Monday, August 12 — Erev Tisha b’Av with Rabbi Dorothy Richman and Special Guests Sherril Jaffe Lew and Norman Fischer

• 6:45 p.m. — Start the High Holiday season on Tisha b'Av with Sherril Jaffe Lew. She will share literary and personal reflections on This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared’s Tisha b’Av chapter and invite us into our own spiritual reflection.

  Sherril Jaffe Lew, Rabbi Lew’s widow, is a prize-winning novelist and Professor Emerita of Literature and Creative Writing at Sonoma State University. 

• 7:30 p.m. — Seudah Mafseket, pre-fast meal (please register here)

• 8:05 p.m. — Maariv Service and Reading of Eicha / Lamentations

• ~9:00 p.m. (after the reading) — Join Norman Fischer and Rabbi Richman to continue to commemorate Tisha B’Av in quiet meditation

Tuesday, August 13 — Tisha b’Av

• 7:30 a.m. — Morning Minyan and Reading of Eicha / Lamentations (in-person and on Zoom)

Rabbi Dorothy Richman

Norman Fischer

Sherril Jaffe Lew

On Tisha b'Av, we commemorate disasters that have befallen the Jewish people, including, but not limited to the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. The Babylonian Talmud teaches that the second devastating destruction of the Temple happened because of sinat hinam - baseless hatred. Today, in a world in which there is so much suffering and polarization, hatred seems to be growing. 

So many of us have so much to mourn, individually and as a people. We will come together on Tisha b'Av to mourn, to allow the sadness and grief to be felt, expressed and witnessed together. Rav Kook, the great mystic and first Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of British Mandate Palestine, wrote: “If we were destroyed, and the world with us, due to baseless hatred, then we shall rebuild ourselves, and the world with us, with baseless love — ahavat hinam.” (Orot HaKodesh vol. III, p. 324).

Tisha b'Av, as Rabbi Lew z’l reminds us, is the beginning of the High Holy Day season. Let us mourn together and rebuild better — from love.