A Nation That Dwells Alone | Tisha B'Av Night at West Str Shul

Why has the Jewish people always stood alone?

Recorded on the night of Tisha B'Av, this shiur begins with a simpler question: what does it actually mean to mourn? The grief turns out to be only the surface of it. Underneath sits something else, the very aloneness the day is built to make you feel. It's there in the halachot that shape Tisha B'Av, in the law that forbids a mezumen at the seudah hamafseket even though mourners, in every other context, are permitted one. And it's there from the very opening line of Eicha: eicha yashva badad, how she sits alone.

Drawing on Rav Soloveitchik's reading of that halacha, and on the prophecy given to Bilaam that Israel would be 'a nation that dwells alone,' the Chief traces two entirely different kinds of aloneness: one born of desolation, one born of a mission nothing else can replace. He follows the thread into the present moment, into the three years since October 7th and the resurgence of antisemitism worldwide, and into where Theodor Herzl's founding assumption about Jewish history went wrong.

What would it take to move from one kind of alone to the other? And on a day built entirely around loneliness, what would it mean to choose it, rather than simply endure it?

Key Questions

• What is actually happening, beneath the grief, when a person mourns?

• Why does Jewish law forbid mourners from comforting each other on the one day mourning is most intense?

• What is the difference between a nation that dwells alone because it has been broken, and one that dwells alone because of what it carries?

• Where did Herzl's founding theory of antisemitism go wrong, and what does Tisha B'Av say instead?

• What would it mean to choose the very aloneness we've spent three years trying to escape?