Idolatry and Avot: a Tisha be'Av afterthought

The emotional intensity of Tisha Be’Av makes it difficult for me to keep track of what I fondly imagine to be my normally rational thought-processes. However, the intellective functions that drive my brain’s engines keep ticking away even when I’m not conscious of them. That, I suppose, is why so many ideas come to me as afterthoughts. Here, by way of example, is something that struck me only after several days had passed since the great fast.

On Tisha Be’Av we recited a kinah, Vayekonen Yirmeyahu al Yoshiyahu, which bewails the tragic and premature loss of Josiah (Yoshiyahu), the last and possibly the most righteous “good kings” of Israel. Basing its text on the midrash of Eicha Rabbah 1:18, the kinah recounts how Josiah searched the length and breadth of the land for idols, to root them out and destroy them. In this he was so very nearly successful. But

“[A] stubborn minority persisted in the pagan beliefs that had taken such firm root over the generations. They invented an ingenious method for concealing their idols. They split their doors in two and they split their idols in two, down the middle. They attached one half of the idol to each half door in such a way that when the doors were closed the two idol halves came together to be whole, but when the doors were opened the idol was split in half and each piece was concealed inside the open door. When Yoshiyahu’s detectives came to search for idols they opened the doors and found nothing”: ArtScroll Kinot).

So what does this have to do with Pirkei Avot?

There are two mishnayot in the first perek that address the way a householder should deal with strangers.

The first is 1:4:

יוֹסֵי בֶּן יוֹעֶֽזֶר אִישׁ צְרֵדָה אוֹמֵר: יְהִי בֵיתְךָ בֵּית וַֽעַד לַחֲכָמִים, וֶהֱוֵי מִתְאַבֵּק בַּעֲפַר רַגְלֵיהֶם, וֶהֱוֵי שׁוֹתֶה בַצָּמָא אֶת דִּבְרֵיהֶם

Yose ben Yo’ezer of Tzeredah says: Let your home be a meeting place for the wise; wrestle in the soil of their feet, and drink their words thirstily.

The second is 1:5, which opens like this:

יוֹסֵי בֶּן יוֹחָנָן אִישׁ יְרוּשָׁלַֽיִם אוֹמֵר: יְהִי בֵיתְךָ פָּתֽוּחַ לִרְוָחָה, וְיִהְיוּ עֲנִיִּים בְּנֵי בֵיתְךָ

Yose ben Yochanan of Jerusalem says: Let your home be wide open, and let the poor be members of your household...

Now, who were these midrashic travelling detectives that Eicha Rabbah 1:18 mentions? It’s not unreasonable to suppose that they were learned men, well versed in the distinctions between idolatry and true Torah practice. If so, they should have been invited in, so that home-owners could learn from them, as Yose ben Yo’ezer suggests. If they had been invited in, it is unimaginable that their hosts would not have closed the front doors, with the result that the detectives would have seen the idols when they turned to face the front door at their point of departure. From this we can infer that these wise men were not invited in in accordance with Yose ben Yo’ezer’s guidance.

But maybe these unsolicited callers were not sages, or didn’t look like them. Perhaps they were garbed as weary travellers, hot and thirsty as they trekked across the kingdom in search of idolators. Here Yose ben Yochanan calls for us to open our doors to all comers and to give them space. Again, it is apparent that the idolatry detectives were not being invited in since, had they been, they would have seen the double doors from the inside and would have realised what was going on.

The moral of the story is that, if you are travelling the country and calling door-to-door on home-owners in search of illicit idol worship, if you are not invited in as a guest you should begin to wonder if your would-be host has something to hide.

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Tisha be'Av 5784

This evening we mark Tisha be’Av, the date on which we remember the destruction of the First and Second Temples and mourn their loss. It is a day for feeling the pain and anguish of our ancestors and for recognising in ourselves the shortcomings in our own commitment to God and Jewish life that have ensured our failure to bring about the Temple’s restoration. It is a day of repentance, grief and contrition. We fast, we pray, we deprive ourselves of the comforts and pleasures that attend our daily life.

Pirkei Avot has no obvious point of contact with Tisha be’Av. On a day when Eicha, the Book of Lamentations, is twice recited in most synagogue services, we find reference to only one verse from that Book in Avot—and that is taken out of context. At Eicha 3:28 we read:

יֵשֵׁב בָּדָד וְיִדֹּם כִּי נָטַל עָלָיו

The Lamentations translation is:

“Let him sit in solitude and be submissive, for He [i.e. God] has laid it upon him”.

In other words, a person who has been beset by misfortune should sit as one who has been forsaken while he awaits an improvement in his condition. In contrast, the Avot ‘translation’ is taken as proof for the proposition that if even a solitary individual sits and learns, without sharing his words of Torah with anyone else, he will still be rewarded for it:

"He sits alone in meditative stillness; indeed, he receives [a reward] for it". 

On Tisha be’Av we do indeed sit by ourselves for much of the day, and most Torah learning (including Avot) is prohibited.  

It is ironical that we may not learn Avot on Tisha be’Av if we follow the extensive narrative in the Babylonian Talmud that seeks to attribute a chain of causation to the destruction of the Second Temple. In short we can deduce that, if our forefathers had taken the tractate of Avot to heart and applied it in their daily lives, the Second Temple would never have been destroyed. This narrative (Gittin 55b – 56a) opens with the story of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza, where a guest mistakenly invited to a party was publicly humiliated (cf Avot 3:15, per Rabbi Elazar HaModa’i, on not shaming another person in public). The rabbis who were present made no apparent effort to make peace between the warring parties (Avot 1:12, per Hillel); nor did they take the initiative and intervene to calm the situation (cf Avot 2:6, also per Hillel). Had they done so, we may infer, disaster could have been averted. 

I hope and pray that this year’s Tisha be’Av solemnities will be the last, that I shall see the Temple rebuilt in my lifetime and that we, and the rest of the world, will experience the real peace that will prevail when that happens. In the meantime, I wish those readers who are marking the day in the traditional way an easy fast—and a meaningful one.

Don't despair!

With Tisha be’Av, our national day of mourning, fast approaching, it can be difficult for committed Jews to focus on the happier and more positive things in life. So here’s a post that is designed to break the unrelieved sadness that many of us are experiencing.

In the first chapter of Avot we learn three things from Nittai Ha’Arbeli:

הַרְחֵק מִשָּׁכֵן רָע, וְאַל תִּתְחַבֵּר לָרָשָׁע, וְאַל תִּתְיָאֵשׁ מִן הַפּוּרְעָנוּת

(i) Distance yourself from a bad neighbour, (ii) do not join up with a wicked person, and (iii) do not give up the expectation of retribution.

The first two teachings are easy to discuss together because they appear to be related: they share a common theme of avoiding bad company. The third, however, is generally taken to stand alone.

The need to discuss the third teaching on its own is not just a consequence of it appearing to address different subject matter. After all, it is possible to tie it in with its predecessors. It demands separate treatment because of its ambiguity. Who is being told not to abandon the belief in retribution—the bad person or his victim? And are we automatically talking here of retribution? The same word פּוּרְעָנוּת (puranut) can also mean ‘repayment’ or ‘reward’.

This being so, here’s a more upbeat message on Nittai’s teaching. The source is Rabbi Norman Lamm’s Foundations of Faith, a 2021 publication on the late Yeshiva University President’s thoughts on Avot, edited by his son-in-law Rabbi Mark Dratch. He writes that not despairing of punishment can be interpreted in two different ways:

“One is, that when things are going well, when good fortune smiles upon you and you bask in affluence and good health, do not imagine that it will always remain thus. Do not distract yourself from the underlying misery and sadness and insecurity of life Do not ‘give up’ on the possibility that adversity may strike, cruelly and suddenly. But there is another way to interpret the same Mishnah: never despair because of adversity! When misfortune strikes, when life seems to crowd you in, when you are caught in narrow straits, when the sun has set and life seems to have darkened—nevertheless, do not give up, do not yield to despair, do not imagine that help will never come!”

[After citing, the Tzava’at HaRivash on Tehillim 16:8 R’ Lamm continues]

That is why we break a glass at a wedding, the time of supreme joy, in memory of the destruction of the Temple. And that is why on Tisha B’Av, the day of national calamity, we do not say the tachanun prayer, because this very day is called mo’ed, a holiday! We introduce a note of sadness during the wedding, and a note of joy during Tisha B’Av. Yet—we do weep on Tisha B’Av and we do dance at weddings! …To be sad does not mean to interpret all of existence as an unmitigated evil, and to be happy does not mean to ignore the tragic dimension of life…”

R' Lamm is not saying “cheer up, things could always be worse”. What he is saying is that the world is not comprised entirely of those things that seem to be worse and that we should acknowledge that this is so. Ideally, our Sages teach, we should be thankful for the bad as well as for the good since we have no means of discerning the objective value of anything that happens in the world God has created. For most people this is hard, if not impossible to do, but we can still do something. We can remember that good exists, whether we experience it or not, and we can be grateful for what we do have.

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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.

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Comforting us on Tisha be'Av: an application of Avot

Tisha be'Av (the 9th day of the month of Av) is the saddest day in the Jewish calendar. Apart from many other tragic events, we mourn the destruction of both the First and Second Temple as well as the dreadful loss of life, livelihood, freedom and human dignity that accompanied these momentous events.

Many customs, practices and rituals are associated with this day of national mourning. One of these is the insertion of a special blessing, Nachem, into the thrice-daily template of the weekday Amidah, the main prayer in the evening, morning and afternoon services.

How many times on Tisha be'Av should we recite Nachem? Rabbi David Abudraham, who flourished in the mid-14th century, cites a dispute between two Geonim as to the answer. Rav Amram Gaon maintained that it should be inserted into all three daily prayers, while Rabbenu Sa'adya Gaon said that it was required only once, in the afternoon prayer -- the third and final prayer of the Jewish day.

What is the ground of their difference? Rabbi Chaim Friedlander (Siftei Chaim: Rinat Chaim) offers the following explanation. On the view that Nachem is a request to be comforted, it is appropriate to recite it right through this tragic date since the entire Jewish people feels the loss and needs the comfort. However, there is a mishnah in Avot (4:23, per Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar) that teaches that we should not seek to comfort a mourner when the deceased (i.e. the object of the mourner's loss) is before him. On the night of Tisha be'Av and in the following morning, it is customary to sit on the ground in mourning but, once the afternoon arrives, the period of full mourning ends and it is only then that the time for offering comfort begins. And that is the time for reciting Nachem.