Tears of Ink
Jewish liturgy abounds with hyperbole about how inadequate our praise for God can be. In Nishmat, we say:
And our tongues as joyous as its many waves,
And our lips praise like the expanse of the heavens,
And our eyes giving light like the sun and like the moon,
And our hands spread like the eagles of the sky,
And our legs agile like rams,
We do not sufficiently acknowledge You.”
The Tisha B’Av kinah, Mi Yiten Roshi Mayim, turns this pattern on its head. “Would that my head were water, and my eyes a fountain of tears,” he paraphrases from Jeremiah 8:23, “and I would cry all my days and nights for the corpses of my babes and infants, and the aged of my community.” It is not our praise that is insufficient, but our grief. There are not enough tears in the world, and certainly not in the eyes of Rabbi Kalonymus ben Yehuda of Speyer, to give voice to the sadness and devastation of the communities laid waste by the Crusader swords.
In this way, this kinah exemplifies Tisha B’Av as a whole, a holiday that reverses every trope of every other holiday in our calendar. Approaching Purim, we sing, mishenikhnas Adar, marbin b’simha – when Adar enters, we increase joy; this month begins with us intoning, mishenikhnas Av, mam’itim b’simha – when Av enters, we diminish joy. On Purim itself, we use the word nahafokhu a lot – reversal, turning upside down. On Purim it is yagon l’simha, evel l’yom tov – from grief to joy, from mourning to holiday. Today, we move in the opposite direction.
Rabbi Kalonymus seems to echo hopeful texts like the ones we chant at weddings, that speak of the voices of brides and grooms returning to the streets of Jerusalem, of the elderly being honored and children at play, of the halls of learning being filled again, and then to dash those hopes on the stones.
“I will eulogize [the Torah] with weeping and with sackcloth. She is more dear than fine gold, more precious than gold, her glory inward, the glory of all precious vessels. I have seen her torn, bereaved, and desolate. Torah, Scripture, Mishna, and Aggada: raise your voice, lament, and tell this tale. Where are Torah, Talmud, and students? The place is in ruin, no one there!” He mourns, he writes, “for the beautiful maidens and delicate lads, wrapped in their schoolbooks and led to slaughter.”
- Kalonymous’ tears are unlike those we read about in Psalm 30, “In the evening weeping will abide, and in the morning joy.” They are unlike Psalm 126, also known as the Shir HaMa’a lot with which we begin Birkat HaMazon, “Those who sow in tears will reap in joy; he will go, departing and crying, carrying his bag of seeds, but coming back he will come in joy, carrying his sheaves.” There is no morning for Kalonymous, only mourning. There is no nehemta. If anything, the nehemta is reversed: at the end of Psalm 30, we read, “You undid my sackcloth and wrapped me in joy.” For Kalonymous, the joy has been undone, and he is wrapped in sackcloth.
As the kinah makes clear, the lament for the Torah itself is not merely a handy device. Kalonymous describes a massacre that begins on Rosh Hodesh Sivan, turning the festival of Shavuot, z’man matan Torateinu, into a nightmare, and another that takes place on the eighth of Iyyar, which falls on a Shabbat. The days on which we rejoice in receiving the Torah have become our darkest.
On Shavuot, before the Torah reading, we encounter another of these effusive moments of praise, in Akdamut. That piyyut exclaims, “He has endless might, not to be described were the skies parchment, were all the reeds quills, were the seas and all waters made of ink, were all the world’s inhabitants made scribes.” For some reason, those words have always made me, as a person who loves to play with worse and describe things, tingle with a sense that is, well, indescribable. Just recently, I heard them paraphrased and turned on their heads in a song that seems a 20th century reboot of our kinah.
The podcast, Pack One Bag, is documentarian David Modigliani’s exploration of his family’s efforts to escape and survive the Shoah in Italy. In Episode 7, “Wolves’ Weather,” he meets his cousin Sara, a musician born in Italy just after the war, to learn about their family members who were deported to Auschwitz from the town of Velletri. Sarah shares a song that she recently recorded, written by a boy who experienced a similar Nazi raid: “Even if the sky was made into paper, and the seas were full of ink, (I) wouldn’t be able to describe (my) pain. This is my goodbye to you, my parents and brothers and friends.”
In like fashion, Kalonymous ben Yehudah of Speyer describes a shocking reversal: “And on [the first day of) the third month [Sivan], as they chanted Hallel, / they made a pact to be martyred for the love [of God]. / I will moan for them with a torrent of tears of woe, / all deserving to be endowed with majestic crowns! And upon the great of the wonderful community of Mainz, / swifter than eagles and stronger than lions, / they too consented in unison to sanctify the awesome One Name. / For them, I will scream a piercing scream with bitter soul, / as if for the destruction of both Temples, razed today, / and for the destruction of minor temples [synagogues] and study halls of Torah! On the third day of the third month [Sivan], these were added to my sorrow and curse. / That month was transformed into one of agony and trouble / on the day the Law was given, when I hoped to be spared in her merit. / On the very day she was given, she departed. / Gone back on high to her original home, / with her “containers” and her “pouches,” those who searched her and studied her.”
I don’t even know whether to consider it ironic, or fitting, that Akdamut itself was written by a near-contemporary of Kalonymus ben Yehudah of Speyer[i], Rabbi Meir ben Yitzchak of Vermaiza (Worms), as a polemic against those same Crusaders. Rabbi Meir was Chazan of Vermaiza and may have been one of Rashi’s teachers. He was killed after “losing” a disputation with the Christian authorities, and left the poem behind to preserve his words, mocking his persecutors, in Aramaic so only his own people would understand. I have to wonder if the neighbors down the road in Mainz had planned to chant Akdamut on their Shavuot which was never to be celebrated.
How familiar we are with these reversals, with our celebrations being stained in blood, our brightest days cast into darkness. As Kalonymous laments the destruction of Mainz, of Worms, of his own beloved Speyer, and the corruption of Shabbat, Rosh Chodesh, and Shavuot, we could easily write our own kinah. For the murdered of Poway, the slaughtered of Netiv HaAsarah, the martyrs of Pittsburgh – or the children of Velletri. The tragedies that befell us on the eighth day of Pesach, Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah, Shabbat Vayera.
Tisha B’Av, in truth, exists so that we don’t do that. Who will grant that my head be like water, my eyes full of endless tears? The same one that grants that this day we are marking be like a bottomless well of grief, deep enough to contain all that has befallen us and all that, I’m sorry to say, will befall us in the future. Perhaps even deep enough to contain the tragedy of what we have done to each other, our fellow Jews, in our self-righteousness, or to other peoples in our rage over the very tragedies we are marking today. Who will grant that this day be seemingly endless, and yet over before we know it, so that we can go forth from it and be decent, loving, hopeful people again, so that we can arrive at Shemini Atzeret and be akh sameah, purely happy?
[i] Kalonymus seems to have lived in the time of the Third Crusade, and Meir in the time of the First, but I encountered sources placing Kalonymus’ dates in various time frames over the course of two centuries spanning the whole period of the Crusades. Regardless of when, exactly, each lived, both clearly experienced Crusaders laying waste to the Jewish communities of the Rhineland.
