There is no such thing as neutrality, wrote the Hasidic teacher Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh-Leib of Ger, known after his work as the Sefat Emet. He was quoting the ancient rabbinic saying that ‘any generation in which the Temple is not built is a generation in which it is destroyed’. On Tisha Be’Av, the bleak fast which begins this Saturday towards the close of Shabbat and continues until dark on Sunday, we remember the destruction and commit ourselves to rebuilding.

In referring to the Temple, the Sefat Emet didn’t only have in mind a physical construction on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. His was the temple of the spirit, a fourth dimension in which we live according to what God asks for us. If we did so, this physical earth too would be transformed into a world of loving-kindness, justice and peace. It would finally become the sacred space God dreamed of at creation.

I have watched the Temple being built – and destroyed – in many places; so, I’m sure, have you.

I’ve seen its foundation stone set in the Drop-in for Destitute Asylum-Seekers. Bearing the wounds of trauma, yet all too often unwanted, unheard, un-helped and rejected, here people find an island of humanity. If someone were to ask: ‘What’s that got to do with Tisha Be’Av?’ I would answer: on this date our people were made homeless by the sacking of our sacred city and our land; this is the day our people became refugees:

Judah was exiled through poverty and hard labour;
her pursuers trapped her in the narrow passes…(Lamentations 1:3)

I’ve seen another keystone at Kuchinate in south Tel Aviv. Here Eritrean women, who’ve undergone horrors of which they do not speak, can earn enough money to avoid having to live on the streets and resort to prostitution to save their young children from hunger. They weave beautiful baskets to the sound of Eritrean music; they cook familiar dishes and find solidarity in working together.

The Temple is not just a structure of stone; it is also made of trees and meadows, of harmony between nature and humankind. I’ve seen it destroyed in sweeping measure, but also, on a scale as yet too small, recreated. I’ve walked with the family amidst bare mountains in Scotland and, revisiting them years later, seen flourishing woodlands. I’ve planted trees myself to restore the forests of the Jerusalem Hills.

God’s Temple is being built in numerous and unimagined ways. Esther Sills, new on the staff of The Council of Christians and Jews, told me how she connected Park Palace Ponies, a riding centre in an abandoned cinema in Toxteth, with asylum-seeker children. They aren’t allowed to go to school, she told me; they’re stuck inside their accommodation, isolated and frightened. But when they met the ponies they relaxed, smiled for the first time, gained confidence.

This reminds me of a moment of holiness in a central London hospital, where, my friend Jane told me, they brought a horse up 14 stories in the lift because a dying girl wanted to say goodbye. A few weeks later, Jane married her long-time partner there, in the visitor’s room of the neighbouring ward. The nurses allowed flowers; they decorated the whole area; they helped bring Jane to her marriage in a wheelchair. Less than a week later, she died, wise, accepting and at peace.

As we fast on Tisha Be’Av we think of our people’s pain through history, of the suffering of many peoples, of the devastation of nature, – and we therefore resolve to be builders of the Temple and not its destroyers. According to tradition the Messiah is born on Tisha Be’Av afternoon; let the Messiah of hope and commitment be born inside each of us then.

It is essential, wrote Rebbe Shalom Noach of Slonim, that ‘a broken heart belong always to the world of building, not to the world of destruction’.