We are in the period of the Nine Days, the darkest stretch of the Jewish year, leading up to the Ninth of Av — the day the Babylonians burned the First Temple and, centuries later, the Romans burned the Second. We give up meat and wine, leave our hair uncut, and do not hold weddings. But on the Shabbat that falls in the middle of these days, we open the book of Isaiah and hear God say something unexpected.

"What need have I of all your sacrifices?" He asks. "I am sated with burnt offerings… who asked this of you, to trample My courts?" (Isaiah 1:11–12). The incense is an abomination to Him. The festivals exhaust Him. On the very Shabbat before we mourn a house of sacrifice, the prophet tells us God could not bear those sacrifices.

How strange — that on the threshold of mourning the altar, we read that the smoke rising off it was a burden, not a delight.

So what are we actually mourning? If God took no pleasure in the offerings, what did we lose when the place of offering burned?