Tisha B’Av directs the religious imagination deep into its own pain. This fearsome day looks straight ahead, neither to the right nor to the left. In the book of Lamentations, read on the fast day, the suffering that the collective suffers is between the collective itself and its god. Rt. 232 in the south of Israel runs along the Gaza Strip. Along the way of this lonely place of moral chaos and political collapse, there were only signs of political protest against the government of Israel responsible for this “path of abandonment” that the people of Israel is suffering in the wake of the catastrophe of October 7.