This Tisha B’Av Halacha Seems Completely BACKWARDS

It almost feels like a contradiction staring you in the face. We're told that the second base of Mikdash was destroyed because of sinas chinam, baseless hatred, petty division, Jews not getting along with other Jews. Fine. So, if that's the root problem, then Tisha B'Av, the day we mourn that destruction, you would think should be obvious, right? It should be a day of radical unity. It should be a day of handshakes and hugs, of shalom aleichem all over the place. Right? If hatred destroyed the Beit Hamikdash, then you would think peace should rebuild it, right? And yet, what's the halakha? We don't say shalom aleichem on Tisha B'Av. We don't have greetings. There's no warm exchanges. We sit quietly alone, low. We avoid each other. We move through the day with a kind of quiet distance. And the question is, why are we doing this? If the whole problem is that we didn't get along, why, of all days, are we not leaning into connection? It almost feels like we're doing the opposite of what we should be doing. But, what if that question assumes something, and that assumption is off? We tend to think that sinas chinam just means not getting along, but it doesn't. Sinas chinam is not the absence of friendliness. It's the absence of oneness. You can say shalom aleichem to someone all you want and still feel worlds apart. You can smile and shake hands and sit at the same table and inside see the other person as irrelevant or annoying or not my type. That's not unity. That's politeness. And lack of politeness didn't destroy the Beit Hamikdash. Disconnection did. A breakdown in how we saw each other, a loss of the sense that we are actually part of one mission and one people and one story. [music] So, on Tisha B'Av, we strip it all away. No distractions, no surface-level warmth, no easy shalom aleichem to cover over what's really going on inside of us because today isn't about pretending we're united. It's about confronting the fact that we're not. It's a day of honesty, a day where we sit in the discomfort of a broken disconnection and actually feel what that looks like, what it cost, what it destroyed. Because only when you feel the absence of something, do you begin to understand what it really means. You don't fix shalom aleichem with the quick greeting. You fix it by rebuilding how you see another Jew, by realizing that you're not just two people sharing space. You're two pieces of the same whole, that his success is your success, [music] that his pain is your pain, that his role is part of your mission. And until that's real, shalom aleichem is just a nice catch phrase. So, on Tisha B'Av, we don't say it. Not because we don't believe in it, but because we're not willing to fake it. We mourn a world where shalom aleichem actually meant something and we lost it. And if we sit with that long enough, if we let that discomfort do its work, then maybe, just maybe, the next time we say shalom aleichem, it won't be a greeting, it'll be the beginning of rebuilding the Beit Hamikdash.