Last Wednesday, the mayor of New York City wished Jewish New Yorkers a "peaceful Tisha B'Av" and invited them to reflect on "the history and resiliency of the Jewish people." Nowhere in his message did the words Jerusalem, Temple, or Israel appear. Without any shame or sense of irony, he posted it one day after releasing a video in which he called the Prime Minister of Israel a war criminal and expressed his regret that he lacks the legal authority to arrest him when he arrives in the city in September.
Mamdani is happy to praise Jewish history and Jewish resilience, as long as nobody asks where that history took place or what we are mourning. He is happy to honor a wandering people with a talent for survival. But what he cannot do is honor a people exiled from Jerusalem who never stopped yearning to return - and who finally came home. That is the only Jewish people there has ever been.
Tisha B'Av is about a city and a Temple in the land of Israel. Remove those and there is nothing left to commemorate.
In 1771, a group of Scottish editors published the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Three volumes for the whole of human knowledge, which meant that every entry was highly compressed. Incredibly, the Jews received a total of 150 words. What would you include with 150 words? The Sabbath, presumably. The Bible. Circumcision. Here is what they wrote instead, immediately after defining Jews as those who profess obedience to the laws and religion of Moses: "When a modern Jew builds a house, he must leave part of it unfinished in remembrance that the temple and Jerusalem now lie desolate."
That was the first thing they thought of. 89 years before Herzl was born, British academics looked at the Jewish people and concluded that our single most identifying trait was that we build our homes as monuments to our destroyed Temple and our desolate city, thousands of miles away.
This is why Mamdani has to lie about our history. If the Jews are a people from Judea who spent two thousand years mourning Jerusalem and finally came home, then the story he tells about a fabricated Palestine falls apart, and so does the accusation of genocide that he builds on top of it. He cannot let our history be true. So he wishes us a meaningful day of reflection on a past he dedicates his entire career to denying.
Tonight begins the fifteenth of Av, which the Sages called one of the most joyous days of the year. Six days after the saddest day on our calendar, we celebrate. Mamdani knows about Jewish destruction. He is fluent in it. What he does not know is that our people have been buried more times than he can count and climbed out of the grave every time, stronger than before. He runs a city that is falling apart while the Jewish state he slanders grows stronger every day. Jerusalem is larger and more alive today than at any moment in her history.
We outlasted Babylon and we outlasted Rome. I like our odds against the mayor of New York.
On that note, I invite you to join me in New York this Sunday evening, August 2 for an important lecture on this topic. Details and registration information can be found in the flyer below.
Rabbi Pesach Wolicki
Executive Director, Israel365 Action
