The Jewish calendar is punctuated by fast days that most Jews — even many observant Jews — know little about. The Fast of the 10th of Teveth (Asarah B’Tevet) is perhaps the least discussed of these, overshadowed by Yom Kippur, Tisha B’Av, and even the Fast of Gedaliah. And yet this minor fast marks the beginning of a catastrophe whose reverberations define Jewish history to this day.
On the 10th of Teveth, in the year 588 BCE, the armies of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, laid siege to Jerusalem. The city’s walls were not breached that day — that would come months later, on the 17th of Tammuz. The Temple was not destroyed that day — that horror would arrive on the 9th of Av. But the siege began. The noose tightened. And what had seemed unthinkable — the destruction of Solomon’s Temple, the center of Israelite worship, the place where heaven and earth were believed to meet — became inevitable.
The prophet Ezekiel, living among the exiles already deported to Babylon, recorded God’s words on that day: “Son of man, write for yourself the name of this day, this very day: the king of Babylon has laid siege to Jerusalem on this very day” (Ezekiel 24:2). There is an urgency in the repetition — this day, this very day — as if God wanted to ensure that the date would never be forgotten.
Fasting, in Jewish tradition, is not punishment. It is a technology of attention. When the body’s most basic drive — hunger — goes unmet, the mind becomes available for reflection. The Rambam (Maimonides) explains that the purpose of fast days commemorating the Temple’s destruction is to awaken the heart, to open pathways of teshuvah (return/repentance), and to remind us that our ancestors’ suffering resulted from their deeds — a mirror held up to our own lives (Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Ta’aniyot 5:1).
This is uncomfortable teaching. We resist the implication that suffering has moral causes. And indeed, the rabbis were careful: the Talmud (Berakhot 7a) records that we should not attribute others’ suffering to their sins. But the fast days ask a different question — not “why did they suffer?” but “what can I learn from their story?” The distinction is crucial.
The Fast of Teveth carries additional layers. The 8th of Teveth marks the date when the Torah was translated into Greek (the Septuagint) under Ptolemy, an event the Talmud (Megillat Ta’anit) compares to the day the Golden Calf was made — a catastrophe of translation, of loss in transmission, of sacred words wrenched from their context. The 9th of Teveth is associated by tradition with the deaths of Ezra and Nehemiah, the leaders who rebuilt Jewish life after the Babylonian exile. Three days of accumulated loss, compressed into a single fast.
In Sephardic communities, the minor fast days are observed with particular solemnity. Selichot (penitential prayers) are recited, and the liturgy includes distinctive Sephardic piyyutim that give voice to the grief of exile. In Moroccan tradition, the melodies of these selichot are haunting — slow, modal, and deeply communal, sung not as performance but as collective mourning.
I believe the lesser-known fast days serve a function that the major observances cannot. Yom Kippur is inescapable; Tisha B’Av is dramatic and widely observed. But the Fast of Teveth asks: Will you pay attention to the beginning? Will you mark the moment when the walls were still standing but the danger was already present? There is a spiritual discipline in noticing early. In refusing to look away when the first signs of destruction appear, long before the catastrophe becomes undeniable.
In 1949, the Israeli Rabbinate designated the 10th of Teveth as Yom HaKaddish HaKlali — a General Kaddish Day — for reciting Kaddish in memory of the victims of the Shoah (Holocaust) whose date of death is unknown. This decision layered new meaning onto an ancient observance. The fast that commemorates the beginning of Jerusalem’s destruction now also holds space for the six million whose individual yahrzeits were erased along with their lives. The connection is shattering and fitting: Teveth is the fast of beginnings, of the siege before the breach, and the Shoah began with sieges of its own — legal restrictions, social isolation, the slow tightening of a noose that the world chose not to see.
We fast on the 10th of Teveth not because hunger brings the Temple back, but because remembering is a moral act. The fast interrupts the ordinary flow of the day and says: something happened here. Something was lost. And you — alive, awake, present — have a responsibility to carry that memory forward.
Even if you do not fast, I encourage you to mark this day. Read the passages from Ezekiel. Sit with the discomfort of knowing that destruction often announces itself quietly, in the form of a siege, before the walls come down. And consider what in your own life, in your community, in the world, deserves attention before it is too late.
Tzom kal — may you have an easy fast.
— Rabbi Tsipi Gabai