Prophecy Issue 4: Preventing the Destruction

For many Jews raised outside Israel, or outside observant homes, Tisha b'Av was never on the calendar. We knew about the Holocaust. We knew Jews suffered more. But the practice of sitting on the floor to mourn two destructions of Jewish sovereignty and then rising in commitment to return was foreign to us. It was only as adults that we read Eicha, the Book of Lamentations, and learned that above all else, Tisha b'Av is a day of accountability. That despite the power of our enemies, our tradition holds that it was our own actions that tipped the scales toward destruction. It teaches that it is our actions now that will tip the scales again. Prophecy Issue 4 is dedicated to that choice. In the years since October 7, 2023, the Jewish people have faced invasion, war, fractured alliances, fractured identities, a resurgent ancient hatred, and internal divisions breaking into open hostility. This issue gathers activists, scholars, rabbis, researchers, journalists, and artists — writing from Jerusalem and Zichron Yaakov, Michigan and Miami — each naming one piece of our collective life under threat, and each proposing how to prevent its loss: how to prevent the destruction of Jewish peoplehood, as legislation on conversion and prayer turns us into them; how to prevent the loss of Diaspora connection to Israel, as a generation of diaspora youth grows up with no firsthand memory of Israel at all. How we are failing to educate the next generation, how our philanthropic sector is failing us by spending hundreds of millions fighting antisemitism while Jewish literacy erodes, how extremism is fraying our relationships with our Abrahamic cousins. How to stop the erosion of the cultural spaces — publishing, art, memory itself — where understanding has always been made possible. This is Am Israel's reader for this year’s Tisha b'Av, a day of responsibility taking in the shadow of tragedy and scandal. An invitation to mourn, take responsibility, and prevent the next destruction before it is too late.