The newest revision of my Tisha b’Av ritual is now available for download here: Tisha b’Av 5773

About this liturgy:

As a contemporary Jewish feminist and peace activist, I could not pray for the restoration of the Temple and the world view connected to it, but I could honor the vast sense of loss that the tradition of Tisha b’Av held. I’d felt that same loss in writings by Jews exiled from European homelands, and in writings by Palestinians driven into exile in the Nakba at the time of the creation of the Jewish state of Israel. As I tried to create a service for Jewish activists that would both resonate with our own cultural sense of loss AND give voice to our desire to honor the experience of our Palestinians allies, friends, and co-activists, I focused on this shared reality of exile as the theme of the service. As a poet myself, I constructed this service by looking for a mix of poems by Jewish, Arab, and Palestinian writers—a mix that would defy time, location and distance.