Maximillian Hollander
A fire burns within me as I recall,
When I left Egypt.
I will invoke lamentations so that I will remember,
When I left Jerusalem. [1]
Kinnah 31, Aish Tukad, takes a powerful and acutely painful approach to mourning on Tisha B’Av. Using a similar motif to the midrashic work Eicha Zuta, the kinnah reflects on the tragic downfall of the Jewish people by comparing the glorious experiences of our redemption from Egypt with our degrading experiences when leaving Jerusalem in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple. Each stanza couples details of the Exodus and our people’s past with painful details of the Churban.
Reading through the Kinnah, one notices the way many of the stanzas’ positive and negative qualities mirror one another or contain some shared element. For example, in the third stanza we read about two kinds of clouds, one being the divine cloud representing God’s presence in the desert, and the other being representative of God’s wrath after the destruction of the Temple.
My house was founded and the divine cloud dwelled there,
When I left Egypt.
But God’s wrath descended upon me like a cloud,
When I left Jerusalem.
In the eighth stanza, the author couples days of celebration with days of mourning.
Festivals and Sabbaths and signs and wonders,
When I left Egypt.
Fast days and mourning and vain pursuits,
When I left Jerusalem.
And in the tenth stanza, the Yovel and Shemittah years, times when slaves are freed and debts are forgiven, are compared to the downfall of our people when our enslavement and debts felt beyond repair.
Jubilee and Sabbatical year and a tranquil land,
When I left Egypt.
Sold beyond reclaim, forever severed,
When I left Jerusalem.
Within each of the author’s lamentations about the present circumstances is a reminder of a more pleasant one. These clashing memories deepen the sadness of the present.
However, I’d like to suggest a reading of this poem that reclaims these positive memories, seeing them as being recalled in spite of the day’s sadness, not because of it.
Traumatic experiences have the power to completely uproot the people who experience them from their sense of self, and rob them of any sense of safety or joy they’ve had before. When we’ve felt enough pain in our lives, it’s easy to forget that there was ever anything else. This feeling is reminiscent of Pharaoh in Genesis, who dreamt of seven years of plenty, followed by seven years of famine so severe that the previous years of plenty would be utterly forgotten.
Sadly, Jews know more than enough about this kind of trauma. Scholars of Jewish history have noted the devastation of the Temple to Jewish life and the kind of uprooting it caused. “The trauma must have been immense,” wrote Rabbi Shai Held about the destruction of the Temple, “almost unfathomable.”[2] After the destruction of the Temple, “no longer did Judaism have a sacred center, a temple, a priesthood, and a sacrificial cult.”[3] With the Temple gone, “much of Jewish life lay shattered.”[4] Since then, our people have only faced more devastation.
But what can make this Kinnah so powerful is seeing its inclusion of moments of splendor from our past as a refusal or inability to forget them. This is a form of resilience, a “process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.”[5] While we recognize God’s cloud of wrath we recall the clouds of glory. While we acknowledge days of mourning, we remember the better days of Shabbat and festivals. And while we feel the brokenness of the present, we recall times of freedom and joy.
This ability to weather the storms of life isn’t foreign to Jewish history and tradition. The Midrash Tanchuma reflects on the Torah’s introduction to Noah, asking why his name was repeated three times in the verse:
These are the generations of Noah. Noah was a righteous man… Noah walked with God (Gen. 6:9).
The midrash posits that this repetition is a nod to three figures in Jewish history who were privileged to witness profound moments of change in the world; Noah, Daniel and Job.
Noah saw the world inhabited, he witnessed its destruction, and finally he beheld it reinhabited. Daniel saw the first Temple intact, he beheld its destruction, and then he witnessed the erection of the second Temple. Job saw his household established, he beheld its destruction, and he finally witnessed its reestablishment.[6]
All three characters experienced periods of blessing, found the strength to survive intense periods of destruction, and ultimately saw the return of good fortune. They can serve as models of resilience. Noah, in particular, presents us with a powerful model of resilience in the way that he not only survived the destruction of the world, but had the strength to construct the ark and care for the people and creatures that would one day rebuild the world when the cataclysm passed.
Furthermore, Rabbi Moshe Weinberger includes the Jewish people as a whole in this ability to miraculously survive cataclysm with holiness intact. He quotes Rabbi Simon in Bereshit Rabbah, who said:
The Holy One blessed be He found three [precious] finds: Abraham, as it is written: “You found his heart faithful before You” (Nehemiah 9:8); David, as it is written: “I found David, My servant” (Psalms 89:21); Israel, as it is written: “Like grapes in the wilderness I found Israel” (Hosea 9:10).[7]
This isn’t meant to say that God didn’t know where these people were, but is describing the abysmal circumstances these people were in, such that anyone else would have considered them impossible to find. “A lost object,” Rabbi Weinberger wrote, “is something that one thought he would never find again.”[8] However, each of these lost objects maintained their faith and resolve. Abraham was enmeshed in a culture of idolatry yet maintained his faithful heart. David was the descendent of a Moabite and lived through tremendous challenges, yet still had the strength to become the redeemer of Israel. And the Jewish people, despite their nearly endless hardships, have been resilient enough to survive and maintain their distinct identity and holiness. As Rabbi Weinberger writes, “the Jewish people throughout history have passed through so many times and places of devastation, destruction, desolation, and misery. After all of that, Hashem looks at us and says, ‘What a find! Like delicious grapes that one would never expect to find in the middle of a desert, I have found you.’”[9]
But what should our resilience look like? Writing about the tragedies of Jewish and human history into the modern period, Rabbi Shai Held writes about the despair we can reasonably resign ourselves to, rather than commit ourselves to the dream of seemingly fruitless religious ideals of human dignity and goodness. “But Judaism,” he writes, “bids us to embrace a third alternative: the dream and the reality.”[10] Rabbi Held claims that doing so means looking at the pain of our world and waiting for God to redeem it while trying to create a better one. “The brokenness is so deep, the problems so intractable, that for a fully redeemed world we have no choice but to wait for God… [but w]e wait for God by manifesting love and kindness and compassion in the world… in a world drowning in hatred and hostility, we are summoned to stand for love.”[11]
This kinnah can be a reminder of that quintessential Jewish resilience and the ability to hold onto hope and goodness when life seems hopeless. In Genesis it was a Jew, Joseph, who was needed to foresee the seven years of famine, and it was a Jew who was needed to direct Egypt to hold onto the seven years of plenty that preceded it to survive it.
However, this kind of resilience doesn’t exist on its own; it needs to be cultivated. Binyamin Bar-Tikvah suggested that the opening language, Tukad, is actually sourced from Vayikra’s description of the Burnt Offering in the Temple, which was supposed to be kept burning throughout the night and fed further in the morning.
Command Aaron and his sons thus: This is the ritual of the burnt offering: The burnt offering itself shall remain where it is burned upon the altar all night until morning, while the fire on the altar is kept going (“tukad”) on it. (Vayikra 6:1-2)
The burnt offering took continuous effort to keep the flames alive, and the same can be said for our commitments to hope when life feels bleak.
No stanza in the kinnah underscores the resilience of the Jewish people more than the last one:
The Torah and its message and precious vessels,
When I left Egypt.
Happiness and joy; gone are sorrow and sighing,
When I return to Jerusalem.
The poem ends by coupling the Jews’ leaving Egypt with the Torah — not with our loss of the Torah or the death of our teachers — but with our eventual return to Jerusalem. Perhaps a lesson we can extract from this is that there is no experience terrible enough to ever destroy the Jewish spirit, and a Jew’s sense of peoplehood and identity. While our outer circumstances may be dire, the fire that burns within us will never be extinguished.
We can read Kinnah 31 holding the losses in our hearts that our people have endured, while also refusing to let go of the moments we’ve triumphed, recalling them with fiery hopefulness and eventually turning our mourning into celebrating.
Thus said GOD of Hosts: The fast of the fourth month, the fast of the fifth month, the fast of the seventh month, and the fast of the tenth month shall become occasions for joy and gladness, happy festivals for the House of Judah; but you must love honesty and integrity. (Zechariah 8:19)
[1] I’d like to thank David Selis, Ruthie Hollander, and Gabriel Kretzmer Seed for their feedback and support on this piece.
[2] Judaism is About Love, Shai Held, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024, 248
[3] Cohen, “The Destruction,” 18, as quoted by Shai Held.
[4] Lee I. Levine, “Judaism from the Destruction of Jerusalem to the End of the Second Jewish Revolt: 70-135 CE,” in Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism: A Parallel History of their Origins and Early Development, ed. Herschel Shanks (Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archeology Society, 1992), 126, as quoted by Shai Held.
[5] Resilience, Psychology Topics, American Psychological Association, https://www.apa.org/topics/resilience
[7] Bereshit Rabbah, Noach 29:3
[8] Warmed by the Fire of the Aish Kodesh, Rabbi Moshe Weinberger, Feldheim, 2015, 49
[9] Ibid. 51
[10] Judaism is About Love, 256
[11] Ibid. pg. 260-261
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