JERUSALEM — This Tuesday is a day of mourning for Jews. It is Tisha B’av, which commemorates the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians (586 B.C.) and of the Second Temple by the Romans (in A.D. 70). The day is supposed to be marked by fasting, a practice most Jewish Israelis don’t observe. I do, but don’t ask me why: Like many Jews, I’m not sure how I feel about this holiday.

Tisha B’av became a day in which Jews pray and preach against internal conflict.

Tisha B’av certainly marks horrifying events: the destruction of a place of ritual and the massacre of many Jews, which eventually caused the dispersal of an entire people. And yet, unlike other Jewish holidays, which are marked and observed without much fretting, this one is met with a measure of ambivalence by Jews around the world. As one article puts it, it’s a “tough sell.”

The common Jewish narrative concerning churban (total destruction in Hebrew) is a story about internal division — a story of sinat chinam, or hating one another for no good reason. The Talmud asks why the Second Temple, a place where Jews practiced religious observance and acts of kindness, was destroyed. “Because there was ‘sinat chinam’ in it,” it answers. Hence Tisha B’av became a day in which Jews pray and preach against internal conflict, in the hope that mending such divisions will lead to the Temple’s rebuilding.

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And yet the holiday is intrinsically divisive. On the occasion of Tisha B’av three years ago, a pollster asked a sample of 500 Jewish Israelis, “What, in your opinion, is the worst source of tension in Israeli society?” Forty-one percent answered the “Jewish-Arab issue,” and 42 percent said the “religious-secular issue” — two great problems symbolized by the site honored on Tisha B’av.

Temple Mount is, after all, a source of much friction between Jews and Arabs living in Israel and Palestine, as well as among Israeli Jews over the proper solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And while religious nationalists trumpet the cause of restoring a Jewish presence on Temple Mount, leftists think that campaign is both kooky and dangerous. Israelis are divided over questions of religious freedoms, as reflected in the controversy surrounding the Women of the Wall, a group of women who regularly attempt — not always with much success — to pray at the Western Wall, which is all that’s left of the Temple.

Then there’s disagreement over the meaning of sinat chinam itself. Supporters of the Women of the Wall say sinat chinam is what those opposing the praying are committing. The detractors say it is what the women practice.

Israelis can’t even agree on whether Tisha B’av deserves any special note. If many religious Israelis are somewhat peeved that most secular Israelis don’t care to mark the occasion, many secular Israelis don’t see why restaurants should be closed by law on a day that has little meaning for them.

That makes many reasons to be skeptical, perhaps even cynical, about the prospects for harmony that supposedly attach to Tisha B’Av. With so many conflicting views about the nature of Judaism, the proper relation between religion and the state in Israel, the wisdom of rebuilding the Temple given what that would do to our relations with our neighbors, you have to wonder: On Tisha B’av, we mourn the destruction of a Temple and pray for our people’s revival, but revival into what?