Tisha B’Av

Yom Kippur

Yom Tov

Rav Zev Chaim Lifshitz

 Fasting, Sanctity, Joy

 Translated from Hebrew by DR. S. Nathan

l'ilui nishmaT Esther baT Mordechai
L'ILUI NISHMAT MEYER HIRSH BEN LAIBEL

What differentiates the mourning fast day, Tisha B'Av from the purifying, sanctifying fast day, Yom Kippur?  What differentiates these fasts from the festivals, on which we are commanded to rejoice?

If fasting is meant to be a retreat and a liberation from the stimuli of existence, limiting food to bread and water would be enough, in the context of a retreat from pleasurable foods.  It seems the fast was designed for the total elimination of eating as an existential need, placing it at the top of the list of the five afflictions observed on a fast day.

During our prayer, we plead that God grant our livelihood, and protection from those who would harm us, “from an evil person, from an evil friend, from an evil trouble.”  These requests are constant, and repeated daily.  Nevertheless the cavana, the inner mental focus is undoubtedly very different when the requester is in distress, when his request bursts forth in groaning and suffering as he feels his own misery: His plea focuses only on his own suffering, on his own survival that has been endangered.  This type of turning to heaven may be no more than the means for seeking a solution.

On the other hand, when one is experiencing satisfaction and contentment, when one’s own survival mechanism has not been threatened and one nevertheless pleads to God to remove distress – this comes to express one’s consciousness of the might and greatness of the Creator, one’s recognition of the fact that it is in His hands to prevent suffering.  This is an inner meaning that draws from the depths of the believer’s heart. 

This is more than mere awareness of gratitude owed, for such awareness could still and all be directed by the survival mechanism, by pessimistic thoughts of all the dire possibilities that “could” “Heaven forbid” transpire, were it not for the Creator’s lovingkindness.  This recognition is rather an expression of happiness: One is conscious of the Creator’s omnipotence, of His control over, and His ability to prevent life’s troubles. 

We thus find three distinct categories of sensation in prayer:

1. Prayer out of distress.  This belongs to the survival mechanism.  The advantage of such prayer is that it purges selfishness, also purging the survival mechanism that characterizes selfishness.  The survival mechanism is preoccupied entirely with a mechanistic confrontation with existence as an adversary.  It operates in a response mode only, reacting to stimuli that threaten its existence.

   2) Prayer as gratitude, accompanied by happiness that       derives from a negation, from having been delivered from distress.  This also still attaches to the survival mechanism, but it includes also the light that pierces through   dark negativity.  (Here is a recognition of the Creator’s central role in one’s own existential condition.  It has the effect of attaching ego to the spiritual dimension, to an experience of faith, and it moderates ego’s incessant preoccupation with the survival mechanism.)

  3) Prayer as the self’s own creative expression.  Here the self is involved – in admiration and delight – with the Creator’s ability to control evil’s powers of darkness, normally found at the center of one’s experience of existence, for by perpetually posing threats, they manage to attract the lion’s share of an individual’s attention and strengths toward themselves.  But now the self comes and pushes the powers of evil to the sidelines, and puts dvaikus in their place instead, at the center of a positive existence that belongs to the self’s mechanism of creativity.  This is a consciousness of Godly presence: One places the Godly presence at the center of one’s sense of existence.

Tisha B’Av relates to the first sensation, Yom Kippur relates to the second sensation, and the simchas hachag relates to the third.
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Yeshayahu 58:4-8:  “Why have we fasted while You have not seen?  …  Because you fast for quarrel and hostility, and to hit with the fist of wickedness…  Would such a fast day be something I would choose?  When a man afflicts his own life force and bows his head like a creeper?  Rather – here is a fast such as I would choose: Loose the fetters of wickedness and set free the crushed and oppressed.  You must slice your bread for the hungry, and bring desperately poor people home with you.  If you see someone naked, cover him.  Also, do not ignore your own flesh.”

The essential substance and goal of the fast is a negation of fasting as an expression of trouble and affliction.  The navi teaches us an edifying lesson in the meaning of the fast.  It is not intended to add insult to injury by self-affliction and self-torment.  Adding insult to injury and sin upon sin – we mean by this that turning to God by way of affliction and torment is not a bonding with the Master of the universe   Who is good and Who does good, Who is all entirely compassion and love for His creatures whom His Hands have created.

It is almost closer to self-pity for one’s troubles, though one has caused them to oneself, for they are the fruit of one’s own ego, one’s own animalistic survival mechanism that is the mother of all sin.   Such self-conscious self-affliction is a potential “reminder of sin.”  Just as we avoid using a calf for atonement, in order not to remind Heaven of the sin of the Golden Calf, similarly, stimulating the survival mechanism with excessive self-affliction could have the effect of rousing this mechanism to further, increased activity without effecting any substantive repair of the damage that it itself has brought about.

Rather than afflicting your life force, in the hope of fulfilling your punishment requirement so that you no longer need to fear heaven’s punishment, a sinner must exit from his own selfishness mechanism and show interest in another’s suffering.  Feed someone who is truly hungry: Identify with his suffering and offer him assistance.  Thinking about the other will liberate you from your own selfish, egocentric orbit and will transfer your attention in the direction of corrective, constructive creativity.

God has no wish for affliction as repair.  Rather, He asks that you repair another person’s affliction.  “Because you fast for quarrel and hostility,” adding negative upon negative, for after all, by suffering you are doing no one any good, and suffering per se` does not enhance your bond with your Creator, “Whose mercies are upon everything He has made.” 

“Do not fast as the day, to sound your voice up above,” meaning that the fast is not a positive phenomenon, as is the day, but rather it is as the night, and therefore affliction is not an instrument likely to create a bond with the One above.

“Would the likes of this be a fast I would choose?”  This sounds as though there is a fast that is preferred by the Creator.  Such a fast does exist.  It is the affliction that comes of identifying, of being conscious of responsibility for the deteriorated situation.  Suffering as an expression of personal involvement with the suffering of another; emotional involvement that leads to practical action; a feeling of empathy that unites the value of being obligated to repair with the practical action of repair.

The fast of Tisha B’Av might be the fast that the navi is referring to, in that it is an expression of mourning over the destruction of the Bais HaMikdash.  The mourning does not in itself hold repair.  God’s servant is stable in his emotions, and he does not tend to extract his sorrow out of the natural structure of emotion, for this structure is designed to connect awareness to action.

Sorrow on its own might deepen the sense of self-pity and do no more than that.  Self-pity deals only with self-preservation.   Excessive focus on the dangers of survival arouses an interest in making war on the                                   causers of suffering.  This leads to revenge, bitterness, and a search for guilty parties (the Creator included) in order to lay the blame upon them.

Self-pity holds no trace or mention of serious investigation, or of delving deeply into causes based upon values.  There is no search for the moral flaw, for the mutiny against heaven that always proves to have been the case in the wake of disaster, as implied in Sefer Iyov.

The fast as affliction is designed to join and attach the private individual to the whole of his people, to unite the historic past with the present, and to examine the causes that require repair.  The mere fact of uniting with one’s people in their historical entirety offers repair for the causeless hatred that was the cause of ruin.

Add to this the words of the prophet Yeshayahu and transfer your sorrow – from the track that only increases deterioration, to the creative track of repair.

The Fast of the Sacred Day

The Fasting that Awakens to Teshuva

The fast as the opening note, as the first stage in the process of teshuva: A central factor in human deterioration and degradation is confusion, caused by an overload of relating to external elements.  Multiple offers entice lustful imagination, and this confusion leads to a blurring of one’s goal.  It leads to a blurring of the needs of the creative self that aspires to its own unique, value-driven self-actualizaton. 

This is a man’s only real route his world.  Indeed, this is his entire world.  Ego, which includes the self-preservation system, activates kina, ta’ava, and kavod, “envy, lust, and pride,” which flood his awareness with an excess of offers and possibilities, drafting his imagination and his emotion to take an interest in and to identify with persons and life forms that offer nothing for the unique needs of his authentic self.

Envy arouses his interest in another’s path.  It is inadequate to help him identify with his own path, which is unique to him alone.  Lust stimulates needs that are without substance and that are inadequate to satisfy the needs of his creative self, while pride pins on him a self-image not his own, thus denying him the awareness that comes of identifying with one’s own originality.

The fast is designed for introspection, for entering inside of oneself by willingly renouncing the entire spectrum of external, alien modes of relating – by renouncing the survival system.  Such renunciation opens the door for the uniquely original self to express its own needs.  It opens the door to an awareness of one’s own ability to connect to the track of quality and to move toward a goal designed to actualize one’s own unique ability.  Something like shutting down business to take inventory, to sum up, to go through the accounts, to evaluate all transactions material and spiritual – chesbon hanefesh. 

This taking of inventory is in context of a return to the vertical axis that connects the self to its Creator.  It is in context of temporarily renouncing and maximally reducing the horizontal axis comprised of existential reality’s survival system.  As in – “to cancel it is to uphold it.”  And “should a man die in the tent.”  Let him put to death all of his existential needs in order to occupy himself with Torah in utter devotion and self-sacrifice.

Simchas Yom Tov

The fast is only the opening stage, designed to return the self-afflicting individual to himself.  In the stage following the fast, the individual returning to himself is involved in building a new horizontal axis, built not out of external stimuli but out of the awakening self initiating the means by which to actualize its goal within existential reality.  This actualization is bound up in activity of real substance, of observance of Torah and mitzvos, of practical involvement in the ontological “here and now” of reality, for the sake of heaven, in order to sanctify physical matter.

At this stage, a man is willing to occupy himself with mitzvos, to broaden the boundaries of his relating to reality, which have shrunk due to fast and affliction.  This is a positive, creative relating and it is the cause of the happiness of Yom Tov.  Such simcha is marchiv da’as.  It is a happiness that broadens one’s perspective and accumulates a wealth of holdings for the self’s expression, spreading outward even to spaces beyond the self’s limitations, as in “it will come to pass when God will broaden your boundaries.”

This broadening grants a wealth of choice for creativity, a wealth of opportunity for the uniquely original self to imprint its seal upon the environment.

Such happiness guarantees that the means and raw materials of creativity will be sorted through properly, while those that are merely imaginary will be removed.  It is this “happiness of mitzvah” that promises the ability to make proper distinctions between the causes of repair and the temptations of ruin, in the sense of “messengers of mitzvah are never harmed.”

This is why the Torah attaches mourning to happiness in that both are stages that complete the perfect tikun, the perfect repair of the bond that unites Creator, man, and universe.

Separating mourning from happiness turns mourning into a stimulus for self-pity, reinforcing the destructive involvement of the survival mechanism.  The happiness that follows self-pity’s mourning does not repair; it is no more than a mindless hilarity that deludes itself into believing it will compensate for the distress of mourning.  Compensation of this kind belongs to the survival mechanism and is learned in the school of selfishness.