More in ‘fasting’

Pharmaceutical company Merck thinks it has solved your Yom Kippur headache—and that its infamous drug Vioxx, which was the subject of a massive recall and class-action settlement, is involved. The anti-headache drug, marketed as Arcoxia, is a Vioxx cousin. In studies, people who took it the night before a night and day of fasting experienced ...

We should’ve known this day was no good when, on it, Moses’s spies came from the Promised Land with reports of a terrible place littered with walled fortresses and roamed by angry giants. Moses ordered his doubting emissaries killed, but the curse of Tisha B’av lived on: the First Temple was destroyed on this day in 586 BCE. The Second Temple suffered the same fate exactly 656 years later, in 70 CE. Sixty-five years after that, in 135 CE, the Bar Kokhba revolt failed, its leader was killed, and its flagship city, Betar, was destroyed. Then, one year later, Jerusalem itself was burned, the Temple area plowed, and the fate of the Jews sealed for millennia. As if further insult was needed, in 1492, King Ferdinand of Spain signed the Alhambra Decree, setting Tisha B’Av as the deadline for all of Spain’s Jews to leave for good.