Last week the Jewish community observed Tishah Be’av. It is a commemoration that is not as well-known and is unique in its observances. There is no glitz or glamour as is common with other holidays. There are no traditional foods (other than boiled eggs and burned toast) to be enjoyed. There are no family gatherings.

And yet, it is a critical moment for the Jewish people. It is a moment in the Jewish calendar when we sit on the floor. We take off our shoes. We read a scroll not by candlelight but by the dimmer, sadder glow of memory.

This is Tishah Be’av, the ninth of the Hebrew month of Av, when we mourn the destruction of both Temples in Jerusalem — the first by Babylon, the second by Rome — and with them, the long exile that followed. In the Jewish community it is seen as our National Day of Grief.

I have always found it strange, and then not strange at all, that this day of ashes sits so close to the start of our Jewish new year. Grief and renewal, it turns out, are friendly neighbors.

The rabbis of ancient Jewish tradition understood this. They placed Tishah Be’av at the bottom of a staircase that climbs, slowly, through seven weeks of comfort, toward Rosh Hashanah. We do not stay in the rubble of destruction and ash. We walk out of it, together, toward the High Holy Days.

This year, the ancient story feels uncomfortably current. Look anywhere in the world right now and you will find people who know exactly what it means to lose a home to fire and shelling, to become strangers in a strange land, or to carry keys to houses that no longer stand. Ukraine. Gaza and Israel. Sudan. Haiti. The Congo. Iran. The Uyghurs of Northwestern China. Afghanistan. The displaced persons camps along countless borders, including those on our own southern border. Displacement is not a metaphor for these families. It is a hard-lived reality. It is the walk to a border crossing with whatever fits in two hands hoping that safety and security is on the other side.

Our own faith tradition gave us language for this long before it gave us solutions. On Tishah Be’av we read the Book of Lamentations. In this piece, written in the wreckage of the first Temple’s destruction, we find a plea that has outlived every empire that ever tried to silence it: “Turn us back to You, O Lord, and we will be turned; renew our days as of old” (Lamentations 5:21).

It is worth noticing what the verse does not say. It does not say fix us, or rescue us, or make the world as it was. It says turn us. The work begins with turning — a small, human motion, available to us long before any large repair is possible. It is a recognition that we cannot fix what is entirely and irreparably broken.

But that does not alleviate our obligation to respond in some way and to try to make the world, and ourselves, better.

That is, I think, the real invitation of this commemoration. Tishah Be’av asks us to practice the turn: away from indifference, toward the neighbor who is suffering; away from certainty, toward humility; away from the comfortable distance of news headlines, toward the harder, closer work of showing up and standing alongside our immigrant neighbors who themselves are living proof that the ashes of destruction and exile are still burning hot. We recognize that we must turn our hearts and bodies, and to keep walking alongside those who are still walking in exile and looking for safety and security. The biblical call to “welcome the stranger” is born from this personal historical memory of our own refugee experience.

And Tishah Be’av is a reminder that out of those ashes can come a vibrant future if we continue that legacy of welcoming now, in our own day, and treat our immigrant neighbors as beloved community members.

At Jewish Family Service of Western Massachusetts, where I serve as the Chief Executive Officer, I work alongside many refugees and immigrants. In that work, and in the daily work of A Faith That Does Justice, the turning is not abstract.

It shows up in a caseworker learning a family’s story. It shows up in an ESOL teacher working one-on-one with a student to help them access a new language. It shows up in a food pantry line, a legal clinic, a volunteer who comes in on a Wednesday because someone needed assistance and they made a choice to show up for them.

Lamentations reminds us that ruins are real, whether they exist dramatically at borders or quietly between neighbors. And it reminds us that ruins are not the end of the story. Renewal is possible. It is just rarely handed to us as a gift. Instead, we have to turn toward it, and then toward one other.

As we move from the ashes of Av, may we find the strength to make that turn. Where there is rejection, may we turn toward welcome; where there is war, may we turn toward welcome; where there is exile, may we turn toward justice; and may we turn toward one another, always.

Rabbi James Greene is the Chief Executive Officer of Jewish Family Service of Western MA, a human service agency based in Springfield, MA, that serves thousands of clients each year, including many refugees and immigrants.