One of the
traditional features of Tisha b’Av observance is the recital of kinnot, verses
of lamentation which describe the suffering of the Jewish people not just in the
Temple era but throughout our subsequent history. Some kinnot are of
ancient provenance; others are sadly recent and commemorate the Holocaust—an event
still within the memory of the last few remaining survivors of its horrors.
Until relatively recent times, kinnot were
simply chanted one after the other by Jews in mourning mode, sitting on the floor
of the synagogue, without a break and without any explanation. There is now
however a popular and increasingly widespread trend towards the selection of
only a sample of kinnot, each of which being introduced in turn by a
rabbi or congregant who could say something about its structure, function and
content. If one is to understand the kinnot this is generally necessary,
since many are replete with embedded biblical references, complex rhyming
schemes, acrostic coding and occasionally baffling if vivid imagery.
Hillel
(Avot 2:5) teaches:
אַל תֹּאמַר דָּבָר
שֶׁאִי אֶפְשַׁר לִשְׁמֽוֹעַ שֶׁסּוֹפוֹ לְהִשָּׁמַע
Translation: Don’t say anything that is impossible to understood when
its objective is to be understood.
This
teaching might well be aimed at the authors of some of the kinnot, where
it is difficult to pick up the meaning on a first reading even if one’s Hebrew
is good, because of their allusive references and poetical style. For us,
sometimes grappling with them at a distance of many centuries since they were
penned, the problem is even harder, but even contemporaries who were not scholars
may have struggled to grasp their full meaning.
I have
thought about this often. My conclusion is that the authors of the kinnot
have not failed the Hillel test. There are two possible reasons for this. The
first is that, while we now have a corpus of kinnot that are printed and
widely distributed at little cost throughout the Jewish world, some of them would
have been written with specific communities, or even individuals, in mind, and they
would have been well understood by their intended audiences. The second is that
some of them reflect the personal feelings of their author and may have been
written as a sort of therapy, as a way of trying to make sense of events that
are too big for many people to accommodate easily, or at all, within the emotional
and intellectual frame of one’s own existence.
So, if we
cannot understand the kinnot the way we would like, it would be unfair
to blame their authors.
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