Kol ha'Seridim (NOW at rabbischneeweiss.substack.com/): Tishah b'Av

Showing posts with label Tishah b'Av. Show all posts

Thursday, August 4, 2022

Is it Permissible to Enjoy Learning on Tishah b'Av?

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: Silence, by Wayne Reynolds

Is it Permissible to Enjoy Learning on Tishah b'Av?

When my rebbi Rabbi Morton Moskowitz zt”l passed away a few months ago, I wrote an article entitled Rabbi Moskowitz Memory #05: Tishah b’Av – the Most Enjoyable Day of the Year, which I began with the following paragraph:

If I had to associate Rabbi Moskowitz with a particular day of the year, that day would be Tishah b'Av: the most enjoyable day of every summer. No, I'm not being facetious. For me, and for those of us who were in Seattle at that time of year, Tishah b'Av was the day we looked forward to the most each summer because we knew we were in for some of the most enjoyable learning of the entire year.

I’m sure some people read this article and wondered, “Isn’t it assur to enjoy learning on Tishah b’Av?” On the surface, it would seem that the answer is a resounding: “Yes!” The Shulchan Aruch (Orach Chayim 554:1-3) writes:

On Tishah b’Av … it is prohibited to read Tanach, to learn Mishnah, midrash, Gemara, halachos, and aggados, because it is stated: “The ordinances of Hashem are upright, bringing joy to the heart” (Tehilim 19:9); school children shouldn't learn [on Tishah b'Av], but one may read Iyov and the bad parts of Yirmiyah, and if there are verses of consolation, he must skip them. It is permitted to learn Midrash Eichah and the chapter Eilu Megalchin, and it is likewise permitted to learn the commentaries on Eichah and Iyov. There are those who prohibit learning via thinking (i.e. even without speaking).

The Magen Avraham (ibid. 5) explains the rationale behind that last stringency: “Even though thinking is not equivalent to speaking … this is different, since the essential reason [for this prohibition] is because of joy, and in thinking [about Torah] there is joy.” He goes on to explain that for this same reason, it is prohibited to learn anything in depth: “It seems to me that for this reason, it is prohibited to learn any explanation or question or answer even about the ‘bad things’ because this brings a person joy.” Suffice it to say, the Magen Avraham would not approve of the hours of enjoyable in-depth learning and thinking that characterized my Tishah b’Av experiences with Rabbi Moskowitz.

Thankfully, my posek follows a different view: that of his rebbi, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (a.k.a. the Rav). In a lengthier analysis than I can summarize in a 1-page article (see Sefer Shiurei ha’Rav al Inyanei Aveilus v’Tishah b’Av, by R’ Eliakim Koenigsberg, pp.44-46), the Rav demonstrated that the prohibition is NOT to experience joy through learning. Rather, Torah study has the legal status of “a joyous activity,” due to its very nature, and it is prohibited to involve oneself in that activity on Tishah b’Av, even if one’s personal learning experience doesn’t bring them any joy whatsoever.

What about the areas of Torah which we are permitted to learn on Tishah b’Av? Why don’t they fall under this prohibition? The Rav answered that even though each of these texts constitutes an entity of Torah and learning it would be a fulfillment of the mitzvah of Torah study, nevertheless, these subjects relate to the essential theme of Tishah b’Av. As such, not only is it permissible to learn them, but learning them constitutes an essential involvement in the aveilus ha’yom (mourning of the day). For this reason, they were never included in the prohibition against Torah study on Tishah b’Av in the first place.

Based on this theory, the Rav – unlike the Magen Avraham – permitted in-depth study and analysis of these texts, since this constitutes an even greater involvement in the aveilus ha’yom. The Rav’s grandfather, R’ Chaim Soloveitchik, cited as a proof of this the fact that it is permissible to study the commentaries on Eichah and Iyov, even though such learning would, by definition, constitute an in-depth study.

According to the Rav’s explanation and halachic position, there is no halachic violation involved in deriving enjoyment from one’s learning of the permissible texts on Tishah b’Av. But is it philosophically appropriate to experience such joy on a day of mourning? And even if it is, does that mean we should avoid it or suppress it? The answer to that question will have to wait for another time. But as always, if you have any thoughts, I’d love to hear them!

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If you've gained from what you've learned here, please consider contributing to my Patreon at www.patreon.com/rabbischneeweiss. Alternatively, if you would like to make a direct contribution to the "Rabbi Schneeweiss Torah Content Fund," my Venmo is @Matt-Schneeweiss, and my Zelle and PayPal are mattschneeweiss at gmail.com. Even a small contribution goes a long way to covering the costs of my podcasts, and will provide me with the financial freedom to produce even more Torah content for you.

If you would like to sponsor a day's or a week's worth of content, or if you are interested in enlisting my services as a teacher or tutor, you can reach me at rabbischneeweiss at gmail.com. Thank you to my listeners for listening, thank you to my readers for reading, and thank you to my supporters for supporting my efforts to make Torah ideas available and accessible to everyone.

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Wednesday, August 3, 2022

How to Make Kinnos Real

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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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Monday, July 18, 2022

The Role of Episodic Memory in the Three Weeks and Tishah b'Av

The Torah content for these two weeks has been sponsored by Judah and Naomi Dardik in loving memory of Rabbi Moskowitz zt''l, who taught his students to pursue truth by asking questions, who modeled love of Torah and learning, and who exemplified living a life of the mind.

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Artwork: Memory Leak, by Karl Kopinski

The Role of Episodic Memory in the Three Weeks and Tishah b'Av

Although this is technically 1-page long, I reference a bunch of other articles I’ve written. Ordinarily I wouldn’t rely on the reader’s familiarity with my previous content, nor would I expect them to read it. However, the goal of this article is to capture where my mind is at going into the Three Weeks. Since I find myself picking up where I left off, I have no choice but to reference these past ideas.

We have commenced the three weeks of mourning during which we reflect on the national flaws that led to the destruction of the two Temples and our present exile. Last summer I wrote a 1-page article about how the Three Weeks, the Nine Days, and Tishah b’Av are designed to induce “metaphysical trauma” on a national level. I wrote another 1-page article about how such trauma is necessary for national teshuvah. I wrote a third 1-page article explaining how the Tishah b’Av liturgy is designed to facilitate this type of teshuvah-from-trauma. I concluded by stressing the importance of allowing ourselves to really feel the unpleasant emotions awakened by our reading of Eichah and the kinnos in order to tap into the trauma which will “awaken our hearts and open the paths of teshuvah” (Rambam, Laws of Fasts 5:1).

This year I believe I have found a new way to induce the aforementioned trauma. This past week I wrote an overview of EFT (Episodic Future Thinking) and a follow-up article on how this technique can be integrated with halacha. Towards the end of Chapter 2 of Imaginable (pp.37-38), McGonigal introduces the following thought-experiment:

I want you to try one more time travel experiment with me. Imagination works both ways in time. So let’s take a ten-year trip in the opposite direction … I want you to picture in your mind’s eye a day more or less ten years ago today. Where would you have been on a typical day? What would you have been doing? Can you picture what you might have been wearing? Who were you with? What were you excited about ten years ago? What were you worried about? What life goal were you working toward, or what life problem were you trying to solve?

It might not be easy to recall all these details at first. Keep working at it. Like episodic future thinking, episodic memory also requires you to stretch your imagination – if only because you’re retrieving memories and reactivating thought patterns you haven’t used in a while … At the Institute for the Future, we call this technique “looking back to look forward.” It’s another excellent strategy for unsticking your mind. As the historian and activist Rebecca Solnit has written, “When you don’t know how much things have changed, you don’t see that they are changing or that they can change.”

As is true of all McGonigal’s exercises, the goal here is not to achieve factual accuracy, but to “learn to control your imagination” (p.33). By practicing episodic memory with your actual past, using your imagination to recall those lived experiences in rich detail, you will become proficient in simulating future experiences with a higher degree of realism.

Halacha obligates us to practice episodic memory on at least one occasion: Pesach night. “In each and every generation a person is obligated to see themselves as though they, themselves, left Egypt” (Hagadah). As a source for this injunction, Rambam (Laws of Chametz and Matzah 7:6) cites: “you shall remember that you were a slave” (Devarim 5:14). In other words, we are commanded to remember events that didn’t actually happen to us as if we lived through them. The intellectual objectives of the Pesach seder cannot be achieved without this use of the imagination.

Likewise, the vividly horrific descriptions of the tragic events depicted in Eichah and the kinnos are also designed to facilitate episodic memory – provided we are willing to take that extra step. For instance, instead of merely reading Kinnah #17 and reacting to the depiction of Jewish women being forced to cannibalize their own children, we should use our imagination to simulate what it might be like for us to live through a time of such starvation and desperation that we are forced to engage in the unthinkable. Will this exercise be traumatic? Yes. And that is precisely the point.

The final chapter of Eichah begins with a plea: “Remember, Hashem, what happened to us; look and see our disgrace” (Eichah 5:1). We know that Hashem sees everything and never forgets anything. Thus, when we beseech Him to remember and see, He expects us to do the same. And unless we do so on a visceral level, then we will not be moved to national teshuvah.

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Friday, July 15, 2022

17th of Tammuz Reflections on Waikiki

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This is a photo I took of the sunset at Waikiki on the 17th of Tammuz last year.

17th of Tammuz Reflections on Waikiki

I wrote this as a Facebook post during the summer of 2021 (Tammuz 5781) but didn’t post it on my blog until now. I’ve made some changes and additions here and there, but most of the article remains the same.

The 17th of Tammuz is a commemorative day of fasting on which we don't eat or drink anything from dawn until nightfall. This fast kicks off the period of The Three Weeks, during which we mourn the greatest tragedies that have befallen our people. All of these events are centered around the destruction of the two Temples in Jerusalem: the First Temple by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E., which was followed by the 70 year exile in Babylon, and the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E., which was followed by the present exile, which has lasted for 1,951 years and counting (and now 1,952 years).

I'd have to check past calendars to be sure, but I'm fairly certain that we've spent every 17th of Tammuz for the past 12+ years in Honolulu, with the obvious exception of 2020 (and now, in 2022).

Spending this fast day in Honolulu is always strange. It's strange because I am so far away from any major Jewish community, and it's even stranger because the majority of people I see walking around are in "vacation mode." Yet, here I am, spending most of the day indoors, not eating or drinking, reflecting on the national flaws of myself and my people and the catastrophes that resulted from these flaws throughout the ages. And there, on the beach and in the streets, are the non-Jews: going about their vacation, dining and drinking, dancing and partying. The feeling of being in exile is real.

This year my experience of the 17th of Tammuz was greatly enhanced by my reading of Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006), by Jonathan Lear. The book is about Plenty Coups, the last chief of the Crow Nation, who witnessed the end of his people's way of life, but who was able to lead them to adapt and preserve their culture – something that no other Indian nation was able to do with such great success. I’d like to share just one small insight from this book that was on my mind as I took a walk along Waikiki just now, with a few hours remaining in the fast.

First, some background. The Sun Dance was a religious ritual that was integral to the Crow Nation's warrior culture. It was "a prayer-filled ritual asking for God's help in winning military victory." Lear uses it as an example of the dilemma faced by a people when its way of life suddenly comes to an end. In this case, intertribal fighting had been outlawed. He writes:

What is one to do with the Sun Dance when it is no longer possible to fight? Roughly speaking, a culture faced with this kind of devastation has three choices:

1. Keep dancing even though the point of the dance has been lost. The ritual continues, though no one can any longer say what the dance is for.

2. Invent a new aim for the dance. The dance continues, but now its purpose is, for example, to facilitate good negotiations with whites, usher good weather for farming, or restore health to a sick relative.

3. Give up the dance. This is an implicit recognition that there is no longer any point in dancing the Sun Dance.

I'm currently rereading Hawaii (1959), which is one of James Michener's epic novels. Last night I finished the section entitled "From the Farm of Bitterness," which follows the story of a group of missionaries who settled in Maui in the first half of the 19th century. Already by that time, the native Hawaiians had begun to suffer the destruction of their people and their culture, through death, through assimilation, and through the many abuses and encroachments of settlers, traders, and colonizers.

So much of the Hawaiian tourism industry thrives on tenuous, artificial, and (to be frank) piteous attempts at #1 and #2. For all intents and purposes, there is no actual living Ancient Hawaiian culture left to speak of. The historical Hawaiian culture - which lasted for centuries, if not longer - fell prey to option #3. The pale vestiges of Hawaiian culture I see when I walk down Waikiki are shadows of what was once a vibrant way of life, but are now merely a source of artificial nostalgia for a Hawaii that was never experienced by anyone living. It is sustained only by popular imagination, and funded by commercialism.

But when I step back and look at Waikiki tourism itself – which, in many ways, has become Hawaii's modern culture – I realize that "this, too, shall pass." Ironically, Lear uses something like this as an analogy to illustrate what it means for a way of life to disappear:

Everything in tribal life was organized around hunting and war – but hunting and war have become impossible. There is a crucial ambiguity in this claim that is easily overlooked. When we say "It is no longer possible to go to war" or "It is no longer possible to hunt buffalo" we might mean either:

"Circumstances are such that there is no practical possibility of our performing those acts"

or

"The very acts themselves have ceased to make sense."

By way of analogy, consider a person who goes into her favorite restaurant and says to the waiter, "I'll have my regular, a buffalo burger medium rare." The waiter says, "I'm sorry madam, it is no longer possible to order buffalo; last week you ate the last one. There are no more buffalo. I'm afraid a buffalo burger is out of the question." Now consider a situation in which the social institution of restaurants goes out of existence. For a while there was this historical institution of restaurants – people went to special places and paid to have meals made and served to them – but for a variety of reasons people stopped organizing themselves in this way. Now there is a new meaning to "it is no longer possible to order buffalo": no act could any longer count as ordering. In general these two senses of impossibility are not clearly distinguished because they often go together. In the particular case we are considering, it is in considerable part because the buffalo herds were destroyed – and thus hunting them became impossible in one sense – that the Crow agreed to move onto a reservation and abandon their traditional way of life – and thus hunting them became impossible in this other sense.

When I see the throngs of tourists on Waikiki going to bars, dining in restaurants, luxuriating on vacation, etc. etc. I am struck with the recognition that even this way of life will, one day, fade from existence – along with America as a whole, and possibly even what we call "Western Civilization," provided that the timeline continues for long enough.

And yet, here I am: a Jew in exile, fasting and mourning and reflecting on events that happened thousands of years ago, following laws that have were meticulously observed for many centuries before the first Hawaiians ever set foot on these islands, thinking about myself, my people, and my future through concepts that have been kept alive in generation after generation through constant study and thought. My culture – the culture of Torah – has outlasted Ancient and Modern Waikiki, and will continue to do so for as long as we observe these laws and anchor our existence in these truths and values.

Towards the end of his book, Lear writes:

Plenty Coups had to acknowledge the destruction of a telos – that the old ways of living a good life were gone. And that acknowledgment involved the stark recognition that the traditional ways of structuring significance – of recognizing something as a happening – had been devastated. For Plenty Coups, this recognition was not an expression of despair; it was the only way to avoid it. One needs to recognize the destruction that has occurred if one is to move beyond it. In the abstract, there is no answer to the question: Is the Sun Dance the maintenance of a sacred tradition or is it a nostalgic evasion – a step or two away from a Disneyland imitation of "the Indian"? What is valuable about Plenty Coups's declaration is that it lays down a crucial fact that needs to be acknowledged if a genuinely vibrant tradition is to be maintained or reintroduced. It is one thing to dance as though nothing has happened; it is another to acknowledge that something singularly awful has happened – the collapse of happenings – and then decide to dance.

The mourning practices of the Three Weeks are our way of acknowledging the destruction of our past way of life which centered around the Temple and its service in the Land of Israel over which we were sovereign – not so that we can "move beyond it," but so that we can maintain it until such a time that it can be reintroduced. Unlike Plenty Coups, who had to try to figure out how he was going to save his people and help them to survive and thrive in the world-after-the-destruction-of-the-world, we are not on our own. Hashem has given us the tools, in the Written and Oral Torah, to preserve our way of life despite the horrific catastrophes suffered by our people. He has given us the promise of a future redemption – one which is rooted in the certainty of the mind, rather than the unreliable forces of the psyche and the imagination. And He has protected us in each and every generation against those who seek to annihilate us - a fact to which all of Jewish history bears witness. I cannot help but recall the conclusion of Mark Twain's famous essay, Concerning the Jews:

To conclude. - If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one per cent. of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star-dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of; but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers.

He has made a marvellous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished.

The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?

Mark Twain didn't have an answer to this question, but we do. The secret of our immortality is observing the fast of the 17th of Tammuz in Waikiki. The secret of our immortality is "sacrificing" a day of vacation in Hawaii to keep Shabbos. The secret of our immortality is to forego the hundreds of popular restaurants in Honolulu to eat only kosher food. The secret of our immortality is to live by the eternal Torah, to adapt its laws and ideas to the modern world instead of withdrawing from it or assimilating into it.

Lear wrote that "It is one thing to dance as though nothing has happened; it is another to acknowledge that something singularly awful has happened – the collapse of happenings – and then decide to dance." Paradoxically, although it was a day of mourning, my reflections today have filled me with gratitude. I have acknowledged that something singularly awful has happened – yet, I have decided to dance.

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Wednesday, August 4, 2021

Sitting Bull’s Ghost Dance and Moshiach

Today’s Torah content is sponsored by Naomi Mann, in honor of Yeshiva Bnei Torah's 50th year. May Hashem grant YBT continued success!

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Sitting Bull (1831-1890)

Sitting Bull's Ghost Dance and Moshiach

The final section of Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation examines how Plenty Coups, the last chief of the Crow Nation, saved his people by adapting to the new world after the devastation of the world of the Crow. Although his leadership decisions were influenced by dream-visions, Lear argues that Plenty Coups possessed “imaginative excellence” which allowed him to “facilitate a creative and appropriate response to the world’s challenges” in a pragmatic, non-mystical manner.

Lear contrasts Plenty Coups’s success in this regard with the failure of Sitting Bull, chief of the Sioux. In 1889, rumors arose of a messianic figure who would arise and save the Sioux. It was claimed “he would wipe out all whites in a catastrophe, bring back their ancestors from the dead, restore all the buffalo.”

The messiah was teaching that the current task of the Indian was to perform a Ghost Dance, which would help usher in the apocalypse. The dance spread like wildfire across the reservation, but nowhere did it take greater hold than at Sitting Bull's camp at Standing Rock. The dance was ecstatic: participants would dance into a frenzy and continue until they dropped of exhaustion; they wore ghost shirts that would protect them from bullets; they abandoned all other activities in order to bring about this cataclysm … The dance continued through October and November and into December, when it was forcibly ended. As is well documented, U.S. authorities were greatly disturbed by the Ghost Dance – they were concerned it might lead to an uprising or, at least, the breakdown of civil order – and they sought to suppress it.

Lear writes: “There is no evidence that Sitting Bull actually participated in the Ghost Dance, but he did support it.” The following is Lear’s analysis of Sitting Bull’s fatal error:

Sitting Bull used a dream-vision to short-circuit reality rather than to engage with it … It is a hallmark of the wishful that the world will be magically transformed – into conformity with how one would like it to be – without having to take any realistic practical steps to bring it about. The only activity in which one is enjoined to partake in is a ritual, in this case a dance. But when the ritual comes to take over one’s entire life, as it did for the Sioux of Standing Rock in the fall of 1890, this is a case of what Freud called “turning away from reality.” Symbolic rituals take over life – whether in an individual’s private life or in the group activity of a culture – and they become a way of avoiding the real-life demands that confront one in the every day. And it led to a disaster for the Sioux.

The Rambam, in his Letter on Astrology, blames the destruction of the Second Temple on such a mistake:

This is why our kingdom was lost and our Temple was destroyed and why we were brought to this, for our fathers sinned and are no more because they found many books dealing with the matters of the star gazers, which are the root of idolatry ... they erred and were drawn after them, imagining them to be glorious science and to be of great utility. They did not busy themselves with the art of war or with the conquest of lands, but imagined that those studies would help them. Therefore, the prophets called them "foolish children" (Yirmiyahu 4:22) – and truly fools they were, for "they followed after that which does not benefit" (ibid. 2:8).

We, too, believe in the coming of a moshiach (messiah). However, our messianic era will involve no changes in the natural order (see Hilchos Tehsuvah 9:2, and Hilchos Melachim u’Milchamos 12:1). The process of bringing about the messianic era is eminently practical and political, and neither supernatural nor miraculous (ibid. Ch11). What remains to be seen is whether the “imaginative excellence” of the Jewish nation and its leaders at the critical junctures in the future will follow the model of Plenty Coups, enabling us to courageously engage with reality, or whether we will follow the model of Sitting Bull, to our peril.

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Tuesday, July 20, 2021

My Experience Fasting for 48 Hours on the 9th and 10th of Av

This week's Torah content is sponsored by a generous donor who wishes to remain anonymous, and told me, "No thanks needed!" so I'm not going to thank them.

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fast began at 8:30pm on Saturday (7/17) and ended at 9:00pm on Monday (7/19)

My Experience Fasting for 48 Hours on the 9th and 10th of Av

I’ve been doing intermittent fasting all year, for health and for energy. I generally fast between 17-19 hours each weekday. “Fasting” in this context means not consuming any calories. I still drink water, coffee, and tea. I had never fasted longer than the standard 25 hour taanis (fast) on Yom ha’Kippurim and Tishah b’Av, but after learning about the health benefits of fasting for 48 hours, I decided to give it a try this year. My plan was to break my Tishah b’Av fast on water and tea, then continue fasting until at least the next morning, if not longer.

In my mind, this extension of my fast had nothing to do with halacha. I figured that since I was drinking fluids, then this wouldn’t count as a halachic taanis. That is, until I saw this Tur (Orach Chayim 558):

It was taught in a Baraisa: "On the 7th of Av the gentiles entered the Sanctuary. They ate and drank and wreaked havoc on the 8th and the 9th until late in the day. Towards the evening they lit a fire in it, and it burned until sunset of the 10th." R' Yochanan said: "If I were there, I would have established [the commemoration] on the 10th, when the majority of the Sanctuary burned." It says in the Yerushalmi that R’ Avin fasted on the 9th and the 10th, [whereas] R' Levi fasted on the 9th and the night of the 10th because he didn't have the energy to fast for the entire night and day of the 10th. Nowadays, our energy has waned, and even Yom ha'Kippurim, which would be proper to observe out of safek (doubt) for two days, we are unable to do. Nevertheless, it is a proper minhag to not eat meat on the night of the 10th and the day of the 10th, but only what restores the soul, which is partial inui (affliction).

It is clear from the Yerushalmi that fasting on the 10th of Av is an ideal to strive for, since that’s when the majority of the Sanctuary was burned. The Ramban (Moed Katan 28b) explains that these Amoraim extended their fasts as a minhag chasidus (a custom of piety), and that “the more one mourns over Yerushalayim, the more meritorious it is for him.” Even a partial fast would count for something, as we see from R’ Levi’s fast on the night of the 10th.

Less clear, however, is the scope of the “proper minhag” mentioned by the Tur at the end. According to the Taz’s explanation of the Tur, the minhag is to refrain specifically from meat – a food associated with simchah (rejoicing) – but there is no kiyum (halachic fulfillment) whatsoever of abstaining from other types of food. According to the Bach, the Tur’s minhag is to refrain from eating even non-meat food, except for “that which restores the soul,” since this abstention constitutes “partial inui.” Thus, according to the Bach, my extended fast would constitute a kiyum in “fasting on the 10th of Av,” despite my consumption of liquids. If abstaining from non-restorative food is a kiyum because it produces inui, then kal va’chomer abstaining from all food!

But then I asked myself whether my fast really did fulfill the minhag. After all, I was doing this for health reasons, not as an expression of mourning, which – according to the Ramban – is what makes this fasting meritorious. In an effort to “legitimize my fasting,” I spent all morning and afternoon learning through the relevant sources to understand the purpose of what I was doing. I made it my mission to find an idea worthy of writing up as an article. The result? I learned a lot, but I didn’t find anything that I deemed profound enough for even a one-page article.

I was about to give up on the search and the article when I realized that this health-motivated 48-hour fasting experiment fit right into my goal of prolonging reflection on the ideas of Tishah b’Av beyond the demands of halacha. Indeed, my observance of this minhag caused me to spend an extra day learning about Tishah b’Av! What began as a non-halachic health experiment became a she’lo lishmah observance of a real minhag (at least, according to the Bach). This might not have yielded transformative insight this year, but it will certainly pave the way for such insight in the future. This is yet another example of “a person should always learn Torah even she’lo lishmah, because from she’lo lishmah one will come to lishmah” (Midrash Eichah Hakdamah 2). And that is a win in my book.

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Monday, July 19, 2021

The Tenth of Av, Seven Haftaros of Consolation, and Life After the Pain

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The Tenth of Av, Seven Haftaros of Consolation, and Life After the Pain

Every year, after Tishah b’Av is over, I find myself eager to just put it all behind me and get on with enjoying my summer. (To be honest, I think some of this attitude is residual “halachic resentment” from when my friends and I followed a psak which prohibited almost all social gatherings of more than two people; suffice it to say, that put a dent into my summer vacation.) It’s always a drag to break the fast after Tishah b’Av and still be bound by many of the prohibitions of the Nine Days until midday on the Tenth of Av.

This year, however, I am going to attempt to relate to the Tenth of Av differently. Tara Brach’s book, Radical Compassion, is about the mindfulness practice of RAIN: an acronym for Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture. There is a fifth step called “after the RAIN,” which she describes as follows:

The four steps of RAIN involve active ways of directing our attention. In After the RAIN, we shift from doing to being. The invitation is to relax and let go into the heartspace that has emerged. Rest in this awareness and become familiar with it; this is your true home. Now, paying attention to the quality of your presence – the openness, wakefulness, tenderness – ask yourself: “In these moments, what is the sense of my being, of who I am?” “How has this shifted from when I began the meditation?”

There are examples of “after the rain” type practices in halacha as well, most notably in tefilah:

And he should not make his tefilah like one who is carrying a burden who casts it off and goes on his way. Therefore, he must sit for a little while after tefilah, and only then may he depart. The early pious Sages would pause for an hour before tefilah, and an hour after tefilah, and they would extend tefilah for an hour. (Rambam: Hilchos Tefilah 4:16)

What are we supposed to do during this post-tefilah “pause”? Presumably, we engage in a process akin to what Tara describes: to reflect on what transpired during our davening, to allow our thoughts and feelings to integrate the effects of our tefilah, and to prepare to reenter life enlightened by the experience.

We observe mourning practices of the Tenth of Av because the Beis ha’Mikdash continued to burn. On a basic level, turning away from our metaphysical trauma and running back to our normal lives would reflect a callous attitude towards the tragedies of Tishah b’Av and their implications. Imagine someone in the middle of a commemorative ceremony at Auschwitz saying, “Sorry, I gotta go. I have tickets to the new Marvel movie, and it’s starting in an hour.” The extension of mourning protects us from this insensitivity.

However, I would like to suggest that the extension of our mourning into the Tenth of Av can function as an “After the RAIN” pause – a time when we can sit in the aftermath of our painful reflections and our national teshuvah and reflect on how to reenter our lives in light of these transformative three weeks.

This function is also served by the Sheva d’Nechamta – the seven haftaros of consolation we read between Tishah b’Av and Rosh ha’Shanah. I haven’t learned these haftaros in-depth, nor have I learned about why we read them, but I know one thing for certain: if we took the messages of these haftaros to heart, then we would not simply cease thinking about the Three Weeks, the Nine Days, and Tishah b’Av at midday on the Tenth, and then return to our lives. Instead, we would utilize this period of seven weeks to build a bridge from our metaphysical trauma and subsequent teshuvah, through the remaining summer months, until the Moadim of Tishrei. I don’t know exactly what this bridge is supposed to look like, but I’m sure that if it’s done correctly, the experience will be transformative. I’d like to give it my best shot.

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Be sure to check out my YouTube channel and my podcasts: "The Mishlei Podcast", "The Stoic Jew" Podcast, "Rambam Bekius" Podcast, "Machshavah Lab" Podcast, "The Tefilah Podcast" For the full guide to all of my Torah content, click here.

Friday, July 16, 2021

Tishah b’Av 5781: An Approach to the Blasphemy in Eichah and Kinnos

This week's Torah content is sponsored by the Reznik family in dedication to the loving memory of Silvia Tanzer (Sora Hesha bas Chaim Moshe) and Irving Tanzer (Yisroel ben Yechezkel).

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Tishah b'Av 5781: An Approach to the Blasphemy in Eichah and Kinnos

“[Hashem] has drawn back His right hand from before the enemy” (Eichah 2:3) “[Hashem] has bent His bow like an enemy, with His right hand set like a tormentor” (ibid. 2:4) “My Lord was like an enemy” (ibid. 2:5)

First Hashem is described as withdrawing His protective right hand, allowing the enemy to attack. Then He is depicted as taking up arms and joining our enemy in its assault. Finally, Hashem, Himself, is identified as our enemy. What insight do these pesukim offer? What is the significance of this progression?

The answer is that this is actually a regression. The first pasuk is the accurate perspective: when we turn away from Hashem, He withdraws His protection, leaving us vulnerable to our enemies. The second pasuk reflects a warped view of Hashem, in which He is characterized as committing treason against His own people. The third pasuk is the worst distortion of them all, in which Hashem is the enemy of the Jews.

Why would Eichah cater to distorted portrayals of Hashem? The same may be asked about the kinnos (liturgical lamentations), which are replete with harsh, inappropriate, even blasphemous statements of this nature. How are we to make sense of such statements? What are we to think when reciting them?

When we suffer a horrific catastrophe – whether the destruction of the Beis ha’Mikdash, or the Holocaust, or even a personal tragedy – there are parts of us which feel that Hashem is like a malicious enemy. This is false, “for He does not afflict maliciously, nor cause the hearts of men to suffer” (ibid. 3:33). It is tempting to think that knowledge alone is the solution – that we can simply supplant falsehood with truth. This approach will not succeed. If we neglect to address these misguided parts of ourselves on their own terms, we will succeed only in driving them underground, where they will continue to affect our minds and hearts in an even more insidious manner. Instead, we must acknowledge that we have these parts of ourselves. We must give expression to them, allowing them to say what they think and feel what they feel. Only when they feel seen and heard will they be receptive to truth. Only then can the healing begin.

Anthony de Mello’s analogy in Awareness: the Perils and Opportunities of Reality illustrates this point:

This reminds me of this fellow in London after the war. He’s sitting with a parcel wrapped in brown paper in his lap; it’s a big, heavy object. The bus conductor comes up to him and says, “What do you have on your lap there?” And the man says, “This is an unexploded bomb. We dug it out of the garden and I’m taking it to the police station.” The conductor says, “You don’t want to carry that on your lap. Put it under the seat.”

The distorted conceptions of Hashem carried by our inner parts are like bombs we carry on our laps. To uncritically embrace these false views as true would be to detonate the bombs. We must seek knowledge of Hashem, led by our tzelem Elokim (intellect) and guided by Torah. But that is not enough. If we dismiss, deny, or “exile” the parts of ourselves that harbor these false views of Hashem, all we’re doing is taking the unexploded bombs and putting them under our seats. This is worse than keeping them on our laps, insofar as we convince ourselves that we’ve eliminated the threat when all we’ve done is hidden it. All it takes is for the bus to be jostled in the wrong way, and these hidden bombs will explode.

There is a third option: to acknowledge the bombs we are carrying, to accept our precarious state, and from that place of awareness, apply our knowledge to diffuse them. This is the intent of Eichah and kinnos: to make us aware of and feel the distorted perspectives we harbor, to accept and feel the precarious metaphysical danger we are in, and from that place of visceral intellectual recognition, to help us “unburden” these misguided parts of ourselves through knowledge and teshuvah and the light of truth.

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If you would like to sponsor an article, shiur, or podcast episode, or if you are interested in enlisting my services as a teacher or tutor, you can reach me at rabbischneeweiss at gmail.com. Thank you to my listeners for listening, thank you to my readers for reading, and thank you to my supporters for supporting my efforts to make Torah ideas available and accessible to everyone.

Be sure to check out my YouTube channel and my podcasts: "The Mishlei Podcast", "The Stoic Jew" Podcast, "Rambam Bekius" Podcast, "Machshavah Lab" Podcast, "The Tefilah Podcast" For the full guide to all of my Torah content, click here.

Wednesday, July 14, 2021

The Necessity of Metaphysical Trauma for National Teshuvah

This week's Torah content is sponsored by the Reznik family in dedication to the loving memory of Silvia Tanzer (Sora Hesha bas Chaim Moshe) and Irving Tanzer (Yisroel ben Yechezkel).

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Artwork: Tainted Pact, by Benjamin Ee

The Necessity of Metaphysical Trauma for National Teshuvah

In The Induction of Metaphysical Trauma I argued that the national teshuvah of Tishah b’Av can only take place from a state of metaphysical trauma – from “abiding sentiments of grief, the resulting sense of void, and the hopeless feelings of groping in the dark,” to borrow the words of Rav Soloveitchik. The question is: Why is this state of “metaphysical trauma” necessary for national teshuvah?

Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, by Jonathan Lear, is a philosophical-anthropological analysis of how Plenty Coups, the last chief of the Crow Nation, led his people when their world – that is, their rituals, traditions, and ways of living – came to an abrupt end. Lear’s thesis is that the Crow Nation did not merely lose the particulars of their way of life when they were forced to move onto the reservations; rather, they lost the world of concepts which made that life conceivable, thereby rendering it impossible to live. Lear provides the following “very rough analogy” for this phenomenon:

Imagine that pieces of a chess game had inner lives. And imagine that each took itself to be a center of agency. I am a knight! I see myself in tribal terms: I am a black knight! I am proud to a black knight! We shall fight a glorious battle and capture the white king! I think strategically in terms of my possible moves: two up and one to the right, two up and one to the left. Perhaps I should wait here quietly for several moves, and if that white rook comes my way ... I understand all the other members of my tribe in terms of the roles they play: and I understand that we are all aspiring to excellence in the sense that we are trying to win. Unbeknownst to me, my world exists because it is protected by a group of humans. These are the guardians of the chess world, who insist that the only acceptable moves are moves that are allowable within the game of chess. From my point of view as a thoughtful knight, the humans are as unknowable as the transcendent gods. But suppose these chess-guardians were one day just to give it up: as a historical phenomenon, humans got bored with playing this game, and the game of chess goes out of existence. My problem is not simply that my way of life has come to an end. I no longer have the concepts with which to understand myself or the world. I understood the other pieces in terms of their roles, but there are no longer any such roles. Perhaps I am found attractive by humans as a physical object. I am put on a bookshelf as a curiosity, an objet d'art. I might sit for generations on a series of bookshelves – get traded as what humans call an antique – and all this while I am in utter confusion. I have no idea what is going on. This isn’t primarily a psychological problem. The concepts with which I would otherwise have understood myself – indeed, the concepts with which I would otherwise have shaped my identity – have gone out of existence.

Bessel van der Kolk, in The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, says of his work with trauma victims: “I have to help them reconstruct [their] inner map of the world.” Unlike personal teshuvah, national teshuvah requires a reconstruction of the world of concepts in which we live. It is impossible to radically reconstruct our world unless we have recognized and felt its utter destruction, intellectually and viscerally. This is why metaphysical trauma is necessary for national teshuvah. Only when we “hit rock bottom” and suffer the consequences of the false concepts and corrupt values that we, as a society, have embraced – only then can we begin to rebuild. The core experiences of national trauma were generated by the instances of “divine wrath” throughout Jewish history. The communal fast days are designed to preserve and reawaken this trauma on a recurring basis to “open the paths of teshuvah.”

Perhaps this is the meaning of Moshe’s prophecy about the national teshuvah that will occur at the end of days: “When you are in distress and all these things have befallen you, at the end of days, you will return to Hashem, your God, and hearken to His voice” (Devarim 4:30). Like the Crow, the Jewish people may endure the total destruction of our world. But we, unlike they, have access to teshuvah: the ability to return to “Melech ha’Olam” – the King of the world of concepts and values in which we ought to live.