כֹּה אָמַר ה ’צִיּוֹן שָׂדֶה תֵחָרֵשׁ, וִירוּשָׁלַיִם עִיִּים תִּהְיֶה

Yesterday we began to explain one of the five tragic events that we remember on the 9th of Ab, the day of national mourning for the Jewish people. This terrible event, perhaps the least known, is called in Hebrew: “the plowing of the city” of Jerusalem (חרישת העיר).

After the Roman emperor Hadrian retraced his steps and regretted his decision to authorize the Jews to rebuild the Bet haMiqdash, relations between the Jews and the Roman empire began to worsen.

One of the most tense moments was when the emperor traveled to the Middle East and (129-130 of the common era) and was horrified by one of the most common practices carried out by Gentiles in that region: castration, especially of slaves to make them eunuchs, and “taming” them. Let us clarify that castration is strictly prohibited by the Tora. Not only human castration but animal castration as well, something that was (and still is) fully accepted in the non-Jewish world. Adriano, then, prohibited human castration and penalized it with the death penalty.
However, an inexplicably, Hadrian extended the crime of castration to the jewish practice of Berit Mila or circumcision….
The Jewish Sages exhausted all venues to try to explain the nature of Jewish circumcision to the emperor’s representatives, and that it had nothing to do with castration. But nothing worked. Adriano banned circumcision and sentenced the transgressors to death. Some historians speculate that Hadrian was influenced by the early Christians, who for different reasons opposed the practice of circumcision and stated that it had been replaced by baptism. Abolishing circumcision was a great victory for their cause.
This decree, which took place around the year 129, further affected the spirits of the Jews, who were willing to sacrifice everything before failing to fulfill the first precept that corresponds to a Jewish child. It also led to collective despair. They had already given up hope of seeing the Bet haMiqdash rebuilt, and now they were seeing their people was in imminent danger of extinction. In despair, Ribbi Yishmael ben Elisha went on to say: “Perhaps the time has come for us to stop marrying and bringing children into the world (Baba Batrá 60 b)”.

The annulment of the Berit Mila was not the last straw that broke the camel’s back.
While Hadrian’s was visiting Judea he made another terrible determination: in order to prevent for good the rebuilding of the Temple he decided to remove even the ruins of the Holy City, which reminded the Jews of its destruction. Hadrian ordered to “erase all Jewish memory of the city, and to change its name, thus the Jews would finally forget “Yerushalayim”. Hadrian’s plan included the construction of a new Roman temple for Jupiter (a pagan god), in the same place where the Bet haMiqdash used to be….
This (provocative?) actions sparked a state of maximum outrage and motivated the Jews to plan a “suicide” rebellion against the empire. We will talk about Bar Kokhba’s rebellion later, and now we will concentrate on understanding why in Tisha beAb we remember “that the city was plowed”.

In 130 of the common era Hadrian decreed that the name “Yerushalayim” will be eradicated, and that the new city shall be called from now on: “Aelia Capitolina”. “Aelia”, in honor of Adriano, since it was one of his names (Aelio) and “Capitolina”, in honor of the Roman mythological idol, Jupiter capitoline, to whom the pagan shrines of the new city were to be dedicated.
Now, what did the Romans do, in general, to erase an old non Roman city and lay the foundations of a new city in that same place? The ceremony for consecrating a new Roman city consisted of plowing the previous city, more specifically, demarcating new edges of the city with carved furrows. The ceremony of the plowing of Jerusalem and the dedication of the new pagan city took place on the 9th of Ab of the year 130.
This “ceremony” was celebrated by the Romans by minting a commemorative coin. The text of the coin, as we can see in the image above says: “Col (onia) Ael (ia) Capit (olina)”. Representing Rome, Hadrian can be seen clearly on the left side, plowing the furrows of the new Roman city and demarcating its limits.

The plowing of the city of Jerusalem and the changing of its name shows us that the Goyim did everything in their hands, even 2,000 years ago, to eradicate every trace of memory of a Jewish Jerusalem, and ensure that we will never even dream to return and rebuild our Capital or our Temple.

Ironically, today, no one remembers Adriano י”ש and the name “Aelia capitolina” or the ceremonies of the mighty Roman Empire can only be found in history books and museums.
However, 1,900 years after this day, there is no human in this planet that has not heard the name “JERUSALEM”, our capital city, more beautiful than ever, that B”H is again in our hands.

God willing, the imminent reconstruction of the Bet HaMiqdash, is only a matter of time.

WE MUST BE VERY PROUD TO BELONG TO A NATION THAT NEVER ALLOWED ITS MEMORY TO BE ERASED AND WE HAVE TO BE VERY GRATEFUL TO THE ALMIGHTY FOR THE PRIVILEGE OF LIVING IN THESE TIMES, WHICH ONLY THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL DARED TO DREAM OF.

יוֹם מְאוֹרִי

יוֹם מְאוֹרִי חָשַׁךְ בְּגֵרוּשׁ קַסְטִילְיָא אוֹי לִי עַל שִׁבְרִי שֶׁבֶר יְרוּשָׁלַיִם אַל תִּזְכְּרִי עוֹד אֲהָה עָלַי וְאוֹיָה לִי כִּי לְשֶׁבֶר קַאסְטִילְיָא לֹא נִמְצָא צֳרִי מִפּוֹרְטוּגַל נִשְׁמַע קוֹל נְהִי בְּמָרָה אֲהָה עָלַי וְאַלְלַי כִּי אֵין שֶׁבֶר כְּשִׁבְרִי וּמָזוֹר כִּמְזוֹרִי עַז פָּנִים מֶלֶךְ קָשֶׁה מְנֻוָּל שְׁמוֹ אֲהָה עָלַי וְאוֹיָה לִי שָׁכַח שֵׁם אֱלֹהֵי יִשְׁעִי וְאוֹרִי יְלָדִים הָאוֹמְרִים בְּכָל יוֹם שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל אֲהָה עָלַי וְאַלְלַי אוֹמְרִים לָעֵץ הָקִיצָה וְלָאֶבֶן עוּרִי הַמְיַחֲדִים בְּכָל יוֹם ה’ אֶחָד אֲהָה עָלַי וְאוֹיָה לִי אָמְרוּ אָב בֵּן וְרוּחַ אֲשֶׁר הוּא יוֹצְרִי קִיְּמוּ וְקִבְּלוּ אֲבוֹתָם כָּהֵם אֲהָה עָלַי וְאַלְלַי אָמְרוּ שְׁלוֹשָׁה אֵלֶּה הֵם כִּתְרִי וּנְזִירִי סִפְדוּ וּנְהוּ נְהִיָּה עַל בֵּית הַתְּפִלָּה אֲהָה עָלַי וְאוֹיָה לִי אֵיךְ סִפְרֵי הַקֹּדֶשׁ נִטְמְנוּ בַּעֲפָרִי וַחֲכָמִים חֲסִידִים וְאַנְשֵׁי מַעֲשֶׂה אֲהָה עָלַי וְאַלְלַי אָמְרוּ בְאִישׁ מֵת שַׂמְתִּי אֲנִי שִׂבְרִי נַחֲמֵנוּ הָאֵל בְּקָרוֹב בִּתְשׁוּעָה בִּמְקוֹם אֲהָהּ אָרִים בִּתְרוּעָה בְּבוֹא יִנּוֹן וְאֵלִיָּה גוֹאֲלִי

My day of light turned into darkness, with the expulsion of Castilla. Woe to me for my suffering!

Don’t remind me of the destruction of Jerusalem anymore, because for the destruction of [the Jewish communities of] Castilla I haven’t found a remedy.

From Portugal a voice is heard crying with bitterness, because there is no destruction like mine and exile like my exile.

The wicked and cruel king [of Portugal Manuel] “menuval” his name, imposed the uprooting of the name of my God, my Savior, my Light!

The children who used to say every day “Shema Israel” , now say to the wood [the cross] “Rise!” and to the stone [the statues of the christian saints] “wake up!” .

Those who used to say “God is one” now say “the father, the son and the spirit” are my creator.

Their parents [also] had to accept [the forced conversion to avoid death] and they had to say: “These three are my crown and my glory.”

Cry and decree mourning for the [abandoned] Synagogues, and for the sacred scrolls [of Tora] that had to be buried in the dust.

And for the pious sages and men of action, who have been forced to say: “In a dead man I put my hope.”

May God soon console us with His salvation, and that instead of crying “AHA” may we sing with joy, with the arrival of our Messiah and Eliahu HaNabi.

“Once the month of Ab begins, we minimize our happiness.”

During the first nine days of the month of Ab, we prepare ourselves to mourn the destruction of the Bet haMiqdash, the great Temple of Jerusalem. To do this, we minimize our happiness by avoiding celebrations and abstaining from the consumption of what is considered luxurious food: meat and wine.

Why meat and wine? Because these foods were offered in the Bet haMiqdash as animal sacrifices (qorbanot) or wine libations (nisukhin). Thus, abstaining from these foods also expresses our longing for the Bet haMiqdash.

The Mishna in Ta’anit (26B) mentions the prohibition to eat meat and drink wine during the Se’udat haMafseqet, which is the meal right before the fast of Tish’a beAb begins. This is the custom of Yemenite Jews, who avoid eating meat and drinking wine only during the meal before the fast. Over time, most Jews extended these restrictions for a longer period. The Shulchan ‘Arukh (551:9) mentions three different customs:

1. Those who refrain from meat and wine from the 17th of Tamuz.
2. Those who refrain from meat from the beginning of the month of Ab.
3. Those who refrain from meat only during the week of the 9th of Ab.

MEAT In Ashkenazi communities, and in some Sephardic communities (such as the Sephardic Jews of Yerushalayim), people avoid eating meat also during the day of Rosh Chodesh, following the tradition of the Ari z”l. In most Sephardic communities, however, the tradition is to avoid eating after Rosh Chodesh. Meat and wine restrictions do not apply on Shabbat. On the contrary, during Shabbat, we have to eat meat in honor of the Seventh day. The restriction from meat also includes avoiding poultry. Consuming fish during the Nine Days is allowed.

A person who is sick or weak, or a nursing woman during the first thirty days after giving birth, is allowed to eat meat during these days. The rabbi’s advice that, when possible, they should eat chicken instead of red meat. Children are not subject to the restriction of meat. However, Rabbi Obadia Yosef recommends that one year before the Bar or Bat Mitzvah, once they better understand the meaning of mourning for the Temple, they should also avoid eating meat. If a Se’udat Mitzva, such as a Berit Mila, takes place during these days, it is allowed to serve meat. In the old days, in many communities, meat was not served at a Se’udat Mitzva during the first days of the month of Ab because the Shechita, the Kosher slaughtering of animals, was discontinued once the month of Ab began, and fresh meat was not available.

WINE The Ashkenazi custom is to refrain from drinking wine during the Nine Days. The Sephardim have three different traditions:

1. Those who refrain from wine for Nine Days.
2. Those who avoid wine only during the week of Tish’a beAb.
3. Those who do not follow any restriction from wine during the Nine Days.

The Mashadi community’s tradition is to refrain from eating meat and drinking wine once the month of Ab begins, except for Rosh Chodesh Ab and Shabbat.

Other alcoholic beverages, such as beer, are not forbidden during the Nine Days.

HAIRCUT AND SHAVING The Ashkenazi custom is to forbid shaving and cutting one’s hair during the three weeks. In most Sephardic communities, men avoid shaving and cutting their hair only during the week of Tish’a beAb. This is also the opinion of Shulchan Arukh.

In the Mashadi community and other Sephardic communities, men do not get a haircut from Rosh Chodesh Ab, but they are allowed to shave until the week of Tish’a BeAb. Haircut restrictions do not apply to women. Each person should follow his or her community’s tradition.

For more information,  see also this great article in Hebrew

For a more detailed summary of Syrian and all Sephardic traditions of the 9 days, watch this video.

In this text, I describe the four foundational harms of the phone-based childhood. These are profound changes to childhood caused by the rapid technological shift of the early 2010s. Each one is foundational because it affects the development of multiple social, emotional, and cognitive abilities.

•  The sheer amount of time that adolescents spend with their phones is staggering, even compared with the high levels of screen time they had before the invention of the iPhone. Studies of time use routinely find that the average teen reports spending more than seven hours a day on screen-based leisure activities (not including school and homework).
• The opportunity cost of a phone-based childhood refers to everything that children do less of once they get unlimited round-the-clock access to the internet.
• Social Deprivation: The first foundational harm is social deprivation. When American adolescents moved onto smartphones, time with friends in face-to-face settings plummeted immediately, from 122 minutes per day in 2012 down to 67 minutes per day in 2019. Time with friends dropped further because of COVID restrictions, but Gen Z was already socially distanced before COVID restrictions were put in place.
• Sleep Deprivation: The second fundamental harm is sleep deprivation. As soon as adolescents moved from basic phones to smartphones, their sleep declined in both quantity and quality around the developed world. Longitudinal studies show that smartphone use came first and was followed by sleep deprivation.
  • Sleep deprivation is extremely well-studied, and its effects are far-reaching. They include depression, anxiety, irritability, cognitive deficits, poor learning, lower grades, more accidents, and more deaths from accidents.
• Attention Fragmentation: The third fundamental harm is attention fragmentation. Attention is the ability to stay on one mental road while many off-ramps beckon. Staying on a road, staying on a task, is a feature of maturity and a sign of good executive function. But smartphones are kryptonite for attention. Many adolescents get hundreds of notifications per day, meaning that they rarely have five or ten minutes to think without an interruption.
  • There is evidence that the fragmentation of attention in early adolescence caused by problematic use of social media and video games may interfere with the development of executive function.
• Addiction: The fourth fundamental harm is addiction. The behaviorists discovered that learning, for animals, is “the wearing smooth of a path in the brain.” The developers of the most successful social media apps used advanced behaviorist techniques to “hook” children into becoming heavy users of their products.
  • Dopamine release is pleasurable, but it does not trigger a feeling of satisfaction. Rather, it makes you want more of whatever you did to trigger the release. The addiction researcher Anna Lembke says that the universal symptoms of withdrawal are “anxiety, irritability, insomnia, and dysphoria.” She and other researchers find that many adolescents have developed behavioral addictions that are very much like the way that people develop addictions to slot machine gambling, with profound consequences for their well-being, their social development, and their families.

When we put these four foundational harms together, they explain why mental health got so much worse so suddenly as soon as childhood became phone-based.

By Jonathan Haidt

The new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people mentally sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now.

Human brains are extraordinarily large compared with those of other primates, and human childhood is extraordinarily long, too, to give those large brains time to wire up within a particular culture. A child’s brain is already 90 percent of its adult size by about age 6. The next 10 or 15 years are about learning norms and mastering skills—physical, analytical, creative, and social. As children and adolescents seek out experiences and practice a wide variety of behaviors, the synapses and neurons that are used frequently are retained while those that are used less often disappear.

Brain development is sometimes said to be “experience-expectant,” because specific parts of the brain show increased plasticity during periods of life.

(3 to 10: Language)

You can see it with human children, who are able to learn languages quickly and take on the local accent, but only through early puberty; after that, it’s hard to learn a language and sound like a native speaker.

(9 to 15 : Identity)

There is also some evidence of a sensitive period for cultural learning more generally. Japanese children who spent a few years in California in the 1970s came to feel “American” in their identity and ways of interacting only if they attended American schools for a few years between ages 9 and 15. If they left before age 9, there was no lasting impact. If they didn’t arrive until they were 15, it was too late; they didn’t come to feel American.

Human childhood is an extended cultural apprenticeship with different tasks at different ages all the way through puberty. Once we see it this way, we can identify factors that promote or impede the right kinds of learning at each age. For children of all ages, one of the most powerful drivers of learning is the strong motivation to play.

Play is the work of childhood, and all young mammals have the same job: to wire up their brains by playing vigorously and often, practicing the moves and skills they’ll need as adults.

Kittens will play-pounce on anything that looks like a mouse tail. Human children will play games such as tag and sharks and minnows, which let them practice both their predator skills and their escaping-from-predator skills.

Adolescents will play sports with greater intensity, and will incorporate playfulness into their social interactions—flirting, teasing, and developing inside jokes that bond friends together. Hundreds of studies on young rats, monkeys, and humans show that young mammals want to play, need to play, and end up socially, cognitively, and are emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play

One crucial aspect of play is physical risk taking. Children and adolescents must take risks and fail—often—in environments in which failure is not very costly.

This is how they extend their abilities, overcome their fears, learn to estimate risk, and learn to cooperate in order to take on larger challenges later. The ever-present possibility of getting hurt while running around, exploring, play-fighting, or getting into a real conflict with another group adds an element of thrill, and thrilling play appears to be the most effective kind for overcoming childhood anxieties and building social, emotional, and physical competence.

The desire for risk and thrill increases in the teen years, when failure might carry more serious consequences. Children of all ages need to choose the risk they are ready for at a given moment. Young people who are deprived of opportunities for risk taking and independent exploration will, on average, develop into more anxious and risk-averse adults (snowflakes).

Human childhood and adolescence evolved outdoors, in a physical world full of dangers and opportunities. Its central activities––play, exploration, and intense socializing––were largely unsupervised by adults, allowing children to make their own choices, resolve their own conflicts, and take care of one another. Shared adventures and shared adversity bound young people together into strong friendship clusters within which they mastered the social dynamics of small groups, which prepared them to master bigger challenges and larger groups later on.

And then we changed childhood.

The Tree: Adversity and Antifragility

Example of the puppy approaching a big dog, then running away, and then approaching again:

• The puppy is dosing itself, adjusting its level of thrill/fear, and each time it grows a little more fearless.

Parents today:

• Don’t allow their kids to do anything dangerous (e.g., crossing the street).

Trees:

I offer these ideas for reforms, all of which aim to reverse the two big mistakes we’ve made: overprotecting children in the real world (where they need to learn from vast amounts of direct experience) and under protecting them online (where they are particularly vulnerable during puberty).

Young people and their parents are stuck in at least four collective-action traps. Each is hard to escape for an individual family, but escape becomes much easier if families, schools, and communities coordinate and act together. Here are four norms that would roll back the phone-based childhood. I believe that any community that adopts all four will see substantial improvements in youth mental health within two years.

No smartphones before high school

Each child thinks they need a smartphone because “everyone else” has one, and many parents give in because they don’t want their child to feel excluded. But if no one else had a smartphone—or even if only half of the child’s sixth-grade class had one—parents would feel more comfortable providing a basic flip phone or no phone at all.

No social media before 16

Each adolescent feels a strong need to open accounts on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms primarily because that’s where most of their peers are posting and gossiping. But if the majority of adolescents were not on these accounts until they were 16, families and adolescents could more easily resist the pressure to sign up. The delay would not mean that kids younger than 16 could never watch videos on TikTok or YouTube—only that they could not open accounts, give away their data, post their own content, and let algorithms get to know them and their preferences.

Phone-free schools

Most schools claim that they ban phones, but this usually just means that students aren’t supposed to take their phones out of their pockets during class. Research shows that most students do use their phones during class time. They also use them during lunchtime, free periods, and breaks between classes—times when students could and should be interacting with their classmates face-to-face. The only way to get students’ minds off their phones during the school day is to require all students to put their phones (and other devices that can send or receive texts) into a phone locker or locked pouch at the start of the day. Schools that have gone phone-free always seem to report that it has improved the culture, making students more attentive in class and more interactive with one another. Published studies back them up.

More independence, unsupervised free play and more responsibilities 

Many parents are afraid to give their children the level of independence and responsibility they themselves enjoyed when they were young, even though rates of homicide, drunk driving, and other physical threats to children are way down in recent decades. Part of the fear comes from the fact that parents look at each other to determine what is normal and therefore safe, and they see few examples of families acting as if a 9-year-old can be trusted to walk to a store without a chaperone. But if many parents started sending their children out to play or run errands, then the norms of what is safe and accepted would change quickly. So would ideas about what constitutes “good parenting.” And if more parents trusted their children with more responsibility—by asking their kids to do more to help out or to care for others—then the pervasive sense of uselessness now found in surveys of high-school students might begin to dissipate. It would be a mistake to overlook this fourth norm. If parents don’t replace screen time with real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity, then banning devices will feel like deprivation, not the opening up of a world of opportunities.

The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood – The Atlantic