return again. 
The path, the boulevard, a skyward eagle tarries… 
And yet the wheat still grows again.… 

And everything that was, perhaps will ever be, 
The rising and the setting of the sun… 
And songs are always sung, but can they speak 
The vastness of the loss and all the love. 
 
It is the same old house now, yes it’s the same old valley, 
But you—they never can return again. 
And can it be, how can it be, that through Time’s endless tally… 
Somehow the wheat still grows again. 

This poem protests a God who allows young soldiers to die and yet makes the wheat grow. It was set to music by Haim Barkani, and singing it is a secular ritual to this day, including in the aftermath of the horrors of October 7, with an additional layer of resonance.  

Many artistic creations can and have become the basis for powerful secular rituals. But the most effective are those that attend to Katznelson’s charge to preserve the “connecting cords”: they build on traditional rituals and texts, deftly twisting them, even “deforming” them in such a way as to change the message, while still giving homage to the original. By intentionally playing off or even subverting a religious ritual, secular rituals can remain in dialogue with tradition while confronting religious conventions and expressing different truths.  

Seventeen years after the Yom Kippur war, Yair Rosenblum did exactly this for Beit Hashittah, by writing a melody for the words Unetaneh Tokef, a piyyut from the machzor that could not have been further from the kibbutz’s militant secularity. The music was evocative, but an essential subversive twist came at the end. In Rosenblum’s version, the text culminated with “כחלום יעוף,” a dream that vanishes. The original piyyut had one more line: “But You are the Sovereign who lives eternally,” providing uplift from the brutal realism of the rest of the piyyut. But the Unetaneh Tokef of the kibbutz ended with the vanishing of a dream of 11 young men living long, productive lives. The ending of a composition can make all the difference in determining its valence, religious or secular, and Rosenblum knew what his secular audience needed in a Yom Kippur ritual. 

Sharett’s and Katznelson’s intuitions about Tisha B’Av remain true. Of all the year’s fast days, only Tisha B’Av has not been abundantly overlaid with theological and penitential themes, and that allows space for those for whom religious symbols do not work, but whose spiritual connection is to the Jewish people and its past.  

So, what could be part of a secularized Tisha B’Av? Past examples of creating new secular rituals out of older religious ones offer us a guide. Perhaps surprisingly, Eikhah (Lamentations), the scroll traditionally read on Tisha B’Av, itself contains striking “inner biblical” examples of a creative twisting of a religious text. Consider these lines (emphasis mine):  

I am the man whom the Lord has shepherded [based on JPS emendation] with the rod of God’s wrath; Me he drove on and on in unrelieved darkness…God has filled me up with bitterness, has made me overflow with wormwood. (3:1, 15)  

Now juxtapose these verses with Psalm 23:  The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing… though I walk through a valley of deepest darkness I fear no harm… Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me… You spread a table for me in full view of my enemies, You anoint my head with oil, my cup overflows.  

All of the phrases in bold here appear in both Psalm 23 and Eikhah 3, but the shepherding of Psalm 23 is done with the rod of anger in Eikhah 3; the emergence from deepest darkness turns into a darkening of the Eikhah poet’s world; the full table has become a diet of bitterness in Eikhah, and the overflowing cup of Psalm 23 yields to an abundance of wormwood.  

David Roskies aptly describes this as a case of “ritual reversal”: “By echoing the psalm in the context of bitter exile, the survivor is voicing a protest against God. For a brief instant the suffering individual registers despair by making the most hallowed and hopeful of texts the target of desecration.” 

Katznelson himself composed such a ritual reversal in the Yizkor he wrote for the eight Jews slain in Tel Hai in 1920. The traditional Yizkor is addressed to God, beginning, “May God remember.” Katznelson adapted this language into something quite different:  

יזכּוֹר עם ישׂראל את הנשמוֹת הטהוֹרוֹת של בּניו וּבנוֹתיו  

May the people Israel remember the pure souls of its sons and daughters 

Here, the people Israel is addressed as the crucial agent of memory of the lost souls, not God.  

Asaf Gur’s post-October 7 poem, “Kaddish,” is yet another excellent example. Here are the first six lines of the poem, translated by Michael Bohnen, Heather Silverman, and Rachel Korazim:  

יתגדל ויתקדש שמה רבה  

ואף אחד לא בא  

כמה אלפים קראו לו בשבת בבוקר  

זעקו את שמו  

התחננו בדמעות שרק יבוא  

…אבל הוא שבת מכל מלאכתו 

Yitgadal V’yitkadash Shmei Raba  

And no one came  

Many thousands called Him on Shabbat morning  

Crying His name out loud  

Begging Him with tears just to come  

But He ceased from all his work.  

Gur combines the widely known lines of the traditional Kaddish and the equally well-known story of creation in Genesis, but instead of suggesting order from chaos, as we might expect, these texts now amplify a cri de coeur. 

Religious rituals have always included both religious and secular poems. But for secular communities who are also in need of ritual, poems and music that react to powerlessness and loss can be reworked to express a secular identification with the historic and ongoing travails of the people, while averting ignorance of our heritage.