The Religious Impetus

I. In two major essays, both written in the mid 1940’s, within a few months of each other, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the Rav, noted the parting of ways between a critical Maimonidean theological construct about the nature of the Almighty and the approach that the Jewish people, the historic, Knesset Yisrael, to use the Rav’s favored phrase, chose to adopt in its liturgy.

In Halakhic Man, the Rav noted:

Halakhic Man never accepted the ruling of Maimonides opposing the recital of piyyutim, the liturgical poems and songs of praise. Go forth and learn what the Guide [to the Perplexed] sought to do to the piyyutim of Israel!…

“In these prayers and sermons they predicate of God qualitative attributions that, if predicated of a human individual would designate a deficiency in him…This kind of license is frequently taken by poets and preachers or such as think what they speak is poetry, so that the utterances of some contain rubbish and perverse imaginings {Guide I:59)”. Nevertheless, on the high holidays, the community of Israel (Knesset Yisrael), singing the hymns of unity and glory, reaches out to its Creator. And when the Divine presence winks at us from behind the fading rays of the sun and its smile bears within it forgiveness and pardon, we weave a “royal crown” of praise for the Atik Yomin, the Ancient One. And in moments of divine mercy and grace, in times of spiritual ecstasy and exultation, when our entire existence thirsts for the living God, we recite many piyyutim and hymns, and we disregard the strictures of the philosophical midrash concerning the problem of negative attributes. (pg. 58)

In a similar vein, in The Halakhic Mind, the Rav wrote:

Indeed, not even Maimonides succeeded in his attempt to purge Jewish liturgy of poetic elements and anthropomorphic symbols derived for our sensational experience.  His endeavor to raise the prayer book to the lofty levels and peaks of philosophical abstraction failed abysmally.  Jewish God-worshippers have ignored the teaching of their master, Maimonides, and still sing hymns teeming with poetic refrain drawn from the well of human passion and emotion. Moreover, Jewish liturgists were not inclined to dispense even with anthropomorphic metaphors that lend warmth and color to the personal man-God relation. (pg. 39)

The Rav’s spiritual hero, Maimonides, was defeated in this philosophical battle and the deep rooted religious and spiritual instincts of the Jewish people, of “Jewish God worshipers” triumphed bringing the Halakha and Jewish practice along.

II. It is interesting to note that a similar phenomenon has occurred in our generation, albeit, in a more limited form, to the Rav himself! A liturgical/theological perspective championed vigorously by the Rav in his lifetime has slowly and now almost completely been abandoned. I refer to the specific issue of the writing and recitation of new kinot on Tisha Be-Av for the tragedies of the Shoah.

A number of scholars have documented that while individual rabbis and laymen authored elegies for the events of the Shoah immediately after the conclusion of the war and throughout the 1950’s-1970’s, in most communities, it was not common to add these kinot to the service on Tisha Be-Av. This was true for both the Modern-Orthodox and Haredi communities. The general hesitancy to introduce new prayers and the more limited role that the Shoah played in American and Israeli public Jewish life in those first decades after World War 2, until after the Eichmann trial and the Six Day War possibly played a role. In the Modern-Orthodox community, Rabbi Soloveitchik, was also a powerful voice in opposition to adding any new liturgy to the mourning service of Tisha BeAv. The Rav argued that we, who were not endowed with Divine inspiration, nor on the level of the medieval scholars had no authority to author and introduce new kinot. He argued that all Jewish tragedy can be subsumed and included under the umbrella of the language of the medieval kinot that are part of the traditional liturgy.  Ignoring the historical evidence that Jews had continued to author kinot well into the early modern period in reaction to the exile from Spain in 1492, the Chelmnitzki pogroms of 1648 and other tragedies, the Rav argued forcefully to his students and rabbis in the field against any such innovation. Indeed, I recall, that in the late 1970’s when I attended the Camp Morasha Kollel, the rabbinic leadership there strongly insisted that we skip the kina that Rabbi Abraham Rosenfeld had authored about the Shoah. This kinah was included in his kinot book which was the gold standard at the time for those looking for a comprehensive prayer book for Tisha BeAv with a good English translation and limited commentary.

In the 1980’s due to the work of a number of lay Orthodox Haredi survivors, such as Mr. Pinchas Hertzke z”l, the Yeshiva and Hasidic communities began to embrace the notion of mourning for the Shoah on Tisha Be-Av and adding kinot written specifically for that purpose. Elegies were written by prominent Haredi rabbis such as Rabbi Shimon Schwab and the Bobover Rebbe and slowly made inroads into the Orthodox community, both Haredi and Modern. These kinot were included in the Mesorah/Artscroll Kinnot that came on the scene in 1991 giving it wide exposure and use. More and more communities adopted some custom to recite one or more kinnot for the Shoah, so much so that even when Koren Publishers issued its Kinot Mesoret HaRav in 2010 based on the teachings of Rabbi Soloveitchik from his celebrated day long Tisha Be-Av lectures and explanatory kinot services from the 1970’s and early 1980’s, it included a number of elegies written for the Shoah, though he surely would have opposed their recitation![1]

The religious impetus, what Prof. Haym Soloveitchik termed in other contexts, the “ritual instinct” of the people, of the community, driven by the powerful impact of the Shoah and its legacy simply overwhelmed any halakhic or philosophic argument for conservatism. The Jewish people felt the need to express themselves in traditional forms as the difficulty, nay, for some, the absurdity of reciting kinot for the murder of a few dozen or a hundred Jews in the Rhineland during the First Crusade, but ignoring any liturgical expression for the murder of six million of our brothers and sisters was simply not tenable ethically or religiously.

As we approach Tisha BeAv 5784, it is clear that the same phenomenon, is bubbling up in the Modern-Orthodox in America and the Religious-Zionist community in Israel regarding the events of last Oct. 7^th. New kinot are being written by lay people[3] and rabbis[4] and they are spreading over the internet, being promoted by rabbinical organizations to their members and being shared by colleagues on list serves to incorporate into the long and tragic history of liturgical responses to Jewish suffering and tragedy.

[1] In the preface to the volume, the editor notes that “the Rav was not in favor of reciting kinot that were composed to commemorate the Holocaust…Nonetheless, the practice has arisen in many communities to recite kinot for the Holocaust, and we have included several, consistent with our view that this edition  should be of practical use for the general Jewish community, and not a reflection of the Rav’s personal practice.” (pg. xviii)

[2] See for example the kina written by Shoshana Haberman published in The Lehrhaus, Dec 26, 2023: https://thelehrhaus.com/culture/%d7%a7%d7%99%d7%a0%d7%94-%d7%9c%d7%a9%d7%9c%d7%95%d7%9d-%d7%94%d7%9e%d7%93%d7%99%d7%a0%d7%94/

[3]  R. Yosef Zvi Rimon and others authored kinot for the tragic events of Oct 7th and its aftermath that were shared widely before Tisha BeAv in many communities in Israel and the Diaspora.

This essay originally appeared in the Tuesday, August 13th edition of the Jerusalem Post and appears here with some very minor revisions. It was written in the weeks leading up to Tisha Be-Av this year.