The first resolution asks the Holy One to remove “hostile forces from the Jewish people and the Land of Israel.” Later, the article connects that language to erev rav – “the mixed multitude” – and glosses it as corrupting elements. That framing is not perfectly clear. It may be aimed at internal subversion, external enemies, or some fusion of the two.

That ambiguity is itself the problem.

A court should be terrified of invoking charged categories without defining them, especially when the request is directed upward rather than through any earthly procedure. No names, no standards of evidence, no legal test, no defense, no appeal – only a spiritually loaded category and a plea for Heaven to remove it. Even the insertion of berachamim suggests that those present understood the risk: if one speaks this way toward Heaven, one had better plead for mercy.

If the target is foreign enemies, the wording is imprecise. If the target includes Jews, the wording is worse than imprecise. In either case, this is not how a court should speak if it wants to model the discipline of Torah rather than the heat of apocalyptic imagination.

And it was written in the Nine Days. We know what the tradition says destroyed the Second House. One does not have to flatten this ruling into an explicit attack on Jews to say that language like this should make a Jewish court tremble before it signs.

The Plain of Shinar

Scripture keeps telling this story and never softens it.

On the plain they said let us build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens. The sin was never masonry. It was the conviction that standing before Heaven is an engineering problem. They wanted access and they wanted a name, and they had the sincerity and the labor and the unity to attempt it, and what they lacked was permission.

Nadab and Abihu were not outsiders. They were consecrated, appointed, already inside the service, and they brought fire which He had not commanded. Their zeal was real. Their design was their own.

Saul asked, and the prophets did not answer, and the Urim did not answer, and Heaven went silent — so he found a woman at En-dor who could reach where he could not. He never stopped wanting God’s word. He only refused to accept that the given channels had closed.

Three men who wanted access. Three who took the route not given. The temptation never arrives dressed as rebellion. It arrives dressed as devotion in a hurry.

The Psak That Was on the Table

Here is what actually stings. A court could have spoken in those same hours, with full authority, and shaken the country.

It could have ruled the nation into coordinated teshuva. Into fasting and prayer in the spirit of the ma’amadot. Into concrete physical preparation for the avodah. Into rooting out corruption through the legal and communal instruments that already exist and are already binding. Into a measurable strengthening of observance as the groundwork the sources actually name as the condition of achishena.

Every one of those rulings binds someone genuinely subject to the court — us. Every one is enforceable by the only means a beit din has ever possessed. And every one keeps the order the Torah has held from the beginning: Israel acts, Heaven answers.

Issued on 6 Av, a ruling like that would have been a thunderclap.

What the Nations Are Reaching For

Ten men from the nations of every tongue shall take hold of the robe of a Jew, saying, let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.

Look at what they grab. Not a mystic. Not a technique. A hem — the edge of an ordinary garment on an ordinary Jew who keeps the commandments given through Moses. The prophecy assumes the nations will finally see something they have never seen anywhere else: a people whose God is present because that people lives inside a covenant, on the earth, in daylight.

Every religious civilization already has upward reach. Ladders, ascents, procedures for moving Heaven. Rendered in Hebrew and filed by a court, it is still the same thing, and the watching nations see a mirror rather than a revelation. There is nothing left to take hold of.

The Tower Can Be Left Unfinished

The scaffolding is still up. Nothing has been completed. A ruling can be withdrawn, superseded, or simply allowed to go quiet while a better one is drafted — one aimed at the people, where a court’s voice actually carries.

The builders on the plain never finished either. Theirs stopped in confusion; this one can stop in a better ruling.

And there is something almost merciful in the timing. The document is dated to the days when we sit on the floor. Tradition says the Mashiach is born on Tisha B’Av, in the middle of the mourning, which is the tradition’s way of insisting that the rebuilding starts inside the grief rather than around it. Not upward. Downward, into the ruins, where the work is.

The commandment is not distant. It is not across the sea and it is not in heaven. It is in your mouth and in your heart, that you may do it.

That is still the whole assignment. It always was.