The Three Weeks: How the Calendar Grieves Before the Ninth of Av

The Sages call these days Bein ha-Metzarim — 'within the straits.' They run twenty-two days, from the seventeenth of Tammuz to the ninth of Av, and to understand the fast day at the end one has to understand the fast day at the beginning. They are the outer and inner edges of the same wound.

The Mishnah lists five calamities that struck on the seventeenth of Tammuz. Moshe descended from Sinai carrying the two stone tablets, saw the golden calf and the people dancing around it, and — the Sages say the letters flew off the stone at that moment — the tablets became too heavy for him and shattered on the ground.

Near the end of the Babylonian siege of the First Temple, the priests searched Jerusalem for a sheep for the daily offering and could not find one. For the first time since Sinai, the tamid was not brought. In the Second Temple period, the walls of Jerusalem were breached on the same date by the Romans; at the First Temple the breach came a few days earlier, on the ninth of Tammuz. A Greek governor named Apostomos publicly burned a Torah scroll. An idol was set up inside the Sanctuary.

From this day forward, the mourning slowly deepens. No weddings, no haircuts, no music. From the first of Av — the day Aharon died — meat and wine are set aside. In the week the ninth actually falls, no laundry, no bathing. On the day itself, five things are forbidden: eating, drinking, washing, leather shoes, and marital relations — the same five that are forbidden on Yom Kippur.

The pattern is not accidental. First the tablets shatter, then the people weep over the scouts. First the wall cracks, then the Sanctuary burns. First the edge, then the center. Observing the Three Weeks means walking that route in the calendar itself.