Jewish Holidays

There are, of course, many Jewish holidays. Among the earliest are the three pilgrimage festivals—Passover (Pesach), Shavuot, and Sukkot—each corresponding to a key point in the agricultural cycle. Sukkot is joined in the late summer/early fall by Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, the three together coalescing into a grand New Year festival. Biblical history itself (in this case, the book of Esther) yields Purim, as well as the Ninth of Av (Tisha be’Av, the commemoration of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem), and later significant events are celebrated or commemorated in holidays like Hannukah.  

Prayer books that include the prayers for these occasions often preserve illustrations of the events the holidays recall. In these representations, we see the ways that later generations of Jews identified with their ancestors, who experienced the events first-hand. 

Tisha BeAv

Tisha BeAv (the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, usually occurring in late July or early August) is the fast day that commemorates the destructions of the Jerusalem Temples, along with several other key calamities throughout Jewish history. First mentioned in the Mishnah, the Ninth of Av is not designated as the actual date of the destruction in biblical texts (or the first Temple) or in Josephus (for the second Temple). Nor, according to Jewish eye-witnesses, was the actual date of the decree expelling Jews from Spain in 1492 (an event often associated with this date). But rituals of remembrance and mourning tend to collapse the fine distinctions of history, and Tisha BeAv thus serves as the key date for the recollection of Jewish catastrophes.