Today (Tuesday) is the Seventeenth of Tamuz, the first of two fast days marking the Three Weeks mourning the breaching and then destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in the sixth century BC.
Often in Israel, debates are had as to the relevance of these fast days and this period, given that Israel is independent and Jerusalem is larger and more prosperous than it ever was.
What's there to mourn? And more importantly - how can we personally experience a tragedy so far removed from our own time?
Poet Tehila Siani answered this question by noting the horrific similarity between the breaching of Jerusalem's walls and the attendant massacre - and the breaching of the Gaza border and October 7:
No-one needs to explain
This fall
Why we fast
When they breach
A wall.
(Translation: Avi Woolf)
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