The Western Wall and Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

This Wednesday night, Jews around the world will sit on the floor, remove their leather shoes, and read the Book of Lamentations by candlelight.

Tisha B’Av, the ninth day of the month of Av, is the saddest day on the Jewish calendar: the day both Temples burned, Betar fell, and catastrophe after catastrophe across 2,000 years of Jewish history seemed to converge on the same date, as if history itself were trying to tell us something.

It is worth asking, this week of all weeks, what those things are.

Because the argument at the center of this fast is not really about the enemies who did the burning. It is about what Jews told each other right before the burning started — and it is an argument we are having again right now.

Start with the two moments in the Torah most Jews think of as opposites. The first is Egypt: a foreign power enslaves us, and we are freed by a force greater than ourselves. The second comes barely a year later, at the edge of the land that our freedom was for. Moses sends twelve men to scout Canaan. Ten return convinced that freedom itself was a mistake. The cities are fortified. The people are giants. We are grasshoppers beside them.

And the generation that had just witnessed so many miracles to get to that point; with its own mouth, chose to go back. To Egypt. To slavery.

Egypt is the story of oppression imposed from outside. The spies are the story of surrender chosen from within. Passover and Tisha B’Av place those two dangers in conversation with one another.

Recent news offers a fresh entry in that second category, dressed, as always, in the language of realism.

Rahm Emanuel recently told an audience at Tel Aviv University that Israel has become a “territorial pariah,” that the world no longer accepts its claims of self-defense, and that it must choose a more accommodating path. Peter Beinart has reached a related conclusion even more directly, arguing that Jewish sovereignty itself has become the problem. Different arguments, different audiences, same underlying message: the greatest danger to the Jewish future is no longer those who seek to destroy Jewish sovereignty, but Jews determined to preserve it.

Notice how the argument is never framed as “let the enemy win.” It comes wrapped in the language of realism. Read the room. Be pragmatic. That was the spies’ argument too. They never claimed the land was worthless. They accurately described formidable enemies and daunting obstacles.

Their failure was not seeing danger. It was treating the danger as destiny.

That is the distinction Jewish tradition asks us to confront, and it remains one that many Jews struggle to grasp. Slavery teaches people to mistake danger for destiny. Freedom requires the opposite habit: seeing danger as something to address rather than something that decides the outcome in advance. The generation that left Egypt escaped physically long before it escaped psychologically. The wilderness became the place where that mentality died so a generation raised in freedom could finally enter the land and establish Jewish sovereignty there.

Every generation gets its Egypt. It also gets its report of the spies. The difference is not one of suffering but of duration. Pharaoh’s army was defeated in a single generation. The mindset the ten spies introduced endured for generations. According to the Mishnah, it echoed so profoundly that it became linked to every major catastrophe commemorated on Tisha B’Av. External enemies eventually pass from history. Internalized defeat can become part of a people’s history unless it is consciously overcome.

That ordering is no accident. The Mishnah in Tractate Ta’anit lists five calamities associated with the ninth of Av, and it places the spies’ report before the destruction of either Temple and before the fall of Betar. The sages were making a profound claim about cause and consequence. External threats end. Pharaoh disappears. Rome eventually falls. Empires die. But the habit of believing that Jewish survival depends primarily on accommodating those who threaten it can outlive every empire that first inspired it.

The tradition likewise attributes the destruction of the Second Temple not primarily to Roman strength but to sinat chinam – baseless hatred among Jews. Once again, the decisive failure was internal before it became external. That is why Tisha B’Av remembers not merely what our enemies did, but what we allowed ourselves to become.

Which leaves an uncomfortable question for Jews living through this moment, whether in Jerusalem or in the diaspora: how much of today’s “tough love” and today’s “as a Jew” hand-wringing reflects genuine strategic disagreement, and how much reflects the ancient reflex of mistaking fear for wisdom?

Jewish sovereignty was meant to be the corrective to that reflex. A people that governs itself, defends itself, and no longer waits for Washington, Brussels, the United Nations, or even well-meaning Jewish critics abroad to determine its fate was meant to become the generation that finally crossed the river the spies persuaded their peers to fear.

Largely, it has.

But the temptation remains. The instinct to apologize for Jewish self-defense, to treat the enemy’s assessment of Jewish vulnerability as more credible than our own capacity to prevail, and to mistake the loudest voices of pessimism or accommodation for the wisest voices of judgment did not disappear simply because the Jewish people once again have an army and a state.

That is why Tisha B’Av remains so relevant. The report of the spies does not return with the same exact message. It arrives in the language of expertise, realism, moderation, and “tough love.” It comes from respected officials, celebrated writers, and fellow Jews who insist that Jewish sovereignty itself has become the problem.

Tisha B’Av does not ask us to pretend Israel is beyond criticism. It asks something far more demanding: whether our criticism strengthens Jewish resilience or revives the ancient reflex that mistakes fear for wisdom and retreat for prudence.

Every generation faces that choice. Ours is facing it now.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.