Every year on Tisha B’Av, Jews throughout the world mourn the destruction of the First and Second Temples. We read the Book of Lamentations, recite ancient kinot, and remember the loss of the Temples.
Yet Jewish tradition sees Tisha B’Av as more than remembrance. It asks every generation: What kind of society are we building today?
The Sages taught that while the First Temple was destroyed because of grave moral failures, the Second Temple was destroyed because of Sinat Chinam (baseless hatred). Whether understood historically or metaphorically, their message remains timeless.
A society begins to crumble when trust disappears, people stop seeing one another as partners in a shared covenant, and disagreement turns into hostility. The destruction of the Temple was therefore not only a collapse of buildings but also an echo of a society’s collapse.
That insight feels painfully relevant today.
Over the past several years, Israeli society has endured extraordinary strain: political polarization, the trauma of October 7, the ongoing war, the anguish of the hostages and their families, the grief of bereaved families, the suffering of the wounded and their loved ones, and profound disagreements about the country’s future.
These wounds transcend any one government. They reflect enduring questions at the heart of the Zionist project: How do we remain both a Jewish and democratic state? How do we preserve deep convictions without losing the ability to listen? How do we transform disagreement into shared purpose?
While these questions often dominate political debate, they cannot be answered by politics alone. At their core, they are educational questions.
As an educator and rabbi, I believe rebuilding Israeli society begins in classrooms, youth movements, community centers, synagogues, universities, and around family tables. It begins wherever young people learn not only mathematics and history, but also how to become responsible human beings.
Judaism has never viewed education as just a transmission of information but as a tool for the formation of character, the cultivation of imagination, and the practice of learning how to live together.
This is why the mourning of Tisha B’Av naturally leads us toward education. If destruction begins with the erosion of human relationships, rebuilding must begin with the teaching of humility, empathy, curiosity, responsibility, and the ability to disagree without hatred.
One rabbinic teaching states that Jerusalem was destroyed because people insisted only on strict justice and failed to act Lifnim Mishurat Hadin – beyond the letter of the law.
A healthy society cannot survive on rights alone. It also requires generosity, restraint, compassion, and a willingness to recognize the humanity of those with whom we disagree.
Importance of Jewish education in the age of AI
These virtues cannot simply be legislated; they must be cultivated through education.
This mission is even more urgent in the age of artificial intelligence.
AI summarizes books, composes essays, translates languages, and answers questions in seconds. If education defines itself primarily as the transfer of knowledge, machines will inevitably outperform us.
But education, especially Jewish education, has never been primarily about knowledge. Its purpose is to cultivate wisdom rather than information, judgment rather than calculation, conscience rather than efficiency, creativity rather than repetition, and meaning rather than productivity.
AI may help us answer questions, but only human beings can decide which questions are worth asking. Only human beings can choose compassion over indifference, dialogue over contempt, and hope over despair.
The rise of AI makes Jewish education more, not less, essential.
Our tradition is built around conversation rather than certainty. The pages of the Talmud preserve disagreement instead of erasing it because truth is rarely possessed by a single voice. Long before modern democracy, the Beit Midrash (study hall) taught that respectful argument can itself become a sacred act.
In a world shaped by algorithms that reward outrage and certainty, Jewish learning reminds us that complexity is not weakness but strength, that disagreement need not destroy community but could be the root of its blessed diversity, and that listening is itself a moral discipline.
This is the kind of leadership our societies now require: educators who are not merely transmitters of curriculum but builders of community, teachers rooted in Jewish tradition while remaining open to broader human conversation.
Education should not produce ideological conformity but responsible citizenship, moral resilience, and hope.
We also need a richer understanding of Jewish identity.
Being a Jewish state is not only about preserving Jewish symbols. It means striving to embody Jewish moral aspirations: human dignity, justice, compassion, responsibility for the stranger, care for vulnerable people, and an unwavering commitment to the sanctity of life.
Likewise, democracy is more than a political system. It is a culture of listening, restraint, shared responsibility, and respect for every person’s dignity.
The challenge before Israel and, in many ways, before Jewish communities throughout the world is not to choose between these commitments but to deepen both simultaneously.
Tisha B’Av is not a day of despair. We mourn because Judaism refuses to normalize brokenness. We remember because memory creates responsibility. Embedded within this day is the conviction that what human beings destroy, human beings can also rebuild.
Perhaps Jerusalem’s rebuilding will not begin with stone. Perhaps it will begin with conversations that restore trust, classrooms that cultivate wisdom, schools that teach respectful disagreement, families that model compassion, and communities that refuse to surrender to cynicism.
Perhaps the rebuilding of Jerusalem begins when we become what Isaiah called repairers of the breach. Every act of education becomes another stone in that rebuilding.
This year, as we mourn the destruction of the Temples, may we also ask ourselves what kind of society we wish to rebuild, and may we find the courage not only to remember what was lost, but to become among those who heal and revive the Israeli society.
The writer is headmaster and managing director of the Leo Baeck Education Center.