Asara B'Tevet: Caring for the Roots, Anticipating Growth

Asara B’Tevet is a fast that feels strangely anticlimactic. No flames. No breached walls. No dramatic last stand. If you were explaining it to someone unfamiliar with Jewish history, you would almost have to apologize. We are fasting, you would say, because something bad started. Not happened. Started.

And that distinction is everything.

On this day, the Babylonian army laid siege to Jerusalem. The city still stood. The Temple was still intact. People woke up, went about their routines, and could plausibly tell themselves that life was continuing. But the direction had changed. The clock had started. From that moment on, even without a single stone falling, the future narrowed.

Judaism cares deeply about beginnings. We mark this day because destruction is rarely sudden. It is usually the result of unresolved problems allowed to calcify, of warning signs explained away, of a collective decision to wait and see rather than act. By the time catastrophe arrives, the most important opportunities to change course are already gone. Asara B’Tevet is the fast of moral lag. The space between cause and effect.

But the same lens that teaches us to fear the early stages of decline also demands that we honor the early stages of growth. Processes do not only spiral downward. They also build upward, quietly and without ceremony. The problem is that we are very bad at noticing that.

We tend to recognize failure only when it is undeniable, and progress only when it is complete. Anything in between feels insignificant. One good conversation does not fix a relationship. One responsible decision does not rewrite a life. One act of courage does not change a society. So we dismiss them. Judaism does not.

The siege teaches that small beginnings matter because they compound. That truth applies just as much to healing as it does to harm. A habit interrupted early. A boundary set before resentment hardens. A moment of honesty before patterns become identity. These are not small things. They are foundations.

Asara B’Tevet asks us to become more attentive historians of our own lives. To ask not only, “What is broken?” but “What is forming?” To notice the early signs that something is drifting in the wrong direction and address them while it is still possible. And equally, to notice the early signs that something is moving toward health, meaning, or growth, and protect them with patience and commitment.

We fast to remember that outcomes are built long before they are visible. And when the fast ends, we are left with a challenge that is both sobering and hopeful. Pay attention early. Intervene early. And learn to respect beginnings, because that is where both destruction and redemption quietly begin.

The fast begins in Jerusalem at 5:17am and ends at 5:12pm.