Tisha B’Av ‘a call to look inward,’ rabbis say

The fast day, considered the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, is an opportunity for “all people of moral conscience to work together to bring goodness and dispel hate,” Yeshiva University president Ari Berman told JNS. The Tisha B’Av fast is an opportunity both to mourn the destruction of Jerusalem and of the Jewish Temples that occurred some 2,000 years ago and to defend the Jewish state today, rabbis told JNS.