And yet, since the moment when it was fixed by the monks of Palestine, the choice of the beginning of August for this commemoration has had also another coincidence which is extremely full of meaning: as a matter of fact, according to the Hebrew calendar the 9 of the month of Av falls on those very days, a day of fast and mourning during which the people of Israel commemorates the destructions of the first and the second Temple of Jerusalem (which occurred respectively in 586 BC and in 70 AD). Since then, the people of Israel also commemorates all the tragedies which marked Jewish history, such as the expulsion from Spain in 1492, till the utmost “catastrophe,” the shoah of the Nazi massacre of the last century.

Thus, born to contemplate Christ as the new Temple, not made by human hands, coinciding with the commemoration of the destruction of the Temple built by men, born to celebrate the destiny of light that awaits each man, the Transfiguration ended by having its meaning tragically enriched by the memory of a light — which blinds the hit mankind and makes the mankind that causes it ugly — and of the commemoration of the annihilation of the place and of the people chosen by God to reveal Himself. While Christians, in their churches filled with light, celebrate God’s glory which is refulgent on Christ’s face, the Jews read the book of the Lamentations in their synagogues, which are almost dark because of the dim light of only one candle. And the shadow of a gloomy and disquieting glow of death lies heavy on everybody, the bright cloud of a exterminating light. An upsetting paradox: the light of life of the Transfiguration, which comes from God and announces the future of the world in Christ, contrasts with the light of death produced by men which threatens the present of the world and compromises its tomorrow. The Transfiguration reminds us of the beauty to which mankind and the whole universe are destined, Hiroshima and the shoah witness the brutalization of which men are able; the Transfiguration evokes, assembling it in Christ, the glory to which the human body is destined, the cosmos itself, Hiroshima and the shoah reveal men’s ability to disfigure human flesh, to deform body and soul, to ravage the cosmos.