9th of Av, Tisha B'av UPDATE Aug. 14, 16

Beginning Saturday, August 13th at sunset the 9th of Av, Tisha B'av begins and it ends at sunset Sunday August 14. 

The Temple Mount was closed to Jews Sunday morning, as Arab rioters attacked security forces and hurled stones. Visitors attempting to ascend the Mount on Tisha B’Av, which marks the destruction of both the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem, were barred by Israeli police who said the holy site had been declared off limits to Jews in the wake of violent disruptions which had broken out. More than 300 Jewish visitors toured the holy site prior to the rioting Sunday morning. Police say nine Jewish visitors were detained for “violating visitation rules”. One of the detainees, a 20-year old man, was taken into custody on suspicion he had prayed during the visit. Two others allegedly say “Shema Yisrael” while on the Mount, also considered a form of Jewish prayer and therefore forbidden on the site. Shema Yisrael (or Sh'ma Yisrael; Hebrew: שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל‎‎; "Hear, [O] Israel") are the first two words of a section of the Torah, and is the title (sometimes shortened to simplyShema) of a prayer that serves as a centerpiece of the morning and evening Jewish prayer services.

As the alleged worshippers were detained and removed from the Temple Mount, Arabs gathered around the police and detainees. “During the detention and removal of [the Jews] from the Temple Mount, Muslims began to gather and started shouting. The police pushed back the Muslims and escorted the Jews until they finished their tour and left the Mount.” But activists who had ascended the Mount dispute the police claim, saying that once Arabs began harassing the Jewish visitors, the police removed the Jews from the Mount and shut down the site to further Jewish visitation.

The 9th of Av, Tisha b'Av, commemorates a list of catastrophes so severe it's clearly a day set aside by God for suffering.

In the year is 1313 BCE. The Israelites are in the desert, recently having experienced the miraculous Exodus, and are now poised to enter the Promised Land. But first they dispatch a reconnaissance mission to assist in formulating a prudent battle strategy. The spies return on the eighth day of Av and report that the land is unconquerable. That night, the 9th of Av, the people cry. They insist that they'd rather go back to Egypt than be slaughtered by the Canaanites.  God is highly displeased by this public demonstration of distrust in His power, and consequently that generation of Israelites never enters the Holy Land. Only their children have that privilege, after wandering in the desert for another 38 years.

The First Temple was destroyed on the 9th of Av in 423 BC. Five centuries later (in 69 AD), the Romans destroyed the Second Temple on the 9th of Av.

When the Jews rebelled against Roman rule, they believed that their leader,Simon bar Kochba, would fulfill their messianic longings. But their hopes were cruelly dashed in 133 AD as the Jewish rebels were brutally butchered in the final battle at Betar. The date of the massacre was the 9th of Av!

One year after their conquest of Betar, the Romans plowed over the Temple Mount and sprinkled the area with salt so nothing would grow. 

The Jews were expelled from England in 1290 AD on Tisha b'Av. 

In 1492, the Golden Age of Spain came to a close when Queen Isabella and her husband Ferdinand ordered that the Jews be banished from the land. The edict of expulsion was signed on March 31, 1492, and the Jews were given exactly four months to put their affairs in order and leave the country. The Hebrew date on which no Jew was allowed  to remain in the land was the 9th of Av.

Germany declared war on Russia, effectively catapulting the First World War into motion, on the 9th of Av, Tisha b'Av.

Friends, history isn't haphazard; events, even terrible ones, are part of a Divine plan and have spiritual meaning. The message of time is that everything has a rational purpose, even though we always don't understand it.