When people speak of a core curriculum in Israel, they almost always mean a general education and the important subjects needed to enter today's technology-driven job market: English, mathematics, computers, cyber studies and more. Tisha B'Av, the day marking the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, offers an opportunity to bring another subject into the public conversation: the core curriculum of identity.
Several days after Tisha B'Av in the Hebrew year 5694, corresponding to 1934, Berl Katznelson, one of the Labor Zionist movement's leading thinkers, learned that counselors from a Zionist youth movement had taken their participants to summer camp on Tisha B'Av night.
Several days later, his essay "Destruction and Detachment," one of Katznelson's best-known and most celebrated works, was published in the Davar newspaper. At its heart was his concern over the status and place of formative events in Jewish national history, or, in practice, their absence from the consciousness of the younger generation. Such an absence, he argued, weakens national identity.
The essay's relevance to our own generation is evident in the fact that it is revisited time and again whenever questions of identity arise, particularly questions concerning the education of the young. Katznelson made clear: "It is inconceivable that they did this knowingly ... Yet this lack of knowledge in itself gives rise to somber thoughts." From his perspective, there could be no separation or disconnect between Jewish religious and national history and the Zionist generation of national revival:
"Had the people of Israel not known how to mourn their destruction for generations on its day of remembrance, with all the intensity of someone whose dead lies before him, someone who has only just lost his freedom and homeland, we would have had no Hess, no Pinsker, no Herzl, no Nordau and no Syrkin ... Yehuda Halevi could not have created 'Zion, Will You Not Ask?' and Bialik could not have written 'The Scroll of Fire.'" How many graduates of today's Israeku education system are familiar with the people and works mentioned in that foundational essay?
There is no question that Tisha B'Av presents a unique challenge for the teaching of Jewish heritage, as many have noted over the years. Its position in the Hebrew calendar means that it always falls at the height of the summer vacation, long after the end of the previous school year and well before the beginning of the next.
A far more significant challenge is that the day commemorates the destruction of the Temple. This was an event of immense religious significance, after which a form of Judaism without the Temple became established, even though the Temple had stood at the very heart of Jewish identity until its destruction.
It is easy to understand why secular Zionism developed an aversion to the very thought that someone might seek to give present-day practical meaning to the prayer, "May the Temple be rebuilt speedily in our days." Rebuilding the Temple is fundamentally different from returning to the land of Israel, settling it and achieving independence, all elements plainly shared by both Zionism and the traditional religious vision of redemption.
It should also be remembered that the Temple Mount is today the most sensitive and consequential point of confrontation between Israel and the many parts of the Muslim world. Much Jewish blood has been shed in recent generations against the backdrop of the false slogan that Al-Aqsa Mosque is in danger. Hamas, it should be recalled, calls its October 7 surprise attack the "Al-Aqsa Flood."
For these reasons alone, Tisha B'Av deserves to be restored to a central place in Israel's national identity. For the day to become a meaningful element of that identity, it need not be confined exclusively to a narrow religious interpretation.
Israeli singer-songwriter Ariel Horowitz, the son of renowned songwriter Naomi Shemer, once told an interesting story about his mother's famous composition "Father's Song," whose refrain declares, "The Temple will be built, will be built, will be built." During one of her performances, Shemer stopped singing and stressed to the audience that they should not think the lyrics referred to rebuilding the Temple in the traditional religious sense. Rather, she said, they expressed the national longing to return to the land of Israel.
"Is it truly the case," Katznelson asked in reference to Tisha B'Av, in a question that still resonates today, "that we are capable only of using borrowed symbols, symbols that amount to nothing more than imitation and replication? ... Are we capable only of a detached life, a detached culture and detached symbols?"
