The Jewish Power Blog: Mourning and Fasting
Traditionally, in a Jewish house of mourning, during the shiv’ah period of intense grief, there is always plenty of food; indeed, an important role of the supporting community during that week is to make sure that the mourners are well fed. There is perhaps a symbolic statement in this concern, of the importance of “life going on.” The mourners must be taken care of and nourished and not be allowed to wallow in despair, to give up on their own lives.
And yet, on the ninth of Av (last week), our day of mourning for our formative national catastrophe – the destruction of the Temple and our loss of sovereignty – the ritual that characterizes the day is fasting: the only full 25 hour fast in Judaism other than Yom Kippur. The Talmud contains an entire tractate, Ta’anit, devoted to the laws of fasting. It turns out that communal fasts were the normative response to catastrophe, whether a local disaster like plague or flood or persecution, or a regional or national one, especially drought. So the question arises, is this fasting an expression of mourning, or something else?
We mourn when a person close to us dies. A piece of us has been ripped away and we feel bereft, abandoned, lost; moreover, we are reminded that we too will die. It takes an effort, a process, supported by family and community and a structure of ritual, to recover from the blow, to transition to a new stage of life in which we figure out how to live without our deceased loved one. While we may feel guilty for surviving, an important part of the process is to accept our own powerlessness: we are not God, and we are not responsible for the catastrophe that has befallen us in this death; the responsibility we do bear is now to live a life that will keep their memory alive.
In the case of national disasters, on the other hand, the biblical ideology of the covenant teaches that we are indeed responsible for what happens to us. From a year of drought to the historical catastrophe of the destruction of the Temple, the classic response is not just grief. It is guilt. It is the acceptance that we were not – and are not – powerless; rather, we are responsible for what has happened, and we have to commit to taking action for repair. We fast not because we are too sad to eat; we fast – we “afflict our souls” – in order to demonstrate to God our remorse for our sins and our sincerity in committing to do better.
The prophets again and again hammered home the point that national disaster awaits us if we fail to build the just society envisioned by the Torah. And when the rabbis set the canon of the Bible, these prophetic warnings were granted sacred status. The ninth of Av may be a national day of mourning and include customs associated with mourning, but the underlying theme, as expressed by the fast, is repentance. We are not ripped by grief at our victimhood; we are rather ashamed at our failure to live up to the expectations of God’s covenant with us.
The Haftara reading for the Shabbat before the ninth of Av is the first chapter of Isaiah, which includes (vss. 17, 24):
Learn to do good. Devote yourselves to justice;
Aid the wronged. Uphold the rights of the orphan.
Defend the cause of the widow…
But if you refuse and disobey,
You will be devoured by the sword.
The Torah makes pretty clear what we have to do, and the prophets reinforce it powerfully and poetically. When bad things happen to the nation of Israel, we are not powerless victims, but bear responsibility ourselves. Of course there have always been forces in the world that had an interest in our suffering, and they are still out there. But if we allow them to determine our actions, then what are we?
On one level, Zionism can be seen as a rebellion against the above scheme, based on a rejection of covenant, replaced by self-determination: it is not God who determines our national fortunes, but our own wisdom and the strength of our army. For this strand of Zionism, the ninth of Av is indeed merely a day of mourning. Look what they did to us in 586 BCE, in 70 CE, in 1492, in 1942, in 2023! And look what they are doing to us still!
But Zionism has always held within it a competing strand, one which saw the creation of a modern Jewish state as an opportunity to build an ideal society in the spirit (if not the specific laws) of the Torah, characterized by social justice and peaceful relations with other nations. For those who identify with this understanding, the ninth of Av is a day of soul-searching, of repentance, of re-commitment to the utopian vision of Israel: how can we get this right – or at least a little better? Isaiah again (58:5-7):
Is such the fast I desire, a day for men to starve their bodies?…
No, this is the fast I desire:
To unlock the fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke,
To let the oppressed go free; to break off every yoke.
It is to share your bread with the hungry,
And to take the wretched poor into your home;
When you see the naked, to clothe him,
And not to ignore your own kin.
