“How do we make sure we never lose the land again?”
This question caught me completely off-guard. I was attending the recent Zohar Conference in Tel Aviv when Yael Leibowitz posed it, saying it was the fundamental question facing the Jewish people. Every other issue, she suggested, was secondary.
I have found myself returning to that question repeatedly. At first, it sounded like a question about military strength or politics. The more I reflected on it, however, the more I realized it was asking the central question of Tisha B’Av.
The question, after all, is what Tisha B’Av is really about. We spend the day mourning Jerusalem, reading Eichah and reciting the Kinnot, but the purpose of mourning in Judaism has never been nostalgia. We remember the past because it compels us to examine the present. Why was the land lost? More importantly, what kind of society must we build if we are to ensure that it is never lost again?
The Torah’s answer is remarkably consistent: The Land of Israel is not simply an inheritance; it is a covenant. Again and again, Moses warns that sovereignty is inseparable from responsibility. A nation that neglects justice, abandons the vulnerable and loses sight of its moral purpose cannot assume that political independence alone will secure its future.
As I left the conference, I realized that I had been wrestling with Leibowitz’s question for years without recognizing it.
This journey began in an unlikely place; not in a synagogue or a beit midrash, but in a corporate boardroom. Early in my career as a CFO, I worked for a CEO whose management style made every meeting unpredictable. Conversations could shift without warning and disagreements often became intensely personal. Eventually, it was decided that both of us should undergo executive coaching.
I entered those sessions convinced I was there to learn how to deal with someone else’s behavior. Instead, I discovered that the person whose reactions I needed to understand first was me.
My coach introduced me to the idea of “emotional intelligence,” explaining that mature leadership begins by pausing before reacting, understanding the motivations of others and thinking beyond the immediate moment. Her words immediately reminded me of something I had loved as a teenager: I played provincial chess, where success depended less on finding the cleverest move than on seeing the game several moves ahead. Good players react to what is happening. Great players anticipate what is coming.
We will keep the land if we remain faithful to the covenant that made our return possible.
In LeNevuchei HaDor, Rabbi Kook compares the life of a nation to the life of an individual. Just as a healthy person can bring all his or her abilities into action, so too can a healthy nation. Kook’s understanding of bitachon (“security”) is equally striking: Trust in God is not passive optimism but the confidence that enables purposeful action, calling upon a nation to use all its strengths in fulfilment of the covenant.
Reading those words, I found myself wondering whether nations require something we rarely speak about. We talk constantly about military intelligence, political intelligence and economic intelligence. Yet perhaps societies also require emotional intelligence; the wisdom to understand themselves, to understand their enemies, to understand one another and to act with patience rather than impulse.
Viewed through this lens, Tisha B’Av reads almost like a study in national emotional intelligence.
The destruction of the First Temple was not a sudden event. For decades, the prophets warned that injustice, corruption and complacency would eventually destroy the nation from within. Among the tragedies commemorated in the Kinnot is the death of King Josiah, one of Judah’s greatest reformers. He restored the Temple, renewed the covenant and inspired a remarkable spiritual revival. Yet despite his righteousness, he fatally misread the strategic reality confronting his kingdom. His decision to confront Pharaoh Necho at Megiddo proved disastrous, accelerating Judah’s collapse.
The lesson is sobering: Good intentions and moral conviction are not enough. Leadership also requires the wisdom to recognize the moment in which one is living.
The fall of the Second Temple is a different story. Here, the sages identify sinat chinam (“baseless hatred”) as the decisive failing. That phrase has become so familiar that we sometimes overlook its practical meaning. The problem was not disagreement; vigorous disagreement has always been part of Jewish life. The problem was that disagreement hardened into contempt and ideological certainty displaced covenantal responsibility.
The zealots embodied this tragedy. Convinced that compromise was betrayal, they burned Jerusalem’s own food supplies during the Roman siege, believing famine would force the population to continue fighting. Instead, they weakened their own people and hastened the city’s destruction. Alongside this is the story of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza, in which a personal humiliation escalated into a national catastrophe because no one possessed the humility to interrupt the cycle of resentment and revenge. Rome destroyed the Temple. But long before the Romans breached Jerusalem’s walls, the covenant that bound Jewish society together had begun to disintegrate.
It is difficult to read those stories today without thinking about our own generation. In Israel, the months preceding Oct. 7, 2023, were marked by unprecedented internal division. The judicial reform debate fractured families, friendships and communities. Whether one supported or opposed the reforms is almost beside the point. The more troubling question is whether we had begun to lose the capacity to disagree without questioning one another’s legitimacy.
Then came the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel, exposing another failure altogether. For years, Jerusalem interpreted Hamas through its own assumptions rather than through the declared intentions of the terrorist organization. We mistook tactical restraint for strategic change. Again, we failed to read the board several moves ahead.
As the ensuing war continues, new debates over military service and the sharing of national responsibility remind us that unity cannot be legislated. It must be cultivated. Empathy does not require agreement; it requires the willingness to understand another person’s fears before dismissing them.
I now realize that my executive coach taught me something far more significant than how to navigate a difficult workplace. She taught me a principle that applies equally to families, organizations and nations. When emotions run high, wisdom begins by slowing down, listening carefully and seeing beyond the immediate crisis.
As I think back to Yael Leibowitz’s question in Tel Aviv, I believe that the Torah’s answer is both ancient and urgently contemporary: We will not keep the land simply because we possess military strength, technological brilliance or diplomatic skill, though all of these are indispensable. We will keep it if we remain faithful to the covenant that made our return possible in the first place.
That covenant demands justice, responsibility, humility and faith. I would add one more quality that our generation desperately needs—national emotional intelligence; the wisdom to read reality clearly, the empathy to preserve our unity and the strategic foresight to recognize danger before it is too late.
Tisha B’Av reminds us how we lost the land. The challenge before our generation is to build the kind of society that ensures we never lose it again.
