Tammuz 17th

 These days if you are an Israeli or a Jew you have it thrust in your face many times a day from ignorant and hateful people around the world that Jews "have no connection to the Middle East", that our people are colonisers, interlopers, thieves and charlatans.

As a Jew who prays three times a day facing Jerusalem and the ruins of its ancient Jewish Temple, who's annual calendar revolves around the rainy cycle of the Land of Israel an who to this day mourns the destruction of our homeland thousands of years ago, this canard is nothing short of ridiculous, a topsy turvy mirror universe accusation that denies the very meaning of Jewish ethnic, cultural and religious identity through the ages.

Today for example was the fast of the 17th of Tammuz, the day the walls of Jerusalem were breached during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem in 586 BCE and centuries later, again, during the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Both sieges were two of the most cataclysmic tragedies to befall the Jewish people, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem, the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Judah (Judea), the killing of many and the exile of much of the Jewish people from our ancestral homeland, first to the Babylonian empire and Egypt, later also to Rome and elsewhere in Europe, the start of many centuries of constant persecution, pogroms, expulsions, spurious blood libels and scapegoating and worst of all the Holocaust.

Millenia later the fast of the 17th Tammuz marks the start of a Jewish period of mourning leading up to the 9th of Av, the date on which the ancient Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, in 586 BCE by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnetzer and in 70 CE by the Romans under Titus. The assault on the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem was an attack on Jewish sovereignty and civilisation, not an accident of the siege of Jerusalem, but a prime target in the attempt of first Babylon and later Rome, to subjugate the Jews, humiliate them and punish them for challenging the might of the region's great empires.

That's right, here and now in the 21st century Jews in Israel and around the world are fasting and mourning the destruction of our ancient capital Jerusalem and its sacred Temple. It is flesh of our flesh, a wound that still bleeds as down the ages the terrible consequences of that terrible day continued to ripple down our agonising history.

On 9th of Av we will sit on the floor as a sign of mourning and read the painfully graphic descriptions in the biblical book of Lamentations, Eikhah, detailing the suffering of our people during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem. We read Lamentations in its original Hebrew, the language clear and accessible to speakers of modern Hebrew today. The descriptions are not for the faint of heart, our ancestors agony our agony.

So painful is that memory that even in modern Jerusalem, today rebuilt and developed on a scale our biblical ancestors could not have imagined, we still feel those scars from the assaults by Babylon and Rome, not only as an almost genetic memory but physically in the heart of our ancient capital, where you can still see blackened, singed, huge blocks of stone where they fell from the ancient walls during the Roman sacking of the city two millennia ago.

It feels ridiculous to have to say these things which are so obvious, such a core part of the culture I grew up with, my parents grew up with, my grandparents grew up with, facts ingrained in our ancient Hebrew prayers, our calendar and our very consciousness. An unbroken chain that binds each generation to the one before in common memory.

And yet today I'm finding I have to explain this over and over and over, even to people who I once thought of as friends, who question why my country, my people, have any right to exist.

Yet another reason to fast and mourn this year.