Category: Excerpts

Excerpted from Erica Brown’s ‘In the Narrow Places: Daily Inspiration for the Three Weeks‘, co-published by OU Press and Maggid Books

Redeeming the Ruins – Tenth of Av

How do we behave in exile, especially when we do not feel as though we are in exile? We turn to Jeremiah, the prophet who foretold of the first exile to Babylon, for advice. He preempted what the ancient Israelites may have thought was the appropriate religious response by writing a letter to his followers. The gloom and doom that we would naturally expect the prophet to suggest – and that fills page after page of his prophetic testimony – is curiously absent from his letter. Instead, he presents a formula that strikes us with its contemporary resonances.

In chapter 29, we read of the letter that Jeremiah wrote to a group of exiles in Babylon, which he dispatched from the land of Israel with Elasah, the man whom King Zedekiah sent to Babylon to see King Nebuchadnezzar. In addition to Elasah’s diplomatic mission, he was also to present this letter as guidance for the small but growing community of exiles. The chapter begins with the letter’s intended audience:

This is the text of the letter which the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the priests, the prophets, the rest of the elders of the exile community, and to all the people whom Nebuchadnezzar has exiled from Jerusalem to Babylon…( Jeremiah 29:1)

The condition of exile changes personal and communal identity. You are in one place but your heart and mind are in another. To quote Rabbi Judah HaLevi, “I am in the west, but my heart is in the east.” To be an exile is never to reconcile yourself with where you are, but to live in a persistent hope of where you want to be. In the book of Esther, Mordekhai is the only person introduced as an exile, as someone who knows that he is not where he should ultimately be at a time of immense assimilation. Imagine the immigrant who, when asked who he is, always mentions the place he comes from and not the place where he currently resides. He lives in perpetual dislocation.

Jeremiah, perhaps realizing the crippling impact of dislocation on the soul of a people, advised against this kind of thinking:

This said the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel, to the whole community which I exiled from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat their fruit. Take wives and beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters. Multiply there, do not decrease. And seek the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you and pray to the Lord in its behalf; for in its prosperity you shall prosper. (Ibid. 29:4–7)

In line after line, Jeremiah adds to his demands across generations, not only in the immediacy of the day but with the foreknowledge that exile can become more than a momentary condition but a way of life, for decades if not centuries.

Build houses, he tells them. Plant gardens. Seek the welfare of the city. Building a house is a statement of permanence. This is Jeremiah’s starting point. Yet as he moves on, we, the readers, realize that building a house is perhaps the least permanent act on Jeremiah’s list of recommendations for exile. After all, no matter where you are, you need some form of shelter even if, as an exile, you build something temporary in keeping with your desire to leave.

Jeremiah moves from building houses to planting gardens. The Malbim (1809–1879) observes that planting a garden implies a longer stay than building a house since the process of sowing and cultivation requires time. He cites a verse from Isaiah that seems to imply the exact opposite of Jeremiah’s thinking:

They shall not build for others to dwell in, or plant for others to enjoy. For the days of My people shall be as long as the days of a tree; My chosen ones shall outlive the work of their hands. They shall not toil to no purpose. They shall not bear children for terror. (Isaiah 65:22–23)

Whereas Isaiah does not want others to benefit from the planting of gardens, Jeremiah wants the gardeners to take advantage of what good can be found while on foreign soil; to invest in their lives.

In a midrash on the famous psalm, “By the Waters of Babylon” (Psalm 137), the rabbis of old say that the question “How can we sing a new song on strange land?” was not rhetorical, but literal. The Levites, in their desperation, cut off their thumbs so that they would not be able to play their instruments for the enemy King Nebuchadnezzar (see Rashi on Kiddushin 69a). They sat, instead, on the banks of the river and bemoaned their loss. But the midrash alludes to something darker: by cutting off their thumbs, they made themselves ritually unsuitable for serving God in the Temple precincts after their exile (see Leviticus 21:17). Signs of mourning that are permanent can show profound loss but may also reveal a lack of faith in the future.

We have met Jeremiah on many pages here, and might not expect him to offer us a positive prescription for exile. Yet he does. He tells us to become good people, raise good children and be good citizens, no matter where. He also offers us the belief that a stronger people will make a stronger nation when the exile is over and redemption is on the horizon.

Isaiah, too, offers his guidance on rebuilding:

And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the former desolations, and they shall renew the waste cities, the desolations of many generations. (Isaiah 61:4)

We are the people who rebuild ruins. And when, as the Talmud teaches, we get to heaven and God asks each of us, “Did you work for redemption?” we can each say, “Yes, I did” with a full heart.

Excerpted from the Koren Mesorat HaRav Kinot: Lookstein Edition. Edited by Rabbi Simon Posner, Kinot translated by Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb.

Kina 10, Eikha Yashva Havatzelet HaSharon

Why is it that the stringency of our observance of mourning decreases in the afternoon of Tisha B’Av, at precisely the time that the flames of destruction began to engulf the Beit HaMikdash?

כי כליה חיבתי כדור המבול For we deserved extinction no less than the generation of the Flood. This passage sounds the recurring theme found in the kinot that the Beit HaMikdash served as a substitute, as collateral, for the Jewish people, and the physical structure of the Beit HaMikdash suffered the destruction that rightfully should have been visited upon the entire nation. The kina says that the Jewish people are responsible and are deserving of punishment; we are guilty, and we should have been destroyed as was the generation of the Flood. God, however, in His mercy and grace, subjected His throne, the Beit HaMikdash, rather than the Jewish people, to disgrace, abuse and destruction. It is for this reason that Tisha B’Av contains an element of mo’ed, a festival – God rendered His decision on Tisha B’Av that Knesset Yisrael is an eternal people and will continue to exist. The Beit HaMikdash was humiliated, profaned and destroyed in order to save the people.

This concept is expressed halakhically in the character of Tisha B’Av afternoon. The second half of the day has a contradictory nature in halakha. On the one hand, the avelut, the mourning, is intensified because the actual burning of the Beit HaMikdash commenced in the late afternoon of the ninth day of Av, and the flames continued throughout the tenth (Ta’anit 29a). On the other hand, Nahem, the prayer of consolation, is recited in the Amida for Minha in the afternoon, and not in Shaharit of Tisha B’Av morning or Ma’ariv of the preceding evening (Shulhan Arukh, Orah Hayyim, Rama 557:1). Similarly, tefillin are put on in the afternoon, not the morning (Shulhan Arukh, Orah Hayyim 555:1), and sitting on chairs rather than on the ground is permitted in the afternoon, not the morning (Shulhan Arukh, Orah Hayyim 559:3).

In Minha, one re-inserts in Kaddish the phrase תתקבל צלותהון ובעותהון”, accept our prayers and entreaties” (see Beit Yosef, Tur Orah Hayyim 559 s.v. ve’omer kaddish belo titkabal, with respect to the recitation of Titkabal in Shaharit). This phrase is removed from Kaddish earlier on Tisha B’Av because the assertion that “satam tefillati, my prayer is rejected” (Lamentations 3:8), which prevails on Tisha B’Av, comes to an end at midday. Paradoxically, the moment the Beit HaMikdash was set ablaze was a moment of relief. At that moment, it became clear that God decided to take the collateral, the Beit HaMikdash, instead of pursuing the real debtor, the Jewish people. Paradoxically, once He took away the Beit HaMikdash in the afternoon of Tisha B’Av, the nehama, the consolation, could begin. Tisha B’Av is a day of limitless despair and boundless hope and faith.

Excerpted from Erica Brown’s ‘In the Narrow Places: Daily Inspiration for the Three Weeks’ co-published with Maggid Books

One of the most beautiful expressions in Eikha is “Let us lift up our hearts with our hands to God in the heavens.” (Lam. 3:41). When we visualize this verse, we can imagine pieces of a broken heart held high in our hands, a gift to God of our innermost feelings. “Look, God, see our pain. See these fragments, these emotional shards, pieces of our heart. We show them to You. Have pity and compassion upon us.”

There is a Hasidic reading of this verse that offers us a different image. It aids us in constructing a positive way to handle human hardship. When we are in pain, personally or collectively, we may turn to others for guidance or cry to heaven for divine assistance, but we still have to struggle profoundly with how to manage with the pain and how to feel about it. Rabbi Soloveitchik once made a distinction between pain and suffering: Pain in the physical universe is what we experience when we get hurt. Suffering is an emotional, existential state that can exist long after the physical pain is gone. It can be wrenching, seem intractable. In the face of immense loss, we feel our smallness and vulnerability. Rabbi Naĥman of Bratslav, Hasidic rebbe and master story-teller, used the narrative form to give advice about this difficult human problem.

As a thinker, Rabbi Naĥman rejected despair and believed that humanity needs to cling to faith, joy, melody, and movement, authoring the famous statement of optimism: “Mitzva gedola lihiyot besimĥa tamid – It is a great mitzva to always be happy.” He believed that communication with a tzaddik, a righteous man, is critical for the soul, and that every person yearns for God. With that spirit in mind, we turn to one of his stories.

A Tale of Suffering:

A king once sent his son to distant places to study. When the son returned home, he was well versed in all branches of wisdom. The king then told his son to take a boulder the size of a millstone, and bring it up to the palace attic. The son looked at the huge, heavy boulder and realized that he would not be able to lift it. He felt very bad because he would not be
able to fulfill his father’s request.

The king then explained his true intention to his son: “Did you really think that I wanted you to carry this huge boulder? Even with all your wisdom, you could not do it. My intention is that you take a hammer and break the boulder into small pieces. You will then be able to bring it up into the attic.”

Many Hasidic tales center around a king and his son. The king obviously represents God, the ultimate King, imagined in human form, and the son represents the children of Israel. The king is both the stern, authoritative figure and the sympathetic father, playing on the tension that exists when these two roles are embodied in one person, much like our prayer “Avinu Malkenu, Our Father, Our King,” beseeches God through the prism of two different relationships melded into a difficult whole.

In this story, the king, as is often the case, tasks his son with an assignment that on the surface seems impossible. No one can shoulder such a large rock and carry it up to an attic. The king is, in essence, testing his son’s ingenuity. How will the son interpret the task? Will he have the originality of thought to find a way through, or will he give up in hopelessness because a solution is not immediately apparent? Although the prince has been sent to learn the world’s wisdom, he must pass this test that requires more than book knowledge in order to be worthy of becoming king. Indeed, in most such stories the king tests his children or his charges in order to check their worthiness, and to prepare thenext generation for the tribulations of leadership.

The son in this study does not measure up. He could not see beyond the size of the boulder to find a way through the challenge that his father posed. The stone was too big and heavy. And the father understood at that moment that his son’s wisdom was severely limited.
Academic learning is not the only, or predominant, requisite for sitting on the throne. The prince lacked a creative problem-solving instinct; he saw only one dimension in the father’s request, and that led to paralysis rather than innovation.

This story also has a wider application. Suffering is at the core of the human experience. Religions like Buddhism aim at helping people grow through suffering rather than shrinking in the face of it. Much of Hasidic thought, based as it is on an eternal sense of optimism, also aims at managing suffering by breaking it up into incremental pieces, each of which can be carried up to God – placed in the divine attic, so to speak. The way to manage suffering, the king wanted his son to know, is not to shoulder all of it at once, but rather to chisel away at it bit by bit, and only then lift it. That way it can be borne, and carried to a high place – given meaning and redeemed before God. Rabbi Naĥman implies that God wants us to “lift up our hearts with our hands to God in the heavens.” But our hearts may be like heavy stones, which we cannot possibly lift. What we then must do is take a hammer of words and break our hearts of stone. Then we can lift them up to God.

We have another biblical verse that has been interpreted in a similar way. In Jeremiah we read, “Is not My word like fire? says the Lord; and like a hammer that shatters a rock?” ( Jeremiah 23:29). In one Talmudic interpretation, Jeremiah is saying that just as a hammer can shatter a rock, so too can the words of Torah combat the evil inclination, breaking it apart so that it has little power to rule over us. This is a wonderful approach to managing temptation. Instead of looking at desire as a solid, immovable rock that obstructs our way, we need to view ourselves as the holders of a hammer, who can break the rock into manageable pieces that will then present little challenge.

So often in our lives we stand in front of a mountain of despair or temptation, before an immovable stone. At the bottom of such an incline, our capacity to scale the heights seems questionable. We can’t move mountains. But we can wear down the mountain, piece by piece, day by day, crumbling the rock, lifting it high to God, asking for compassion, realizing that we are far stronger than we’ll ever know.

Kavana for the Day

Recall a situation in the past that seemed beyond your ability to manage: it may be a family problem, an educational challenge or a professional struggle. Or perhaps there’s a mountain in front of you at this very moment, or a stone too heavy to lift. Write down what made or makes it seem so overwhelming and frightening. Now list ten small ways that you can chisel into this rock, and some reasons why you should offer up to God each piece that you’ve broken off. Think how this will make a difference.

Tackle the first on your list. Don’t leave it until tomorrow. You begin healing your suffering now. Believe that the King has faith in your creativity.

Excerpted from the Koren Mesorat HaRav Kinot: Lookstein Edition. Edited by Rabbi Simon Posner, Kinot translated by Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb.

Kina 22

The Rav discusses what we mourn for on Tisha B’Av. It is not only the Hurban Beit HaMikdash in the material sense, but also the Hurban Beit HaMikdash in the spiritual sense, the destruction of centers of Torah and the thousands of towns and villages over the ages where Jews lived a sacred life.

After shifting from kinot for the Hurban Beit HaMikdash to a kina for the Ten Martyrs, there is now a further shift in the subject matter of the kinot. This kina (Hacharishu Mimeni Va’adabera) is the first of several commemorating the massacres in Speyer, Mainz and Worms, and other related tragedies during the Crusades in Germany at the end of the eleventh century. These kinot recount the Hurban Batei Mikdash of the Hakhmei Ashkenaz, the slaughter of the Torah scholars and the destruction of the Jewish communities.

In a sense, however, this kina is a continuation of the kina “ארזי הלבנון.” In both kinot, the deaths that are described represent a double catastrophe. Thousands of Jews were killed during the Crusades. But the tragedy was not just the murder of ten people during the Roman times or the myriads during the Crusades. The tragedy was also the fact that the greatest scholars of the Jewish people were killed. In this kina, the mourning that is expressed is not just for the inhuman act of the massacre. Rather, the principal emphasis is on the destruction of the Torah centers in Germany.

The dates of these massacres are known to us. The Crusaders generally started out on their journey in the spring, and the massacres took place in the months of Iyar and Sivan, around the time of Shavuot. Even though these events did not occur on Tisha B’Av, they are included in the kinot and are commemorated on Tisha B’Av because of the principle, already noted in connection with other kinot, that the death of the righteous is equivalent to the burning of the Beit HaMikdash. If the Beit HaMikdash was sacred, how much more sacred were entire Jewish communities which consisted of thousands of scholars. These communities were also, collectively, a Beit HaMikdash in the spiritual sense. If the kinot speak about the Hurban Beit HaMikdash in the material sense, they also mourn the Hurban Beit HaMikdash in the spiritual sense, the destruction of centers of Torah and the killing of great Torah scholars.
In fact, sometimes the death of the righteous is even a greater catastrophe than the destruction of the physical Beit HaMikdash.

There is an additional reason for including these kinot dealing with the massacres in Germany in the Tisha B’Av service. Hurban Beit HaMikdash is an all-inclusive concept. All disasters, tragedies and sufferings that befell the Jewish people should be mentioned on Tisha B’Av. Rashi says (II Chronicles 35:25, s.v. vayitnum lehok) that when one has to mourn for an event, it should be done on Tisha B’Av. When these kinot relating to the Crusades are recited, one should remember that the tragedies being described happened not only in 1096 but in the 1940s as well. These kinot are not only a eulogy for those murdered in Mainz, Speyer and Worms, but also for those murdered in Warsaw and Vilna and in the hundreds and thousands of towns and villages where Jews lived a sacred and committed life. The kinot are a eulogy not only for the Ten Martyrs and those killed in the Crusades, but for the martyrdom of millions of Jews throughout Jewish history.

Excerpted from Erica Brown’s ‘In the Narrow Places: Daily Inspiration for the Three Weeks’ Click here to buy the book

Ours is an age which has forgotten how to cry.” Rabbi Norman Lamm, chancellor of Yeshiva University, offered this observation in a sermon he gave on Rosh HaShana called “Three Who Cried.” Rosh HaShana is a time when many of us cry over ourselves and our wrongs, and sometimes over the state of the world. Rabbi Lamm speaks of three types of tears: the tears that come when our myths of absolute security and certainty are shattered; the tears of those who resign themselves to hopelessness; and the tears of those who cry over reality, not from frustration or resignation, but from a determination to change and renew that reality. Jewish crying fits the last of these categories: the act of crying, according to Rabbi Lamm, is the beginning of transformation – the tears are those of protest and resolute purpose.

But Rosh HaShana is not the only crying time of the year where we have perhaps forgotten the meaning and the power of tears. Eikha returns to the motif of crying again and again. We can visualize Jeremiah, its attributed author, weeping ceaselessly as he writes. He tells us as much:

My eyes are spent with tears, my heart is in tumult; my being melts away over the ruin of my poor people. (Lam. 2:11)

When I cry and plead, He shuts out my prayer. (Ibid. 3:8)

My eyes shed streams of water over the ruin of my poor people. (Ibid. 3:48)

My eyes shall flow without cease, without respite until the Lord looks down and beholds from heaven. (Ibid. 3:49)

Do not shut your ear to my groan, my cry. (Ibid. 3:56)

We hear a familiar refrain in Jeremiah’s words: God is ignoring our tears. We sense multiple levels of pain in these verses. There is the anguish of destruction which prompts tears and then there is the additional weeping that occurs when God ignores the tears. Perhaps there is no pain greater than ignored pain. Just watch a child fall in a playground. The child in pain looks up to see if a parent is watching. With no parent to watch, he holds back the tears and continues to play. But when he sees that his mother is indeed watching, he bursts into tears, waiting for a nurturing embrace and someone to brush them away. Tears are one of the most powerful, wordless ways we communicate our feelings to others. To know that someone hears those tears and ignores them adds an additional element of suffering: “Do not shut your ear to my groan, my cry.”

But what about God’s tears? Does God ever cry about us? Do we ever ignore His cries? In the opening to Eikha Raba, an ancient rabbinic commentary on the book of Lamentations, there is an interpretation of the verse, “And God, the Lord of Hosts, called the day for crying and eulogizing” (Proem/Petiĥta 24). When our enemies broke into the Mikdash and conquered it, God said, “I no longer have a place in this world and will remove My Presence from it, back to its original resting place.” And at that same time, God cried and said, “What have I done? I placed My Divine Presence in the lower world for the sake of Israel and now that they have sinned, I have returned to My original dwelling.” In the midrash, God then goes with the ministering angels to see the destruction of the Mikdash from up close, and He cries again, “Woe is Me over My House. My children, where are you? My priests, where are you? My loved ones, where are you?”

At this point, God speaks to Jeremiah of what He is experiencing. “Today I am like a man who made his only son a wedding canopy, and he died in the middle of the ceremony.” God then tells Jeremiah to go and call upon his ancestors Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses at their burial places since “they know how to cry.” Jeremiah says that he does not know where Moses is buried (since we are told in Deuteronomy 34:6 that no one knows the location of Moses’ grave). God tells him to go to the edge of the Jordan River and call out “Son of Amram, son of Amram.” Jeremiah does this and asks Moses to petition God on behalf of Israel.

Moses asks Jeremiah why, but Jeremiah does not know (this midrash positions Jeremiah before the destruction. Here, the prophet has been denied the power to see the future). Moses then asks one of the ministering angels whom he knew from the time of Sinai to explain Jeremiah’s request and is told of the upcoming destruction: “The Temple has been destroyed and Israel has been exiled.” At that moment Moses begins to cry and petition so that his tears wake the patriarchs, and the angels rend their garments, put their hands on their heads, and scream and cry so that their tears reach the gates of the Temple. When God sees this spectacle, He declares a day of mourning.

This midrash explains the etiology of Tisha B’Av in an imaginative rendering of how tears prompted God to declare a day of mourning – and also describes how Jeremiah had to learn how to cry. He needed to take lessons from a master, Moses. And Moses needed the angels to cry with him so that the tears would reach the Temple. Finally, looking at all of this emotional unraveling, God Himself was also moved to tears.

Tisha B’Av is Jewish crying-time. It is a day when we look back at persecution and shed tears over the mess. Once a year we have to revisit a painful past where persecutions meld and merge into a continuous timeline of tragedy. We fast. We pray. We think. We cry.

What if we have forgotten how to cry? Though we may feel like crying, we so often hold back tears. Rabbi Lamm reflects on this in relation to Rosh HaShana, but his words are easily transferable to Tisha B’Av:

Once upon a time the Maĥzor [High Holy Day prayer-book] was stained with tears; today it is so white and clean – and cold. Not, unfortunately, that there is nothing to cry about…It is rather that we have embarrassed ourselves into silence…And so the unwept tears and unexpressed emotions and the unarticulated cries well up within us and seek release. What insight the Kotzker Rebbe had when he said that when a man needs to cry, and wants to cry, but cannot cry – that is the most heart-rending cry of all.

For us to feel the impact of the Three Weeks deeply, we have to allow ourselves the full range of sadness: grief, loss, remorse, guilt and confusion. We don’t have to teach ourselves to cry. We just have to give ourselves permission.

Kavana for the Day

Has there ever been a time when you cried over the Jewish people? Think of that moment and what prompted it. What was the trigger that pushed you over the invisible emotional boundary line? Open up the book of Eikha and skim its verses. Identify the one that pains you the most. On Tisha B’Av, go back to that verse and read it several times until you feel that you have taken it in fully.

If you cannot cry over it, but want to learn how to cry, think of someone you could turn to in order to learn how to cry. What prompted that choice of person? What makes some people “good criers” and others less able to express emotion fully? When we give ourselves permission to cry and to experience the full range of pain that Jeremiah expresses, we also learn how to experience the intensity of joy.

Excerpted from Erica Brown’s In the Narrow Places: Daily Inspiration for the Three Weeks, co-published by OU Press and Maggid Books 

Growth through Discomfort

We grow only through discomfort. When we are comfortable, there’s no reason to change. The book of Proverbs helps us appreciate the voices of those who make us feel uncomfortable with ourselves: “He who criticizes a man will in the end find more favor than he who flatters him” (Proverbs 28:23). We all love compliments. They make us feel special and connected to the person who offers them. But Proverbs tells us to be wary of the flatterer, the person who gives us too many compliments. We will do better with the person who offers us solid criticism that can help us grow and change in the future, than with one who offers us the fleeting luxury of a feel-good moment. How well do you take criticism? How well do you give it?

The book of Proverbs contains many descriptions of the wise man and the foolish one, comparing and contrasting them, praising one and criticizing the other. One of the most meaningful differences between the wise person and the fool is how they each take criticism. “Do not criticize the fool for he will hate you. Correct the wise man, and he will love you” (ibid. 9:8).

To understand why wisdom requires criticism, we have to think about the nature of rebuke. To do so, we turn to the very first verses of Deuteronomy, to the parasha of Devarim, the Torah portion that is always read during the Three Weeks. The Hebrew word “devarim” means “words” or “things.” In fact, words are things, giving the translation double weight. Many will shrug off an abuse of language with the simple dismissal, “It’s just words,” but Jewish tradition, from its semantic roots, treats words as having the concreteness of objects. They are our intellectual and emotional currency; they exist in the world. They are not wind or air that circulates lightly among us. They have weight and measure. Selecting the right words, the right context in which to use those words, and the right people to whom to say them is the better part of wisdom, especially when it comes to giving criticism.

When it comes to the things that we have to say, but don’t always want to say, we look to Moses for advice. We open the book of Words/Things and read the following verses: “These are the words that Moses addressed to all Israel on the other side of the Jordan. Through the wilderness, in the Arabah, near Suph, between Paran and Tophel, Laban, Hazeroth, and Di-Zahab, it is eleven days from Horeb to Kadesh-Barnea by the Mount Seir route. It was in the fortieth year, on the first day of the eleventh month, that Moses addressed the Israelites…” (Deuteronomy 1:1–3). Rashi adds layers of nuance to what seems like a typical biblical introduction, merely offering us the place and time of events. Moses, he contends, gathered everyone together so that there was no one absent who could later say that Moses spoke and no one contended with him. In other words, when everyone is present at a speech and hears the same words, there can be argument over interpretation but no refutation. Everyone knows who spoke up in debate. Rashi cites this ancient midrashic reading because the verse says “to all Israel,” an expression which is surprisingly rare in describing Moses’ audience. The actual words, “See, you are all here; he who has anything to say in reply, let him reply,” is a remarkably democratic position. If Moses is going to chastise the Israelites for a difficult past, let all be present to hear it so that anyone can counter, if anyone dares.

All of the complicated place names that may mean little to later readers are locations where the Israelites sinned. Rashi surmises that the audience would have well understood the significance – and implicit shame – in the mention of these specific stops along the way; the text does so subtly, Rashi observes, to protect the honor of the Israelites. While we may not be able to recall the import of these places, we can understand the significance that names embody. Consider how we can immediately conjure images of freedom just by naming a few cities: Gettysburg, Selma, Philadelphia, Boston, Jamestown.

Why does Moses gather everyone together in the last year of this wearying journey? Any number of possibilities come to mind. He could be preparing them for life in the Promised Land, giving over laws that they have not had to keep thus far, but that would be critical as they neared the land – such as laws related to war, to agriculture and to the formation of a government – all matters that are discussed in this last of the five books. He could review history and offer his perspective on the past, which is certainly one way that this farewell speech is understood. He could be preparing final words of inspiration, since he knows that he will not be making the last leg of the journey.

Rashi believes that Moses, following in the footsteps of Jacob, Joshua, Samuel and David, gathered everyone together to rebuke them before he took leave of this world. There is something harsh and grating in this idea, that the last words of a beloved and beleaguered leader to his followers are words of chastisement. The Sifrei, the midrashic compilation on Deuteronomy, presents four reasons why people offer rebuke on their deathbeds: in order to criticize once rather than repeatedly; the shame of the person criticized is mitigated by the fact that this is a final meeting; to prevent the person who is rebuked from harboring a grudge against the rebuker; in order that they may part in peace.

Each of these reasons aims at clearing a path so the relationship can move forward. The last words someone utters are profoundly impactful, and stay embedded in the receiver’s mind, precisely because they are the last ones. If you were to hear criticism again and again it would wash over you without really making a soulful mark. Sincere and thoughtful feedback not only fulfills the biblical command, “You shall not hate your brother in your heart; you shall surely rebuke your friend” (Leviticus 19:7), it also helps clear the barriers that stand in the way of a relationship. Rather than a final parting with the mystery of words unsaid, a last-ditch effort at advice and guidance can be its own meaningful legacy, a gift from the person who is leaving us forever.

Although Maimonides tells us how best to give difficult feedback – softly, in private and for the good of the person and not for our own good (Laws of Character 6:7) – we all still struggle with hearing it well and not putting up our defenses. Rabbeinu Baĥya ben Asher, the thirteenth-century Spanish scholar, writes in his introduction to Deuteronomy that Moses gathered everyone together to leave his ethical last will and testament, even though not all in the group were willing to listen:

It is well known that most rebukes [sic] are directed at the average person, the masses; the masses have different views, are not homogeneous…Seeing that all these people do not have minds of their own, they do not easily accept rebukes [sic] seeing that what one person likes another dislikes. What is pleasing to one person is unacceptable to others.

When in the presence of many people, it is always easy to believe that the rabbi offering up a heated sermon, or an angry boss at a staff meeting, is talking to or about someone else.

Rabbeinu Baĥya quotes two Talmudic passages to validate his reading. One states that younger scholars are preferred over older ones because the younger scholars are less critical. It’s easier to be popular if you make people feel good than if you make people feel challenged. The other reflects the words of Rabbi Tarfon: “I wonder if there exists in this generation anyone who knows how to accept rebuke.”

The way that we give and receive criticism is often shaped by culture, community expectations and societal norms. When we are defensive, we lose a whole avenue to introspection that can help us develop and grow in our sensitivity and thoughtfulness to others. Think of the helpful words of a mentor, a supervisor, or someone who took your last performance review seriously and gave you feedback that might not have been comfortable to hear but helped you become a better professional. Or the friend who you thought insulted you, but actually helped you become a better parent. There’s the word your wife said that offended you, but that made you see that you weren’t treating one of your children with the proper respect. Every day we receive messages about ourselves. Every once in a while, someone cares enough to tell us what they see. Correct the wise person and he will love you…

Kavana for the Day

Part one: Ask someone who is close to you either professionally or personally for feedback about something very specific. Listen carefully and prompt with questions. Think afterwards about what they said, how it made you feel, and what you’re going to do about it.

Part two: Think of a relationship that has suffered because you have not been telling someone what you really think. Find a way to give respectful feedback that shows love and concern. How did you do?

Excerpted from Rabbi Shmuel Goldin’s ‘Unlocking The Torah Text: An In-Depth Journey Into The Weekly Parsha- Bamidbar’, co-published by OU Press and Gefen Publishers 

Context

Following Bilam’s failed attempts at cursing the nation, the Israelites are seduced by the “daughters of Moab” and fall prey to the licentious idolatry of Ba’al Peor. God responds with a devastating plague that tragically claims twenty-four thousand victims from among the people.

Although no clear connection is immediately drawn in the text between the main story of Parshat Balak and the devastating episode of Ba’al Peor, a brief reference found later in the book of Bamidbar lays blame for this tragic event squarely at the feet of the sorcerer Bilam: “Behold! It was they [the Midianite women] who caused the children of Israel, by the word of Bilam, to commit a betrayal against the Lord regarding the matter of Peor; and the plague occurred in the assembly of the Lord.”

Questions

If the episode of Ba’al Peor can be directly traced to the scheming designs of Bilam, why doesn’t the Torah immediately say so?

Why record this tragic episode as an apparent epilogue to the Balak/Bilam narrative, omit any connection between the two stories, and then subsequently affirm such a connection, in a textual aside, much later in the text?

Approaches

A

A solution to these puzzles can be found if we recognize the tragic episode of Ba’al Peor not only as the textual epilogue to the Balak/Bilam narrative, but as the event that drives the message of that entire story home.

As we have noted before, the Talmud maintains that God’s transformation of Bilam’s curses into blessings ultimately has very limited practical effect. Due to the sins of the Israelites, the majority of these blessings revert back to their original curses. From this rabbinic perspective the Balak/Bilam story conveys a powerful, counterintuitive lesson: Bilam’s words, and other similar phenomena, do not matter at all. Ultimately our fate is determined by our own merit or guilt.

B

Suddenly, the strategically placed episode of Ba’al Peor is invested with new, devastating significance. As the Israelites emerge unscathed from Bilam’s external threat, only to fall prey to their own shortcomings, the flow of events mirrors in practice what the Balak/Bilam narrative preaches in theory: We can blame no one else for our failures; our destiny is in our hands.

The Torah’s immediate omission of Bilam’s pivotal role in the episode of Ba’al Peor now becomes completely understandable. Any mention of the sorcerer’s involvement would have diminished the Torah’s consistent message of personal responsibility. Through its silence, the Torah effectively robs us of the ability to blame anyone else for our people’s descent into idolatry. We are forced to realize the uncomfortable truth: Bilam’s machinations would never have succeeded had he not found the Israelites willing, easy prey.

Any mention of connection between Bilam and his successful plot against the nation will wait for another time and place. For now, the Torah is intent on bringing Parshat Balak to a cohesive close. From start to finish, this parsha is designed to sensitize us to the role that we play in determining our own fate.

Excerpted from the Koren Mesorat HaRav Kinot: Lookstein Edition. Edited by Rabbi Simon Posner, Kinot translated by Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb

Kina 25

This kina, by Rabbi Kalonymos ben Yehuda of Speyer, laments the massacres perpetrated by the Crusaders in 1096, which destroyed the most prominent Jewish communities of the Rhineland. The main motif of this kina (מי יתן ראשי מים, Mi Yiten Roshi Mayim), a motif found in some of the prior kinot, is that the death of the righteous is equivalent to the burning of the Beit HaMikdash.

If we are to mourn for the Beit HaMikdash, we must also mourn the death of the great Torah scholars. Since the tragedy of the destruction of the Torah centers in Germany is equivalent to the Hurban Beit HaMikdash, we are justified in thinking that a special fast day should have been established to mourn for the martyrs of those massacres. However, the kina declares, we are not to add any fast day beyond Tisha B’Av to commemorate any other catastrophe, massacre, or destruction.

The phrase in the kina “אי תורה ותלמוד והלומדה, Where are Torah, Talmud, and students?” has a message. The message of this phrase of the kina is that it is important to mourn not only for the great scholars but for the ordinary Jews as well. One does not have to be a genius or a great teacher of Torah. All one has to do is study, at any level. This itself is part of mesora, the chain of tradition. Our mesora consists not only of brilliant scholars, but also of simple Jews who study even if they do not understand what they study.

The phrase “Where are Torah, Talmud, and students?” was the phrase used by a Holocaust survivor to describe to me his feelings at visiting Vilna on Kol Nidrei night in 1945. Shortly after he was liberated, he returned to Vilna where he had lived before the War, for the High Holidays. It is difficult to describe what Vilna looked like on Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur before the War. In one neighborhood there were eight or nine synagogues, including the Beit Knesset HaGra and a synagogue that dated back to the Middle Ages. This person remembered what the Vilna shulhoif, the neighborhood where the synagogues were located, was like on Kol Nidrei night when tens of thousands of Jews would congregate. On that Kol Nidrei night in 1945, he returned to the synagogue where his mother used to pray, and it was deserted. He used the phrase from this kina to describe his feelings, “Where is the Torah and those who study it? Her place is desolate, with none to dwell therein.”

This survivor continued with a haunting story. His mother was a pious Jewess and of course attended shul on Yom Kippur. When it came time for Maftir Yonah, she used to leave the shul for half an hour and feed her cat at home. The cat would wait for her, and after feeding the cat she would return to shul. This man, who knew the cat, spent Yom Kippur of 1945 at the home where his parents had lived, and at 4:30 in the afternoon, there was a scratching at the door. It was the same cat waiting for him to feed her the way his mother had. This visit had a traumatic effect on him. At that moment, he felt the full magnitude of the Holocaust. Indescribable despair and bleakness overwhelmed him.

This story also illustrates how accurately Lamentations captures the devastation of the Ĥurban. When a place is desolate and devoid of human beings, it is tragic; but when animals prowl there, the pain is almost unbearable. As the verse in Lamentations (5:18) says, “For Mount Zion is desolate.” It is tragic that Mount Zion is desolate and deserted; but, not only are people absent, the verse continues, “foxes prowl over it.” The fox and the cat walk around. All he saw was the ruins of the synagogues and the cat prowling amidst the ruins. The only link between the past and present was the cat.

Excerpted from The Koren Mesorat HaRav Kinot: The Lookstein Edition

“People respond to the story of an individual personal tragedy more readily than to a national tragedy on a large scale.”

The placement of this kina in the sequence of the kinot initially appears odd. The order of “החרישה ממני” following “ארזי הלבנון” is logical and proper. However, one would have expected that the kina following “החרישה ממני,” which commemorates the martyrs of German Jewry, would have been “מי יתן ראשי מים,” the second kina pertaining to the Crusades in which Speyer, Worms and Mainz are mentioned by name and the dates of their destruction are recorded. Instead, the story of the death of Rabbi Yishma’el’s son and daughter is interjected, interrupting the series of kinot about the destruction of the Jewish communities in Germany. To compound the question, one could also ask why it is necessary to interrupt the description in the kinot of major national catastrophes with a story of a young man and woman who suffered as a result of the Hurban of Jerusalem, but whose deaths did not change the course of Jewish history or the routine of daily Jewish life. The narrative flow of the kinot mourns the destruction of the state, the land and the Beit HaMikdash – all of which changed Jewish history – then the martyrdom of the ten greatest scholars of the Talmud, and then the massacre of thousands of people and the destruction of the most important communities in the Middle Ages, both spiritually and numerically. In the midst of this national commemoration of the tragedies that befell the community, the sequence of kinot is interrupted with the story of the death of two individuals.

The answer is that Judaism has a different understanding of and approach to the individual. We mourn for the individual even if he or she was not a significant person. Rabbi Yishma’el, the father of these youngsters was already killed, and they were orphans. In light of the major calamities, who is responsible to remember a story about an individual young man and woman who were taken captive by some slave merchants? The answer is that we are. We have a special kina dedicated just to them, as if one hundred thousand people were involved, not just two individuals. Their life and their death may not have changed Jewish history, but we suffer and remember. We do not forget the faceless, nameless individual even in the midst of national disaster and upheaval, even when telling the story of the greatest of all the disasters in our history, the destruction of the Beit HaMikdash. In this kina we mourn not for the Jews of Worms or Mainz, not for the Hurban Yerushalayim, and not for the Beit HaMikdash. We mourn for a boy and a girl who were not leaders or scholars and who did not play any major public role. They are as important as the greatest leaders. Sometimes we become so engrossed in the national tragedy that we forget the individual, and the sequence of the kinot is interrupted to highlight the worth of the individual.