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TISHA BAV
Fasting, Mourning, and Sanctity
Translated
from Hebrew by S. NAthan
l'ilui nishmat Esther bat
mordechai
What
is the difference between fasting for mourning (Tisha B’Av) fasting for
kedusha and tahara, for sanctity and purity (Yom Kippur) and
eating on the mo’adim, the festival times when the mitsva of
simha is declared.
If
fasting is intended as a retreat and as a liberation from life's
stimulations, it would be enough to limit food to bread and water –
paht bamelah umayim bameshureh, “bread in salt and a measured amount
of water,” as part of a general retreat from pleasure-giving foods.
It
seems that fasting is meant to be the absolute elimination of eating as an
existential need, abstinence from eating being the dominant form of
abstinence among the five inuyim,afflictions.
The
requests one puts before God during prayer – to be granted income, and
protection from harm, “from an evil person, from an evil friend, from an
evil plague...” are continuously relevant to one’s existential experience.
Yet, there is no doubt that kavana is drastically different when
the requester is in distress, and the plea bursts forth from a cry of
suffering, when one is feeling the torment of need, when the entire
request is focused solely on one’s own suffering, on one’s own survival
which is endangered. Turning toward heaven in this case seems no
more than a means for seeking the solution to one’s problem.
Praying to
God to remove distress, when one is oneself satisfied and well-fed, and
when no threat to one’s survival mechanism is felt, expresses one’s
recognition of the Creator’s greatness and power; that it is in His hands
to prevent suffering. This kavana rises from the depths of
the heart of the believer. It is not gratitude only, for gratitude
can be directed by the survival instincts, based on the pessimistic
thought of what “could” “God forbid” happen were it not for the Creator’s
hesed, generous kindness. Rather it is also an expression of
happiness, and recognition of the Creator’s capacity to control even
life’s afflictions, and to prevent them as well.
We
find here three separate experiences of existence:
A.
Prayer that rises out of distress, and that belongs to the mechanism of
the survival instincts. Its benefit is in that it purges one of the
egoism characteristic of the survival mechanism, for this mechanism is by
and large given over to mechanical confrontation. It is a pure and
simple response to the stimulus of threat to one’s existence.
B.
Gratitude accompanied by a happiness that is the derivative of a negative
– from having been rescued from trouble. This too still belongs to
the survival mechanism but includes some light that manages to pierce the
darkness of the negative. (One recognizes the Creator’s central role
in one’s own life situation. Ego is joined to the spiritual
dimension, to the experience of faith, which prevents its incessant
preoccupation with the mechanisms of survival.)
C.
Giving creative expression to one’s “I”. This preoccupation derives
from happiness that derives from an admiration for the Creator’s capacity
to control the murky forces of evil that occupy the center stage of life
experience, which – by constantly presenting one with threats – draw the
greater part of one’s attention and energies to themselves. This is
gladness and awareness, and it pushes the forces of evil aside to relegate
them to marginal positions, placing in their stead dvaikut,
positioning dvaikut at the center of a positive experience of
existence that belongs to the creative mechanisms of “I”. This means
recognizing the Godly Presence, and placing it at the center of one’s
sense of existence.
Tisha
B’Av relates to the first sensation, Yom Kippur to the second, and
simhat hahag, the joy of the festival to the third.
Yeshayahu: (58: 4-8) “Why have we fasted and You have not seen? ...
Because you fast for quarrel and aggression. And to hit with the
fist of wickedness. ... Can this be a fast that I would
choose? ... Rather this is the fast I would choose:
Loosen the knots of wickedness...send the shattered free...should you not
slice bread for the hungry and bring home the miserably poor? If you
would see someone naked and cover him, and your own flesh not ignore...”
The Essence and Purpose of Fasting:
Fasting that is Not an Expression of Sorrow and Suffering.
The
navi teaches us an illuminating lesson on the meaning of the fast.
Fasting is not meant to add insult to injury through self-castigation and
self-torment. Why are self-castigation and self-torment called
adding insult to injury? Because turning toward God in this way is
no connection to the Master of the universe, to the All-Beneficent,
hatov ve’hametiv, “the Good One Who does good”, Who is all entirely
compassion and love for the creatures He has formed with His Own hands.
Self-castigation and self-torment have their source in self-pity for what
one has perpetrated against oneself. They are of the fruit of ego,
of the bestial survival mechanism, forebear of all sin.
Self-affliction is reminiscent of sin:
Just
as using a calf for atonement must be avoided, so as not to evoke the
memory of the Sin of the Calf, so does stimulation of the survival
mechanism by self-castigation serve only to rouse the survival mechanism
to further egocentric activity, without effecting any substantive repair
to previous damage done.
Instead of afflicting one’s soul and hoping thereby to pay off one’s debt
of punishment, so that one no longer need fear the retribution from above,
let a sinner leave his own egocentric mechanism behind and show interest
in another’s afflictions, in another’s hunger that is the result of real
want – let him identify with another’s suffering and offer assistance.
The
thought of the other frees one from one’s closed self-centered,
ego-centered circle, and transfers one’s attention to constructive and
healing creativity. God has no interest in affliction as healing.
Rather He desires that you heal the affliction of the other. “For
you fast for quarrel and aggression,” heaping negative upon negative
since, after all, your suffering does no one else any good, nor does
suffering per se` further one’s attachment to one’s Creator, Whose
compassion rests upon all His works. “Do not fast, like the day, to
make your voice heard on high,” meaning that fasting is not a positive
phenomenon, like the day, but rather like the night, and therefore
affliction is not a tool that is likely to create a bond with the One
above.
“Would this be a fast that I would choose?” This sounds as though
there is a certain fast that is preferred by the Creator: It is the
affliction of identification, and of awareness of one’s own responsibility
for what is wrong; suffering as the expression of personal involvement
with the suffering of the other. Emotional involvement that becomes
action – a feeling of empathy, which unites the value of one’s obligation
to correct matters with the act of correcting.
The
fast of Tisha B’Av could be construed as the fast mentioned by the navi,
which was an expression of mourning over the destruction. Mourning
in itself is inadequate to repair. God’s servant is stable in his
emotions. He does not artificially extract sorrow from his natural
structure of emotions, for this structure is designed to bind awareness to
action.
Sorrow alone is capable of deepening only the sensation of self-pity.
Self-pity deals only with self-preservation. Excessive focus on the
dangers to survival rouses one to an interest in fighting those elements
that are causing one’s suffering. Vengefulness ensues, and
bitterness, and the search for guilty parties (the Creator included) in
order to cast the burden of blame upon them.
There
is no trace here of any profound delving into causes based upon values, no
serious search for the moral flaw, for the rebellion against heaven, as
proven in the wake of disasters and implied in the book of Iyov.
Fasting as affliction is designed to join and merge the individual with
the nation as a whole, to bridge the historical past with the future, and
to explore the elements that are in need of rectification. Add to
this the words of the prophet Yeshayahu, and transfer sorrow from a
condition that can only cause further deterioration to a movement along
the creative track of tikun.
The Fast of the Holy Day Awakens One to Teshuva.
Fasting as the Opening Line, as the First Phase in the
Process of Teshuva
A
central factor in moral deterioration is the muddle caused by overload –
by excess relating to the outer environment. The multiplicity of
proposals and propositions offered by the environment seduces the
yetser’s imagination, and this muddled mental state causes a blurring
of one’s awareness of one’s goals. It blurs one’s awareness of one’s
needs as a creative “I” that aspires toward its own unique, value-based
self-actualization.
The
road to self-actualization is the only road a man can travel in his
universe. Indeed this road is his whole universe.
Ego
with its self-preservation systems activates kina, ta’ava,
and kavod, which pound at a man’s consciousness with their endless
offers, drafting his imagination and his emotion into their service,
persuading him to take an interest in persons or life forms that have
nothing to offer him in the way of fulfillment of the authentic needs
required by his unique “I”.
Kina, envy arouses his interest
in the road traveled by the other. Kina offers nothing that
is capable of helping him identify with his own road, with the path that
is unique to him alone.
Ta’ava stimulates needs that have
no real substance, and that are inadequate to express or fulfill the real
needs of his creative “I”.
Kavod affixes to him a self image
that is not his, thereby denying him the awareness that would come from
identifying with his own uniqueness.
Fasting is intended as a turning inward, as a returning to “I”, by
willingly relinquishing the vast spectrum of alien relationships to which
one is attached, by being willing to relinquish the system of the survival
instincts. This relinquishing opens the door for “I” to express
itself and to fulfill its own needs. It opens the door to
recognition of one’s ability to attach to a track of values that moves
toward a goal designed to actualize one’s own unique potential.
It is
a sort of pause to take inventory, to summarize, to do heshbon hanefesh,
and heshbon hama’asim, by returning to that vertical axis that
attaches one’s “I” to one’s Creator. This accomplished by
temporarily relinquishing and by reducing to the minimum that horizontal
axis that consists of the survival system of existential reality.
Bitula hi kiyuma: “By canceling it one upholds it.”
“Should a man die in the tent...” Should a man bring on
the death of all his existential needs in order to give himself utterly
and through mesirut nefesh
to
the learning of Torah.
Simhat Hahag, the Joy of the
Festival
Fasting is only the opening phase, designed to return the self-afflicting
person to himself. At the later phase, after the fast, the returner to
oneself is occupied with building a new horizontal axis that is not built
of external stimulation but of the awakening of the initiating “I” to seek
the means to actualize its goal within existential reality.
This
actualization is bound up with tangible activity, with the fulfillment of
Torah and mitsvot, with involvement with what is found in reality
leshaim shamayim, for the sake of heaven, u’l’kidush hahomer,
and in order to sanctify physical matter.
At
this phase, one is ready to deal with mitsvot, to broaden the boundaries
of one’s relating, which had been reduced by fast and affliction – toward
a positive and creative relating that is the cause of simhat hahag.
This
simha has the effect of marhiva da’at, broadening awareness.
It acquires property and wealth as an expression of “I”, though it covers
vast spaces far outside and beyond the limited territory of “I”, as
suggested in “it shall come to pass when God broadens your boundaries.”
This
broadening grants a wealth and a broad range of choice to creativity, and
to “I”s imprinting its unique stamp upon the environment. This
simha guarantees a proper sorting of the means and raw materials of
creativity, accepting the compatible and rejecting the imaginary.
It is
the simha shel mitsva that guarantees that accurate distinctions
will be made between the factors that correct and the seductions that do
one wrong, as suggested by shluhei mitsva ainam nizakim,
“messengers of mitsva cannot be harmed”.
The
Torah therefore attaches mourning to rejoicing, in that they are both
mutually compatible phases in the whole picture of repair of the link that
unites Creator, man, and universe.
Separating mourning from rejoicing could turn mourning into the stimulus
for self pity, reinforcing destructive involvement with the survival
mechanism. Simha that is not meant to complement the phase of
mourning can turn into mindless merrymaking, indulged in as compensation
for the distress of fasting. Such compensation attaches to the
survival mechanism learned in ego’s classroom.
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