Beyond understanding

Tisha b’Av (the 9^th day of Av) is almost upon us. This is the day on which we remember, among other things, the destruction of the First and Second Temple, the sack of Jerusalem and the expulsion of the Jewish people from the land God promised and then gave them. We mark the day with prayer, fasting, reading the Book of Lamentations and various other practices that are associated with mourning and solemnity; some of these extend even to midway through the following day.

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.