The eve of the 9th of Av, by the Jewish calendar, is a special night for the Jewish people. On this night, according to tradition, the First Temple was destroyed by the army of Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, in the year 422 B.C. to Talmud sages (586 B.C. to historians), and the Second Temple was destroyed in A.D. 70, amid the defeat of the Jews’ Great Revolt against the Roman Empire. With the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jews were exiled from the Land of Israel in what is considered one of the greatest crises in the history of the Jewish people. Even almost 2,000 years after the destruction of the temple, this day is commemorated in most Jewish communities. Both religious and traditional Jews fast and mourn. In a singular exception, the 9th of Av is the only day of the year when the study of Torah is forbidden, to encourage focus on the national tragedy.

Tisha B'av has become a time for general social soul-searching for many in Israel. Israeli society, with its many sectors, ethnicities and groups, gathers on this night in dozens of social forums across the country to discuss a problem that many probably prefer to avoid the rest of the year: gratuitous hatred, the hatred of people or groups for no practical reason. According to the Talmud (b. Yoma 9b), this hatred was the reason that the Second Temple was destroyed. In the Second Temple period, the Jewish people in Israel were divided into sects and streams that fought each other, which brought about their unsurprising defeat by the Romans.

The gatherings, in which both religious and secular Jews participate, are produced and organized by the Sderot Conference for Society, the Sapir Academic College and the religious-Zionist Bnei Akiva and secular Hanoar Haoved Vehalomed youth groups. At dozens of sites across the country, the gatherings attract politicians across the political spectrum, academics, former judges, social activists, journalists and authors, all deliberating on the topic of gratuitous hatred.

The initiative, founded 20 years ago by the Tzav Pius organization as a response to the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, which caused a deep rift in Israeli society, has become a widespread and cross-cultural phenomenon in recent years. At the gatherings, participants take turns reading, according to the tradition of the 9th of Av, the book of Lamentations — a lament ascribed to Jeremiah the Prophet on the destruction of the temple. After the reading, a pair of speakers debate from opposing points of view. The audience is invited to participate and respond. At the oldest such event, held on the roof of the Gan Ha’ir shopping center in Tel Aviv on July 25, Knesset member Yinon Magal of the right-wing religious Habayit HaYehudi party debated Ayelet Nahmias-Verbin of the center-left Zionist Camp.