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.

For comments and discussion of this post on Facebook, click here.

Hillel's policy: keep it simple

Hillel teaches (Avot 2:5) that one should never make a statement that cannot at first be understood if one intends that it should be ultimately comprehended.

I came across a good example of the applicability of this axiom while listening to a conversation between a four and a half year-old boy and his mother. The subject of this discussion was the mother's brother (to protect his anonymity let's call him Archie):

Little boy: "Mummy, how old is uncle Archie?"

Mother: "Uncle Archie celebrated his 37th birthday only last week".

Little boy (somewhat puzzled): "Yes -- but how old is he now?"

Though the mother's response was perfectly correct, it didn't quite address the child's need: less information would have done the job better. The child in question had some comprehension of both numbers and the measurement of time but was sometimes confused by the way they were expressed. Thus sometimes he said he was "four and a half" but on occasion he would say he was "half past four".

Incomprehensible

Reading an otherwise enjoyable book this morning, I had the frustrating experience of encountering a chapter which opened with a quotation.  Annoyingly, while the book was in English, the quotation was in Spanish and it came without an accompanying translation.

I like to think that, as a former university professor and as an author and editor in my own right, I am a more than averagely literate reader. I can cope with Shakespearean English and the King James Bible with the same facility with which I read Damien Runyan. My linguistic skills embrace Latin and Classical Greek as well as biblical and mishnaic Hebrew and a fair smattering of Aramaic. I can even cope with French menus and street signs. However, the range of languages spoken by human beings on this planet is vast and I have no competence in Spanish at all.

Hillel the Elder had something to say about dropping foreign-language quotations into one's writings. In Avot 2:5 he advises that a person should not say anything that cannot easily be understood if he intends that people should understand it.  He, I am sure, would have suggested either translating the Spanish quotation into English in its entirety or featuring a parallel translation for the convenience of readers.

There are many examples of this sort of thing, in print and in speech. One of the most frustrating is to attend a Jewish wedding at which someone stands up and makes a speech -- in English -- the main feature of which turns out to be a long and involved joke. As the climax of the joke approaches, it is clear that it is a real classic and everyone eagerly awaits the punchline.  When it comes, it is delivered in Yiddish (another language that I do not understand). Everyone falls about laughing but, when I ask them what the punchline means, they say they can't tell be because it wouldn't be funny in English. I remain unamused.