How to Make Kinnos Real

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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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.

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"  Email me if you'd like to be added to my WhatsApp group where I share all of my content and public shiur info. 

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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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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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.

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"  Email me if you'd like to be added to my WhatsApp group where I share all of my content and public shiur info. 

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.

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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/Chase QuickPay 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 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. 

The Induction of Metaphysical Trauma

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: Eliminate, by Rovina Cai

The Induction of Metaphysical Trauma

This morning I read the following idea from Rav Soloveitchik about the uniquely Jewish phenomenon of aveilus yeshanah (mourning a past tragedy), as opposed to aveilus chadashah (mourning a present loss):

A Jew lives with a unique time consciousness. He experiences time not in the standard tripartite division of past, present, and future; rather, all three dimensions converge into a single integrated existence. This unique orientation toward time enables a Jew to pre-experience events of the distant future and to relive occurrences of the ostensibly dead past … A Jew has the unique capacity to relive past tragedies and to experience them anew as if the wounds were still fresh. As a result, the abiding sentiments of grief, the resulting sense of void, and the hopeless feelings of groping in the dark are felt just as powerfully when mourning for past events.

I am in the middle of reading The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. One of the key characteristics of trauma is the reexperiencing of past events as though they are happening in the present. Van der Kolk writes: “Long after the actual event has passed, the brain may keep sending signals to the body to escape a threat that no longer exists.”

In this sense, aveilus yeshanah is metaphysical trauma. It is “trauma” in that it is a reexperiencing of a painful event from the remote past as though it were happening in the present. It is “metaphysical” in that its aim is the perfection of the soul, as opposed to psychological or neurological functions. This aim is reflected in the Rambam’s statement about the purpose of all national fast days in Hilchos Taaniyos 5:1:

There are days on which all of Israel fasts because of the catastrophes that occurred on them, in order to awaken the hearts [of the people] and to open the paths of teshuvah (repentance). This will be a remembrance of our corrupt actions and the corrupt actions of our fathers that were like our actions today, which ultimately reached the point that [these corrupt actions] caused these catastrophes for them and for us. Through the remembrance of these matters we will return to do good, as it stated: “they will confess their sins and the sins of their fathers” (Vayikra 26:40).

This Rambam underscores a key point: the metaphysical trauma of aveilus yeshanah must be artificially induced. In aveilus chadashah, which is triggered by the death of a close relative, grief is a natural reaction which is then harnessed and directed within the framework of the laws of mourning. In aveilus yeshanah, the natural reaction of grief is no longer extant; the catastrophic events we mourn happened so long ago that they have faded from our national consciousness. Instead, the mourning customs and laws we observe during The Three Weeks, The Nine Days, and Tishah b’Av are designed to awaken, generate, and cultivate a sense of tragic loss. It is from those “abiding sentiments of grief, the resulting sense of void, and the hopeless feelings of groping in the dark” that the real work of national teshuvah can begin.

This is another feature which makes aveilus yeshanah a uniquely Jewish phenomenon. The world views trauma in an entirely negative light. Trauma is something to be avoided or gotten rid of at any cost. Who in their right mind would seek out trauma? Ironically, the answer is: one who seeks to be in their right mind. Only the Jew, who lives not for the body but for the soul, will artificially induce a painful state of trauma each year for the sake of teshuvah. Only the Jew sees teshuvah as essential for the life of mind.

[1] excerpted from the Reshimot of Rabbi Menachem Genack in the appendix of The Koren Mesorat HaRav Kinot

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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/Chase QuickPay 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 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. 

Haftarah of Mattos / Masei: Divine Love as the Foundation of Rebuke

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Haftarah of Mattos / Masei: Divine Love as the Foundation of Rebuke

Sefer Yirmiyahu is filled with messages of rebuke, catastrophe, and tragedy. Yet, the very first prophecy Yirmiyahu is sent to deliver has a markedly different character from the rest of the book:

Go and call out in the ears of Yerushalayim, saying: “Thus said Hashem: I recalled for you the kindness of your youth, the love of your wedding [ceremony], your following after Me in the Wilderness, into an unsown land. Israel is holy to Hashem, the first of His crop; all who consume it will be held guilty; harm shall befall them - the word of Hashem” (Yirmiyahu 2:2-3).

Rav Hirsch (Commentary on Haftaroth) notes this thematic discrepancy:

The first Word which the young prophet has to bring to his people in the name of God, as the beginning of his mission, is no stern rebuke, no prophecy of the impending disaster, but a message of love, of encouragement, a Word that looks beyond all the precipices, pierces through all the dark clouds of the gloomy fate, to the bright outlook on the ultimate sun-bathed goal of the undying People at the zenith of their destiny intimately united with their God. No more intimate or more glorious Word has ever flowed from the lips of any prophet. A Word which embraces the most distant past with the most distant future, and thereby demonstrates the wonderful continuity of the Thought of God which comes to be developed in Jewish history.

Why does Yirmiyahu preface his prophecies of rebuke with this message of love? I would like to suggest an answer based on the words of the Rambam (Moreh ha’Nevuchim 3:28) and a quotation cited by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. in The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2015).

The Rambam maintains that the doctrines taught by the Torah fall into two categories. The first is “beliefs through which the ultimate perfection may be attained,” including “the belief in Hashem’s Existence (exalted is He), His Oneness, His Omniscience, His Omnipotence, His Will, and His Eternality.” The second category is comprised of “beliefs which are necessary for the sake of societal welfare, such as our belief that He (may He be exalted) is violently angry with those who disobey Him and that it is therefore necessary to fear Him and to dread Him and to take care not to disobey.” The belief in Hashem’s enduring love for the Jewish people belongs to this second category, since Hashem has no actual emotions and “love” is only ascribed to Him by way of metaphor.  

Van der Kolk begins the section of his book “on the minds of children” with the words of Diana Fosha, PhD, known for her work on the psychotherapy of adults suffering the effects of childhood attachment trauma and abuse: “The roots of resilience ... are to be found in the sense of being understood by and existing in the mind and heart of a loving, attuned, and self-possessed other.”

Perhaps Yirmiyahu opened his rebuke with a message of Divine love for this reason. He knew that in order for the Jews to endure their impending destruction and exile with the type of resilience that leads to teshuvah, they needed to feel seen and loved by Hashem. It is known that a baal teshuvah is “cherished and beloved” by Hashem (Hilchos Teshuvah 7:6), but that knowledge is not enough for the sinner. The sinner must also know that “the one whom Hashem loves, He rebukes” (Mishlei 3:12) – that the rebuke, itself, is from love, and reflects a confidence in the intrinsic worth of the sinner, despite their sins.

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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/Chase QuickPay 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 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.