Tisha B’Av’s Camp Revival

For years, Tisha B’Av, the fast day commemorating the destruction of the First and Second Temples that falls when summer is in full swing, was the loneliest day on the American Jewish calendar—observed by only a few, ignored by most. Then along came Jewish summer camp and, presto, Tisha B’Av became the cynosure of camp directors everywhere and, in short order, the collective practice of a most unlikely population: the Jewish adolescent. I exaggerate only slightly when I say that, thanks to an accident of timing and the zealousness of Jewish camping staff, this “black-letter day” came into its own in modern America, its moment in the sun as much a bona fide revival as that of Hanukkah decades before.

As early as 1924, Camp Mohaph, that “glorious march in the development of Jewish boyhood,” made much of Tisha B’Av, positioning the fast day and its rituals as the centerpiece of the well-endowed facility’s “Jewish life.” That year, The Mohaph Mirror, its promotional brochure, not only sang the praises of its ideal location in Glen Spey, New York, “roomy and airy” bunks, private lake, hiking trails, basketball, baseball and tennis courts, and a “bubble of activity.” It also extolled the virtues of its Tisha B’Av service.

“Uncle Hal,” the narrative related, held the camp’s population of Alvins, Seymours, Jeromes, Mortimers, and Mortons “spellbound by his dramatic narration of the history of Tisha B’Av,” while, as a “fitting climax,” Cantor Kantor chanted the kinos, or lamentations. Ornamenting the page was a stark black-and-white illustration, just one of a handful, which brandished the words “Tisha B’Av,” in a faux-Hebraic font. Underneath the letters, cap-clad boys were shown sitting reverently on the floor while, by candlelight, one of their elders read from a sacred text.

In the years that followed, as the number and type of Jewish summer camps multiplied, the repertoire of Tisha B’Av rituals grew to include dressing in white and setting memorial candles afloat on the lake as night descended: the stuff of powerful and uplifting memories.

Equally powerful, though far less benign, memories were also generated by the increasing saturation of Tisha B’Av with Holocaust remembrances, becoming in the secularist, Yiddishist universe of summer camps, its exclusive focus. An “antidote to forgetfulness,” Leibush Lehrer, Camp Boiberik’s director, called the reimagined fast day, an unparalleled opportunity to “enlarge [the campers’] memory to include not only themselves and those immediately around them, but an entire people.”

These days, most American Jews have probably heard of Tisha B’Av even if they’re not entirely sure what it’s all about; its unusual name rings a distant bell. In the event they haven’t, a memorable scene in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel made sure they would. A second-season episode set in the Catskills in the summer of 1959 found the Maisels and the Weissmans at breakfast. As family members took their seats, one by one, the first thing they noticed was the empty plate that belonged to the Weissmans’ willowy, blond daughter-in-law Astrid, herself a recent convert. “You’re not eating?” they asked, as if such a thing were hard to imagine.

Tentatively, Astrid explained that today was Tisha B’Av, a fast day, only to draw a blank from her tablemates who, apparently never having heard of it, made a hash of its Hebrew name. Taken aback, she wondered aloud if she was the only one who cared (although that’s not exactly how she put it). When her fidelity to Jewish history and tradition continued to generate zero interest, much less stir up any admiration, Astrid became increasingly aggrieved and, to no one in particular, blurted out, “these were important fucking temples!”

That, too, fell on deaf ears, everyone at the table either too preoccupied with eating or their own personal dramas to pay this wrenching historical moment any mind. The incident was played for laughs—“oh, those Jews”—but if you were really paying attention, you came away thinking that the trivialization (or, more harshly, the erasure) of Tisha B’Av was no laughing matter.

By the 1880s, observers of American Jewish ritual behavior noted that the Ninth of Ab, as the fast was then commonly called in English-speaking circles, was all but “extinct,” a relic of the past, its evocation of sackcloth and ashes one for the books. Mourning the destruction of the ancient Temples was no longer practiced by Reform Jews—then the vast majority of American Jewry—for whom talk of “the temple” conjured up the majestic one on Main Street, not the one laid low in Jerusalem. They harbored no hopes for the restoration of Zion either, for they had already found theirs in the USA. American Jews, it was said, had “turned their backs” on the Ninth of Ab, letting it sink into “lazy oblivion.”

Still, when the day rolled around, Reform-oriented newspapers such as the American Israelite made sure to comment on the fast day’s fate. Accounting for as well as noting its absence became a form of commemoration in its own right—and, in some circles, cause for celebration rather than breast-beating.

Some commentators blamed the summer, that “season of holiday-making, when the atmosphere is charged with jubilation,” maintaining that high temperatures, hijinks, and ritual acts of renunciation didn’t mix. “With us,” the American Israelite observed in 1880, the “Ninth day of Ab follows too closely after the Fourth of July to be upheld as a day of mourning.”

Still others took a broader, more historical, view, arguing that modernity and, with it, the tendering of equal political and civic rights to the Jews rendered obsolete any kind of wishful thinking for the sovereign nation of yesteryear. American Jews now had a home and a nation to call their own; no need to go pining after one that dated back millennia. A bright new era had dawned in which dirges and lamentations had no place; rousing anthems were more like it. As Reform Rabbi Max Heller put it in 1906, the “Ninth of Ab marks another Exodus, a midnight out of which light was born.”

Just because Tisha B’Av had gone the way of the camel didn’t mean it couldn’t be put to good use. The English-language Jewish press seized on the dark day as an opportunity to point out the curious ways in which Jewish tradition persisted despite all the inroads made by modernity. In what we today might call ethnographic foraging, it sent out its reporters in search of quaint and outlandish practices associated with the ancient fast. They did not come up empty-handed. Here and there, pockets of age-old customs, devotional oddities, persisted: worshipers sitting on the floor during services in stocking feet, using candles in lieu of electricity, placing thistles and thorns in the sanctuary, and, perhaps most eye-catching of all, wearing woolen mittens—in the summer, no less!—so as to discourage the shaking of hands, a convivial gesture not in keeping with the solemnity of the occasion.

Rabbis as well as journalists deployed the obsolescence of the Ninth of Ab for their own ends, often transforming the day of mourning into an opportunity to knock Zionism, then in its early febrile days, into a cocked hat. Speaking before the Jewish Chautauqua Assembly in August 1897 on the “Ninth of Ab,” Dr. Kaufmann Kohler, then dean of the Reform rabbinate, laced into those of his coreligionists whose rallying cry was “Back to Jerusalem! Back to Judea! Back to the Orient, ye Jews of Occidental civilization!,” taking them to task for their misguided views. “I have in my youth shed more tears over Jerusalem’s fall than the Herzls and the Nordaus and the Zionists probably ever did,” he continued, “but to me Zion is more than a mere national dominion…To me, Zion stands for the fulfillment of the religious mission of the Jew.”

Not everyone agreed, of course. Internal discord was as much an attribute of modern Jewry as it was of their ancient forbears. Some American Jews at the time rallied around the cause of Zionism, calling for the restoration of the ancient kingdom and deriding Kohler’s position as “foolishness.”

Many of their ilk also rallied around the observance of Tisha B’Av, making a case for “ceremonialism.” As the editors of the American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger, a traditionally oriented weekly, put it in 1889, “it is not any morbid brooding over the lost glories of the past, nor any cross-grained indifference to the advantages we enjoy in the present that causes us to pray a tribute of tears.” Rather, it is “simple manliness to recall them, to perpetuate their memory and, above all, to pluck from the memory the lessons of fidelity to principle.”

A couple of years later, in 1898, the paper’s advocacy of Tisha B’Av assumed a less strident, more lyrical, tone when it published a heartfelt poem titled “Dirge,” written by Esther Jane Ruskay. One of its stanzas went like this:

Jerusalem! Jerusalem!
Woe to them! Woe to them
Whose streaming eyes
And mournful cries
Ascending to unanswering skies
Bewail thy fate
Jerusalem!

Others, even within the Reform movement, went further still, seeking to persuade their coreligionists to reconsider their neglect of the venerable fast day. Though their efforts were ultimately futile—few, if any, modern American Jews were ever persuaded to give up their ice cream cones in exchange for reciting kinos—it wasn’t for want of trying.

“Why should we celebrate only the happy moments in our history?” wondered Rabbi Montague N.A. Cohen, in 1902. Why not “accord the honor of thoughtful accommodation” to the Ninth of Ab? The claims of history demanded no less. And should they not prevail, the woeful state of our Russian brethren was a cruel reminder that, among the Jews, misfortune and calamity were not of the past but all too current.

In that spirit, even those who had no interest in fasting on the Ninth of Ab were enjoined to make a charitable contribution on that day. “There is no cause that commends itself so much to the Ninth of Ab as the Jewish National Fund,” the organization declared in 1912 and again in 1914. “Every dollar given to the Fund is, therefore, of everlasting benefit to the Jewish people.” Two years later, as WWI ravaged Eastern Europe, a call went out to the nonfasting members of the American Jewish community to donate whatever they would have spent on food on Tisha B’Av for Jewish war relief: “It is our duty to help, not with tears and lamentations, but with sacrifice.”

Still, no amount of despair could have predicted the very next twist and surprising turn in Tisha B’Av’s history: its embrace in the 1920s by observant Jewish camping professionals and their young American charges, which permanently changed the fast day’s trajectory from oblivion to prominence. Had it to do with the Balfour Declaration? With heightened interest in the Middle East and its ancient Temples? With the devastation wrought by WWI? It’s hard to say: Religious revivals, after all, work in strange ways.

What can be said is that then, as now, no matter how the Ninth of Ab was marked—whether by fasting, lighting a candle, making a donation, contemplating the ruptures of the Jewish historical experience, or giving the entire nine yards the cold shoulder—one thing was not in dispute. As night followed day, the gloom of Tisha B’Av would invariably give way to the hopefulness of Shabbat Nahamu, the very next moment on the Jewish calendar.