The Torah content for these two weeks has been sponsored by Ariel Rachmanov, a friend and Mishlei talmid of mine. Ariel works for Keller Williams Real Estate and has generously offered to donate to the Rabbi Schneeweiss Torah Content Fund a percentage of any business that comes his way as a result of this sponsorship, resulting in a Mishleic "win, win, win" scenario for all parties involved. Ariel is based in New York but will be happy to help you meet your real estate needs in all 50 states.
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| Artwork: Tendrils of Agony, by Rovina Cai |
How to Make Kinnos Real
Over these past two summers I’ve been developing a method of utilizing kinnos for their intended purpose (i.e. facilitating aveilus and national teshuvah on Tishah b’Av). The most recent component of this method is EFT (Episodic Future Thinking). For a full exposition of this approach, see The Role of Episodic Memory in the Three Weeks and Tishah b’Av and the articles linked therein. I’d like to provide two examples of what this looks like in action: the first is my own and is based solely on imagination; the second is from my brother and is based on imagination rooted in real-world experience.
I’m currently learning Kinnah #28: Eich Enacheim? (“How Can I Be Consoled?”). The sixth stanza reads: “[Nevuchadnetzar] slaughtered throngs of those anointed with sacred oil. Young budding kohanim, eighty thousand. How can I be consoled?” It would be very easy to read this, intellectually grasp what it’s saying, then move on. Instead, I asked myself, “What would I think and feel if ALL the kohanim I know were killed?” I went further than that: I did an EFT journaling exercise set five years in the future in which all the kohanim in Israel are rounded up and murdered. I came up with a fictional geopolitical scenario in which this outcome was plausible, then journaled as if the event had just happened. I named specific kohanim (friends, chavrusas, students) and wrote about my grief and disbelief that this type of thing could transpire in the modern era. I wrote the religious doubts and questions that were prompted by the occurrence of such a tragedy.
True, this scenario hasn’t happened. But it could happen. Five years might not sound like a long time, but Auschwitz opened less than five years after the Nuremberg laws were passed. The notion of kohanim, specifically, being targeted sounds ridiculous, but history is rife with examples of specific classes of people being treated as symbols of evil and corruption and marked for extermination. This scenario may sound farfetched, but it is not impossible.
If this exercise sounds unpleasant, it was. That was the point: to induce trauma through imagination and knowledge as a catalyst for teshuvah. Now, when I read that stanza on Tishah b’Av, it won’t just be words. It will evoke trauma.
Now for an even more extreme example. My brother, Jonny, is a world traveler and a student of history. Last summer he took a trip to five countries with the objective of studying three genocides: first Rwanda, then Armenia and Turkey, and then Germany and Poland. This was the first time he had visited any concentration camps. Even though none of our immediate family was murdered by the Nazis, it was a deeply emotional experience for him. But the most unexpected part came at the end. Within the span of a little more than a day, he went from Majdanek straight to a wedding. During that wedding, in the midst of the joyous singing and dancing, he was seized with a PTSD-like experience of trauma:
During the first dance after the ceremony, I kept picturing everyone dead. It was involuntary and I was not expecting it when it came. After the pictures I had seen and stories I had heard in the last week of whole communities being wiped out, it was hard not to picture what that would mean if it were my own community. These were not faceless crowds, they were real people expressing themselves, friends celebrating, happy people, laughing people. I imagined my friends as those emaciated prisoners in stripes, or in the piles of open eyed corpses. I ended up having to leave for a minute and take some time alone.
For most of our history, we would not need to artificially induce this type of trauma by visiting historical sites or engaging in exercises of imagination. We would read the horrific passages in the kinnos and identify them as things that could happen to us, or that are happening to us. To an extent, this is true for Jews who have family that were murdered in the Holocaust: the threat is fresh enough to make the world of the kinnos real. But for those like myself who grew up in a world of relative peace and freedom from the antisemitism that characterized most of Jewish history, it is necessary for us to utilize our intellects and imaginations to evoke the feelings that the authors of the kinnos embedded in their poetry. If we are not naturally moved by the liturgy, then it is our responsibility to simulate the type of trauma-response which will lead us to engage in national teshuvah.
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