Our observance of Tishah B’Av, or any holiday for that matter, is never directly associated with the food that we eat. Granted, the Gemara writes that the yom tov experience is a composite of half for you and half for Hashem, still when we talk about a yom tov and the sum gain that we achieved in its observance we generally think of that in terms of the davening and the mitzvos unique to that particular holiday, the learning that we accomplished, and the novel insights that we gained throughout the duration of that day or series of days.
This is certainly true when it comes to a fast day, such as Tishah B’Av, where hours are spent in shul davening and reciting kinos and there is no focus on eating other than perhaps going to a store to buy the things that we need for after the fast. However, the nature of life is that absence generates a yearning for that which is missing, as the Haftorah for Machar Chodesh begins “Vayomer lo Yehonatan machar chodesh v’nifkaditah ki yifaked moshavecha.” Rashi writes that the word v’nifkaditah connotes memory and yifaked connotes absence, which seems like a contradiction but the explanation given is that the vacancy of King David’s throne caused Shaul to think about him even more. So if we were able to eat then perhaps we could be more focused on the ritual, rather than the food, but in the absence of being able to eat, a stronger and more intense yearning for food sets in.
Despite that statement being true in a general sense I was speaking tongue in cheek with regards to the absence of food generating a stronger yearning for it.
The bottom line is I found myself on line at Toddy’s for over an hour to buy four bagels and a pound of tuna fish. Who in their right mind spends an hour on line at a bagel shop, you are wondering, and what took so long?
Let me begin by saying that I was in shul from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and when I got home, we decided to go to the avenue to buy the few items we needed for after the fast.
I was in Toddy’s on erev Tishah B’Av and was told they’d be open from 2–5 on the fast day itself. As it turned out the mashgiach was delayed and the Va’ad doesn’t let them prepare food before Chatzot so that resulted in them opening an hour later than scheduled.
I got a call from my brother after about a half hour on line telling me that he was on the line at Toddy’s 10 minutes before me and ended up leaving and going to Bagel Boys, which took just a few minutes. I actually asked my wife a couple of times during the wait that we should perhaps just go to Bagel Boys instead. I guess we felt like we had waited this long, it was a long afternoon either way, and we were not in a rush anywhere, so we just stayed put and waited it out.
When we got there at 2 o’clock there were just a handful of people waiting single file outside the door, spilling out across the sidewalk. As people kept coming instead of blocking passersby from walking across the sidewalk the line turned with me starting out on the right side of the door but concluded with me joining my wife who was waiting on the opposite end in case that represented the front of the line.
Towards the end of the wait a woman who was parked and waiting in her air-conditioned car came out saying that she was number 8 although she was unaware as to who the people before her or after her were on the line. At that point it was clear that she had made a number system up herself without letting anyone else know about it. I said to myself, in just a few minutes they are going to open the door and Tishah B’Av or not, antisemitic slurs are going to be flying over one person attempting to cut another on the line for breakfast bagels.
Exactly as I predicted it, the moment the doors opened and people began filing into the store in a semi-orderly fashion the woman who had privately made the number system began arguing with a couple of men on the line who it seemed were just trying to have a good time at her expense. At one point the guy said to her, “I don’t know who you are, we are not even friends, and you ought to speak respectfully to me.” She kept insisting that she had witnesses to the fact that she was there first and that she was not lying about it to them.
As this was going on another lady right in front of me kept shaking her head and with an air of righteous indignance kept saying to herself, “It’s Tishah B’Av, we are mourning the destruction of the Beis HaMikdash and we can’t even get along on line at a bagel store.” As the altercation kept dragging on she kept saying, “This is terrible, this is just terrible, this is precisely why Moshiach hasn’t yet come.”
It was at that very moment when I realized why I had waited an hour on line for four bagels and a pound of tuna. It had nothing to do with the mashgiach coming late, or the Va’ad’s strict rules; it had everything to do with the fact that Tishah B’Av was being observed at that very moment on line at the bagel store and G-d needed me there at that moment.
Earlier that morning I was in Khal Mevakshei Hashem for Shacharis and kinos where the rebbe spoke prior to each kinah followed by a song after each one. Last night the rebbe said a vort on the verse “Lo tachsom shor b’disho,” which means that an ox owner is not permitted to muzzle his ox while it is working the field. The secret behind this halacha is the tzaddikim are called oxen as the verse about Joseph the righteous states, “bichor shoro hadar lo,” and tzaddikim in this world are busy working in the form of making rectifications. G-d is enjoined in the performance of his own mitzvos and therefore G-d needs to remove the muzzle from the mouths of tzaddikim, allowing them to articulately express what it is that we need to do in order to bring finality to this bitter exile.
This morning, he seemed to be continuing this theme prior to the kinah of the ten righteous martyrs when he said, “The greatest challenge that Moshe had to deal with in this world was his speech impediment. Moshe was the teacher of all the Jewish people and his difficulty in communicating must have made it difficult for him to speak clearly in a manner that all the Jewish people could understand when he spoke to them. The Torah calls Noach a tzaddik and proceeds to tell us about him entering an ark to be spared from the raging flood waters that engulfed the earth. A teivah, which is the Hebrew word for ark, also means a word. The Torah, in describing Noach trapped in a teivah for a full year is describing yet another tzaddik who had a hard time expressing himself, which is the greatest exile for a soul who knows what needs to be done but has a hard time expressing it in a way that the people listening could understand what is being said.
All the while that the rebbe was building this idea, he repeatedly expressed apprehension, not wanting to say something that might come across as expressing negativity about another Jew, not wanting his words to be used in a prosecutorial way against other Yidden. As such, he said he will use allusions and allegories in conveying what it is he wanted to say and anyone who understands will understand and those who don’t understand don’t understand.
He then recalled a thought from the Komarna who discusses the notion of opposition to tzaddikim. He writes if there is mortal danger to the life of a tzaddik or an attempt to disqualify him altogether based on lies, of course, it is due to a deficiency or some chait that the tzaddik committed that he may or may not know about. However, there is a more benign form of opposition that the aggressor is as well not culpable for but is rather attributed to the failure to articulate the tzaddik’s teachings and worldview. If the teachings of the tzaddik were clearly articulated and understood that would silence any opposition.
Last night, based on a number of inconsistencies in the Rambam the rebbe built a case that not only is the appellation tzaddik appended to the community of Jews but in every individual Jew. Not only are the multitude a representation of the Shechinah, he said, rather every solitary Jew regardless of whether or not his or her actions warrant that.
All the while this verbal altercation was ensuing at the store, I kept humming to myself, loud enough that the disputants in front of me should hear, “Every Yid’s a big tzaddik.” To the claim of the frum lady directly in front of me I said it’s not terrible. It’s only as good or as bad as you perceive it to be. There is no heavenly tribunal. The judgments that we pass down here are used as defense or prosecution above. If you would only look deeper and find a redeeming element beneath the outer veneer of what this seems to be then you would redeem the entire encounter.
The people in my periphery took very warmly to the ideas that I was espousing; sadly the frum lady who I later learned was a ninth-grade teacher in a prominent girls’ high school, seemed to think that they had sounded too esoteric and unrealistic and preferred to maintain her righteousness and blame Moshiach’s lateness on the imprudence of a couple of people fighting over their position online at the bagel store.
And although my hunch is that the rebbe was alluding to some much more microcosmic issue I believe that I was heeding the call by stepping between these two disputants and clearly articulating the teachings of our tzaddik whose proper dissemination may have prevented the sad outcome of the macrocosmic issue, which seemed to be weighing heavily on his consciousness.
So, although as I began, the perception is that the playing field of Tishah B’Av is on the floor in the shul reciting kinos, for me it was in the manifested pettiness of that small mindedness playing itself out on line in Toddy’s.
The teachings and lessons that we are privy too daily and weekly need to grow wings and be passed forward to revolutionize the Jewish world and indeed the world in its entirety. n
Yochanan Gordon can be reached at ygordon5t@gmail.com. Read more of Yochanan’s articles at 5TJT.com.
