SPAIN

On Tisha B'Av, 1492, one of history's most infamous deadlines arrived. It was on that day that the Jews of Spain had to convert or leave the country - or face torture and the auto-da-fe. One Jew was spared from the decree - Don Yitzhak Abarbanel, the famous Torah commentator and statesman who, as finance minister of Spain, had saved profligate Ferdinand and Isabella from bankruptcy. He was too valuable to be confronted with a choice that would have forced him to leave the country.

But Abarbanel spurned the 'generosity' of his monarchs. He tried to induce them to withdraw the decree. Failing, he led as many as 75,000 of his fellow Jews in a march that reached the Spanish border and crossed it on Tisha B'Av. The rabbis of the time permitted Jewish citizens to play music during the trek, despite the laws forbidding such merriment during the three weeks leading up to Tisha B'Av. They ruled that it was a mitzvah to raise the spirits and celebrate the bravery of Jews who were ready to give up everything and to face a hostile world in hunger, disease, and poverty – [in order] to sanctify the Name of God.

Ferdinand and Isabella, with their advisor and mentor the fiendish Torquemada, thought they had broken Jewish spirits by forcing them out of the country that had given them 'golden eras' of Torah, wealth, and influence. They thought that they had proved to the wandering Jews that the Guardian of Israel was asleep and slumbering. They were wrong. Abarbanel and his followers knew the lesson of the calendar. It was Tisha B'Av...

EUROPE

World War One began on Tisha B'Av. To contemporary people, the tragedy of our century is the Holocaust of World War Two - indeed, the words have still not been invented to describe the extent of its loss and suffering. But we Jews have a different measuring rod. The Holy Temple was burned to the ground on the Tenth of Av, but we commemorate the Ninth because it was then that the fires were set. It is impossible to minimize the events of World War Two, but viewing this tortured century in its historic sweep, we must conclude that the fires began to rage during World War One - and it was a pivotal event in shaping the trends of Jewish experience that are still unfolding.

The German sweep into Eastern Europe beginning in 1914 uprooted Jewish communities and demolished a laboriously built tradition that took centuries to shape. Enlightenment, Bolshevism, Socialism, Nationalism, and all the other movements that characterized rebellion against Torah demands and authority, surged through the breach in the wall of tradition. Virtually all of the major rabbis in the wide swath cut by the Germans were exiled for several years. Rabbi Chaim Soloveichik, the Chofetz Chaim, and Rabbi Chaim Ozer Grodzensky were only a few of the many who were forced to leave their flocks leaderless for years at a time. Cities were devastated and tens of thousands of Jews became homeless refugees.

Small wonder that the devastation of the war was no less spiritual than material. The diminished stature of the rabbinate, the extreme poverty afflicting communities and yeshivas, the Bolshevik revolution and the clamping of an Iron Curtain around the three million Jews of Russia, the decay of German political and economic life and the emergence of an evil genius named Hitler - all these and more were legacies of World War One.

In a deeper sense, just as World War Two was a legacy of World War One, World War One was a legacy of earlier times - because World War One broke out on Tisha B'Av, the day that was designated for punishment. The heartbreak and tribulation of this century, too, are manifestations of the historic Tisha B'Av.

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