Q&A: Tisha B’Av
Tisha B’Av
Question
How can one explain rationally that so many calamities happened to the Jewish people דווקא on this day?
The expulsion of the Jews from England, the great expulsion from France, the expulsion from Spain, the outbreak of World War I, the great Aktion from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp.
Can we say that all this is accidental? Isn’t this proof of the truth of the verse, “All her pursuers overtook her between the straits”?
Answer
First, it is not true that all these calamities happened on this very day. They happened around this day, within gaps of a few days one way or the other. In many cases, you can also shift the historical date however you like, because it depends on definitions (when exactly some event began). World War I was not an event connected to Jews. In sum, these statistics are biased. Indeed, quite a few calamities happened in the month of Av (and not necessarily on Tisha B’Av), but I do not know whether, if you gather events around another date, you would not find similar numbers.
And finally, the verse you cited is far from saying that many calamities would happen to us on Tisha B’Av. Midrashim claim that this is a day predisposed to calamity, but the verses do not.
To learn a bit about the statistics relevant to a discussion like this, I suggest you read here: https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%A4%D7%A8%D7%93%D7%95%D7%A7%D7%A1_%D7%99%D7%95%D7%9D_%D7%94%D7%94%D7%95%D7%9C%D7%93%D7%AA
And when you are talking about the same “birth month” (that is, 1 out of 12, not out of 365), the numbers get smaller accordingly.
Now think about how many events throughout the generations could count as a date of calamity. For example, an event on the level of “the great Aktion from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka” that you mentioned here—there were thousands of such events throughout history. In the Holocaust alone there were hundreds of them, in my estimation. Now calculate, according to the formulas you read about, how many of these events should be expected to fall in the same month (out of 12 months).