As darkness fell last night, Jews around the world sat on synagogue floors and listened to the chanting of Eicha, the Book of Lamentations, marking the beginning of Tisha B’Av. Traditionally the saddest day on the Jewish calendar, it is a day of mourning for the calamities that have befallen the Jewish people over the centuries—chief among them the destruction of the First and Second Temples and the devastation of Jerusalem.

While the community survived and continued going through the motions of worshipping the god of their forefathers, surely many Jews—in the generation that saw the Temple burn, and the streets of their holy city strewn with starved and butchered bodies—must have lost their faith. And today, as Jews read Lamentations and refrain from eating, drinking, washing, wearing leather shoes or even greeting one another, some may participate in rituals they no longer entirely “believe” in.

On this episode of Not in Heaven, rabbis Avi Finegold and Yedida Eisenstat ask how closely Jewish observance has to line up with personal conviction or theological belief. Sparked by the new Israeli television series Behasture, about a secret group of Jerusalemites who outwardly live fully haredi, strictly religious lives despite having lost their faith long ago, they explore why people remain in communities they no longer internally align with; the pressures of living with the cognitive dissonance between practice and belief; and the costs of searching for a community whose rituals and values perfectly mirror your own commitments.

Credits

• Hosts: Avi Finegold, Yedida Eisenstat, Matthew Leibl
• Production team: Zachary Judah Kauffman (editor), Michael Fraiman (executive producer), Alicia Richler (editorial director)
• Music: Socalled

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