If you have signed up to receive THE LIST of atrocities against Jews, you should receive that tomorrow, which gives you time to prepare for the 9th of Av.

My main advice is simple: Just block out some time on the 9th of Av to read the truth for yourself:  about 500 events over about 2,000 years in about 40 pages. I found the reading of it is not too difficult at first, but it gets worse. And in the process you will likely learn many things that you did not know.

Sample Page of the List

Our Limitations

While we know you will learn something, we have absolutely no control over what will be going on in your heart while you read it.

We do pray that God opens up your mind and heart to “see what He wants you to see” and have “ears to hear” what He is saying.

Do not be surprised if interference comes between now and the 9th of Av that might distract you and dissuade you from taking time to look at THE LIST. Israeli citizens knows what surprise interference can look like: 174 rockets were launched from Gaza into Israel during the country’s weekly day of rest.

On the 9th of Av itself, the biggest danger we see for participants is a danger within the heart. Specifically:

• We hope you won’t try to separate Catholic from Protestant. The record is bad in either case.
• We hope you won’t try to separate out in your mind which of the persons of the past was a “saved born-again Christian” and who was not. We don’t see good fruit coming from that exercise.
• We hope you won’t judge us for mistakes we may have made in the list’s compilation. There must be many mistakes and omissions. Our written descriptions and those we repeat from our many, varied sources are certainly not perfect.
• We hope our Jewish brethren won’t judge us for including some selected positive items along with all the negative. A few people did stand up against the tide in a way that “made history,” and so we did not refrain from adding them where we found them. On the other hand, as Christians we must ask ourselves why so few cases were to be found.
• We hope that by ending THE LIST with an important, positive event, that we are not seen as trying to “put a happy face” on a 2,000 year story of grief.

What We Did Not Do

Putting aside our hopes and concerns,  here is something we intentionally did not do in this document: we did not propose your response.

For example, we are not sending you a prayer to pray on this day.

We did, however, mention that the Jewish People will be reading Lamentations. So if you want to add in an element of Biblical truth to go alongside THE LIST of historical truth, then we suggest that book as appropriate.

How Much Time Will it Take?

For those who signed up to receive THE LIST, you will be receiving the link in an email in about 24 hours.

That link will provide you the document as well as the opportunity to respond publicly, and you are welcome to reach out to us privately as well.

While you will certainly open THE LIST in advance, we recommend that you save the formal reading of THE LIST for the 9th of Av — save off at least a couple of hours if you only read the list, and probably at least three hours if you add Lamentations as well.

Be blessed in this endeavor. The truth cannot but make a difference to those whose “hearts are in the right place” to receive it.

Ray and I will be joining you in this process. We must now face the truth again, and listen to the whispering of God once again. We will again wonder how this history was never taught to us before now. And perhaps this time around we will also wonder how it felt, not only to the myriad of Jews through history, but to that particular Jew, Our Lord Jesus/Yeshua, who has watched this atrocious story unfold over the centuries.