On Tisha B'Av Jews Sit on the Floor and Mourn by Candlelight
Every year on the ninth of Av, synagogues dim the lights, remove the Torah curtains, and have congregants sit on low chairs or the floor. Then, in near darkness, they chant Lamentations. The tradition has continued for nearly 2,000 years.
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The ninth of Av is the only day in the Jewish calendar that mourns not a person but a place. The practices of the day are designed not to describe the Temple's destruction but to make the person observing the day feel it — physically, sensorially, in the body rather than just the mind.
Most Jews today have never seen the Temple, lived in its era, or experienced the exile of 70 CE. The practices of Tisha B'Av are tools for making a 2,000-year-old loss present.
What the Synagogue Looks Like on Tisha B'Av
By the evening of the ninth of Av, the synagogue has been prepared for mourning. The parochet — the curtain over the Torah ark — is removed or replaced with a black one. The usual decoration is stripped. The benches may be turned over. The lights are dimmed or reduced to candles. Congregants remove leather shoes at the entrance; leather footwear is one of the five prohibitions of the day, along with eating, drinking, bathing, and marital relations.
The Midrash Rabbah on Lamentations (Eichah Rabbah, c. 400–500 CE) explains the rationale for sitting on the floor: it is the posture of a mourner. In the seven-day mourning period (shiva) following a death, mourners traditionally sit on low chairs. On Tisha B'Av, the community sits low for the entire day, because the Temple's destruction was the community's death — a loss that has never been fully recovered from.
The Chanting of Lamentations
After dark, the lights are dimmed further and Megillat Eichah — the Book of Lamentations — is chanted aloud by a reader from a parchment scroll. The melody used for Lamentations is one of the oldest preserved in Jewish liturgical tradition; manuscripts identifying it date to the medieval period, but the melody itself is believed to be considerably older. It is a descending, mournful line that is unlike any other chant in the synagogue calendar.
The five chapters are chanted sequentially. Chapter 1 begins with the widowed city sitting alone. Chapter 3 — the longest and most personal — speaks in first person: "I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of His wrath." This chapter's final verses are often identified as the spiritual center of the book: "The kindness of God has not ended, His mercies have not ceased. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness." In the middle of the bleakest lament in the canon is a declaration of trust. The Legends of the Jews reads this as Jeremiah's testimony: even in the ruins, he could not write without the truth breaking through.
The Kinot — Elegies for the Nine Days
After Lamentations, additional elegies called Kinot are recited. These poems, accumulated over many centuries — some medieval, some ancient — mourn not only the Temple's destruction but every subsequent catastrophe the Jewish people experienced: the ten martyrs executed by Rome, the Crusade massacres of 1096 CE, the expulsion from Spain in 1492. The day became a vessel into which every great communal loss was poured, its original grief expanding to hold the grief of every following century.
The Babylonian Talmud (Tractate Ta'anit 30b, compiled c. 500 CE) records the tradition that Tisha B'Av will become a day of celebration in the messianic era. The same day that is now the most sorrowful will become the most joyful — the grief and the joy corresponding exactly to one another. This is the tradition's way of saying that the mourning is not permanent but that the repair must be real before the celebration can be genuine.
The Morning Service and the Rest of the Day
The morning of Tisha B'Av continues without tallit or tefillin until the afternoon — mourners do not wear these signs of divine favor. Torah study is also restricted, since it is considered a joy. Only the specific texts of mourning are permitted: Lamentations, Job, the portions of Jeremiah dealing with destruction, the laws of mourning themselves.
The fast breaks at nightfall. There is a custom of softening the transition — not eating meat immediately, not celebrating. The Kabbalistic tradition of 16th-century Safed taught that the day does not end cleanly, that something of its weight carries into the following day. The Ari (Rabbi Isaac Luria, 1534–1572) was known to weep throughout Tisha B'Av as though his own house had burned down that morning. Explore Tisha B'Av texts, Lamentations traditions, and Temple mourning at jewishmythology.com.