Daf Ditty Taanis 15: Ashes on the forehead and Grief in the Soul

Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own:

I wavered through the streets, among
Objects:
Nothing mattered or had a name:
The world was made of air, which waited.

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I knew rooms full of ashes,
Tunnels where the moon lived,
Rough warehouses that growled 'get lost',
Questions that insisted in the sand.

Everything was empty, dead, mute,

Fallen abandoned, and decayed:
Inconceivably alien, it all

Belonged to someone else - to no one:

Till your beauty and your poverty
Filled the autumn plentiful with gifts.
Pablo Neruda

MISHNA: What is the customary order of fast days? Normally the sacred ark in the synagogue,
which was mobile, was kept in a locked room. However, on fast days they remove the ark to the
main city square and place burnt ashes upon the ark, as a sign of mourning. And they also
place ashes on the head of the Nasi, and on the head of the deputy Nasi, and each and every
member of the community likewise places ashes upon his head.

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The eldest member of the community says to the congregation statements of reproof, for
example: Our brothers, it is not stated with regard to the people of Nineveh: And God saw
their sackcloth and their fasting. Rather, the verse says: “And God saw their deeds, that they
had turned from their evil way” (Jonah 3:10). And in the Prophets it says: “And rend your
hearts and not your garments, and return to the Lord your God” (Joel 2:13). This teaches that
prayer and fasting are insufficient, as one must also repent and amend his ways in practice.

They stood for prayer. The congregation appoints an elder, who is experienced in leading
prayer, to descend before the ark as communal prayer leader. And this prayer leader must have
children and must have an empty house, i.e., he must be poor, so that his heart will be fully
concentrated on the prayer for the needs of his community.

And he recites twenty-four blessings before the congregation: The eighteen blessings of the
everyday Amida prayer, to which he adds another six blessings, and they are as follows: The
special series of blessings recited on Rosh HaShana, the Remembrances and Shofarot; and the
sections of Psalms that begin with the verses: “In my distress I called to the Lord and He
answered me” (Psalms 120:1), “I will lift up my eyes to the mountains; from where will my
help come” (Psalms 121:1), “Out of the depths I have called You, O Lord” (Psalms 130:1), and
“A prayer of the afflicted, when he faints” (Psalms 102:1).

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The baraita continues: And on the final seven fasts they remove the ark to the main city square
and place ashes upon the ark, and on the head of the Nasi, and on the head of the deputy
Nasi, and each and every member of the community takes ashes and places them upon his head.
Rabbi Natan says: They would bring specifically burnt ashes. This baraita indicates that the
full ritual is performed only on the final set of fasts. Rav Pappa said in explanation: When we
taught the mishna as well, it was taught only with regard to the final set of seven fasts, not the
earlier series of fasts.

JASTROW

§ And the mishna further states that ashes are placed on the head of the Nasi and on the head of
the deputy Nasi. And then it teaches that each and every member of the community places ashes
upon his head. The Gemara asks: Is that so? Is this the proper order? Isn’t it taught in a baraita
that Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi says: With regard to matters of greatness, where it is a mark of honor
and distinction to be treated first, one begins with the greatest member of the group, but for any
matter involving a curse or dishonor, one begins with the least important member of the group.

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Summary
Introduction1

In the previous chapter we learned about the series of fast days declared in order to petition God
for rain. In this chapter we learn the rituals that were observed on those days.

What is the order [of service] for fast days?

They take the ark out to the open space of the city.

They bring the ark with the Torah or Torahs outside to the open space where they will have a very
public ceremony. This is part of their attempt to achieve as broad of a spectrum of involvement as
possible.

And they put ashes on the ark and on the head of the Nasi and on the head of the head of the
court av bet.

The leaders of the community ceremonially put ashes on the heads of the two main leaders of the
community and on the ark as well. It seems that by putting ashes on the ark, it is as if they were
putting ashes on God’s head as well. Perhaps they might even be trying to show that God is sharing
in Israel’s distress. Theologically, this creates somewhat of a paradox we are praying to God for
rain, rain that God is withholding, and yet at the same time we believe and we demonstrate that
God is sharing in our distress. The image is one of a parent, punishing a child and yet at the same
time feeling the child’s pain.

And everyone [else] puts ashes on his own head.

Everyone else puts ashes on their own heads. The ritual application of the ashes is performed only
for the two leaders and for the ark.

The elder among them says in front of them words of admonition, “Brothers, it does not say of
the people of Nineveh, ‘And God saw their sackcloth and their fasting,’ but, ‘And God saw their
deeds, for they turned from their evil way. (Jonah 3:10)’ And in the prophets it says, ‘And rend
your heart and not your garments” (Joel 2:13).

The elder among the people now reminds them that the external motions are meant to invoke inner
teshuvah, repentance. When God sees that Nineveh has repented, He says that He has seen their
deeds and not that He has seen their external signs. Similarly, Joel tells the people that they should
rend their hearts, meaning tear their hearts so that they repent, and not merely their external
garments. Note that the mishnah emphasizes this message at the very point at which they are

1https://www.sefaria.org/Taanit.15a.4?lang=bi&p2=Mishnah_Taanit.2.1&lang2=bi&w2=English%20Explanation%20of%20Mis

hnah&lang3=en

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describing the intricate ritual of the Taanit. It is as if they wish to warn us of the danger of slipping
into “ritualism” a fixation on the external at the expense of the more important internal.

In Order of Importance: Fast Days, Rituals & Gan Eden2

We begin with fascinating words by Rav Nachman bar Yitzchak. Not all are fit for light, and not
all are fit for gladness/happiness. The righteous with light, and the upright with gladness. This is
because "Light is sown for the righteous" and "gladness for the upright in heart" (Psalms 97:11). I
want to better understand the meanings of righteousness and of upright behaviour. The implication
is that light, a more spiritually pure experience is different than the reward of happiness or
gladness.

Perek II of Masechet Ta'anit begins with a very long mishna. It outlines the six prayers that are
added to the 18 prayers of the amida on fast days. Those on the priestly watch are expected to fast
less than those in the patrilineal family. As the fast days progress, these community members have
different obligations regarding fasting and other behaviors. The mishna also outlines on which
days of the week fast days are to be scheduled.

The Gemara begins to examine this mishna by looking at how people actually observed the fast
days. Did they go to synagogue? In which order would people take burnt ashes and place them
upon their heads. First the Nasi, then the Deputy Nasi, and then every member of the
community. But is this what Rabbi Yehuda taught us? The Gemara tells us that Rabbi Yehuda
taught us that yes, we observe rituals of greatness in order of greatness. But when the ritual
involves a curse or a dishonor, we begin with the "least important member of the group" and
ascend.

The proof text for 'greatness' is found in Leviticus (10:6) when Moses spoke to Aaron and then to
Elazar and to Itamar. Because Aaron is "more important" than his sons, we can assume that
greatness travels from the greatest person down through the ranks. The proof text for our rituals
when dealing with a curse is more intriguing. We are told that "the serpent was cursed first
and afterward Eve was cursed and afterward Adam was cursed". And so Adam is the most
important, followed by Eve, followed by the serpent.

What if Adam is not the most important person in this group, but instead he is simply the person
who participated least in the betrayal? And so the serpent is cursed first because of its role in the
story and not because it is a less important creature? To assume that Adam is more important than
Eve, and that his status is what allowed him to be cursed last, fits very nicely with the world view
of the rabbis who were creating these interpretations.

2 http://dafyomibeginner.blogspot.com/2014/06/

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Perhaps, just perhaps, if even one woman (well, one woman might be pushed aside by the men, so
let's say three women) were part of this particular rabbinical discussion, this proof text using Adam
as the 'most important' person might not have been defensible. Perhaps - and this is a long shot -
the rabbis would have been forced to examine something other than a hierarchical analysis of
merit. And if that had happened, well, who knows how our tradition might have evolved?

Rav Avrohom Adler writes:3

PROCEDURE OF THE FAST

The Mishna proceeds to describe the process of the prayers that were recited on a communal fast
due to lack of rain. They would take the Ark into the streets of the town and we would place ashes
on the Ark and on the head of the Nasi and upon the head of the Rosh Beis Din (Head of the Court).
Each person would place the ashes on his head. The eldest among them addressed them and said
words that would inspire them to mend their ways: "Our brothers, it is not said regarding the men
of Nineveh, "And Hashem saw their sackcloth and their fast," but rather, "And Hashem saw their
actions that they repented from their evil way" (Yonah 3:10); and in the Kabbalah it states, "And
rend your hearts, and not your garments" (Yoel 2:13).

They would send a chazzan to lead the prayer who was an elder and fluent in the prayers. He
should have children and his house should be empty (lacking the necessary funds to support his
family) in order that his heart will be completely devoted in the prayer. He recites before them the
twenty-four blessings; eighteen as on every day and there are an additional six due to the fast.

The six additional brochos are: Zichronos and Shofaros, "To Hashem, in my distress I called Him
and he answered me," "I will lift up my eyes to the mountains…," "From the depths, I have called
you, Hashem," "A prayer of the afflicted, when he faints." Rabbi Yehuda says that he did not have
to say Zichronos and Shofaros, but instead he said, "If there be a famine in the land, if there will
be a plague…," and "The word of the Hashem that came to Yeremiya concerning the droughts."
The Mishna continues that each of these blessings had a conclusion as well.

For the first brocha (this was actually for the brocha of Geulah as the Gemora will explain) he
would conclude, "He Who answered Avraham on Mount Moriah, He will answer you and He will
listen to the sound of your crying on this day. Blessed are You, Hashem, Redeemer of Israel."

For the second brocha, which is Zichronos (the first of the additional blessings), he says, "He Who
answered our forefathers at the Red Sea, He will answer you and He will listen to the sound of
your crying on this day. Blessed are You, Hashem, Who remembers forgotten things."

3 http://dafnotes.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Taanis_15.pdf

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For the third brocha, which is Shofaros (the second of the additional blessings), he says, "He Who
answered Yehoshua in Gilgal, He will answer you and he will listen to the sound of your crying
on this day. Blessed are You, Hashem, Who hears the blowing of the shofar."

For the fourth brocha, he says, "He Who answered Shmuel at Mitzpah, He will answer you and he
will listen to the sound of your crying on this day.

Blessed are You, Hashem, Who hears crying."

For the fifth he says, "He Who answered Eliyahu on Mount Carmel, He will answer you and He
will listen to the sound of your crying on this day. Blessed are You, Hashem, Who hears prayer."

For the sixth he says, "He Who answered Yonah from the fish’s belly, He will answer you and he
will listen to the sound of your crying on this day. Blessed are You, Hashem, Who answers in time
of distress."

For the seventh he says, "He Who answered Dovid and his son, Shlomo in Yerushalayim, He will
answer you and he will listen to the sound of your crying on this day. Blessed are You, Hashem,
Who has mercy on the land."

The Mishna relates an incident which occurred during the time of Rabbi Chalafta and Rabbi
Chananyah ben Tradyon. The leader passed before the Ark and concluded the entire blessing, and
they did not respond after him "Amen." They responded by saying Boruch shem kevod malchuso
l’olam vo’ed, which is the response usually reserved for the Beis Hamikdosh. The attendant
announced: "Blow the tekiah, kohanim, blow the tekiah!" He then said: "He Who answered our
father Avraham on Mount Moriah, He will answer you and listen to the sound of your crying on
this day." "Sound the teruah, sons of Aaron, sound the teruah!" "He Who answered our forefathers
at the Red Sea, He will answer you and listen to the sound of your crying on this day."

And when the issue came before the Sages, they said, this was not our custom, (responding with
Boruch shem instead of answering Amen) except at the Eastern Gate and on the Temple Mount.

The kohanim were divided into twenty-four groups, referred to as mishmoros. Each mishmar
contained seven families, batei avos. Each mishmar had a turn to serve in the Beis Hamikdosh for
one week on a rotating basis. Each beis av had a designated day of the week to perform the service.
The first three fasts, members of the mishmar (who were not working on that particular day) would
be required to fast but they would not complete the fast; and members of the beis av (the group
that was performing the service on that day) did not fast at all.

Regarding the second series of fasts; members of the mishmar would fast and complete it; and
members of the beis av would fast but not complete it. On the last seven fasts; the members of the
mishmar and the beis av would fast and complete. These are the words of Rabbi Yehoshua.

The Chachamim disagreed and maintain that on the first three fasts, the members of the mishmar
and the beis av would not fast at all. Regarding the second series of fasts; members of the mishmar
would fast but not complete it, and members of the beis av would not fast at all. On the last seven

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fasts; members of the mishmar would fast and complete it, and members of the beis av would fast
but they would not complete it. The Mishna digresses to discuss other distinctions between the
members of the mishmar and the members of the beis av. Members of the mishmar are permitted
to drink wine at night but not during the day because they might be called upon to help perform
the service and a drunkard is prohibited from serving in the Beis Hamikdosh. Members of the beis
av are not allowed to drink wine during the day and even at night.

The members of the mishmar and members of the ma'amad (Klal Yisroel was divided into twenty-
four groups in order to fulfill the requirement of standing by the korban tamid – some went to the
Beis Hamikdosh and others remained in their cities) are prohibited from cutting their hair and from
laundering clothes, however on Thursday, they are permitted to cut their hair and perform
laundering in honor of Shabbos.

Any minor festival that is written in Megillas Taanis with the restraint of "not to eulogize" on it,
the day beforehand is also prohibited but the day afterwards would be permitted. Rabbi Yosi
maintains that the day before and after is prohibited. Any minor festival that is written in Megillas
Taanis with the restraint of "not too fast” on it, the day beforehand and afterwards is permitted.
Rabbi Yosi holds that the day before is prohibited but afterwards is permitted. The Mishna resumes
discussing the fasts that were decreed because of the lack of rain.

The Chachamim would not decree a communal fast which would begin on a Thursday, in order to
prevent a raise in the market prices. The first three fasts would be declared for Monday, Thursday
and Monday and the second series of fasts would be on Thursday, Monday and Thursday. Rabbi
Yosi maintains that just like the first series cannot commence on a Thursday, so, too, the second
series and the last seven do not begin on a Thursday. Rabban Gamliel said that the Chachamim
would never decree that the first day of the series of fasts should be on Rosh Chodesh, Chanukah,
or Purim. If the fasts began already and one of the days of the fasts fell out on Rosh Chodesh, we
would not interrupt the fasts.

Rabbi Meir maintains that even though Rabban Gamliel said that they do not interrupt, he would
admit that the fast should not be completed. This halacha is identical to a case where Tisha B’av
fell on Erev Shabbos.

ASHES

The Mishna had stated that they would place ashes on the head of the Nasi and upon the head of
the Rosh Beis Din (Head of the Court). Each person would place the ashes on his head. The
Gemora asks from a braisa: Rebbe says that in matters of prominence, we commence with the
greatest, and in matters of cursing, we begin with the least important. He explains: In matters of
prominence, we commence with the greatest, as it is written: And Moshe spoke to Aaron and to
Elozar and to Issamar, his sons that were remaining: Take etc. And in matters of cursing, we begin
with the least important, for first the serpent was cursed, and then Eve, and then Adam!?

The Gemora answers that placing the ashes on the head of the Nasi and the Rosh Beis Din is an
honor for them since the people are telling them that they are prominent enough to beg for
compassion for the entire congregation.

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ASHES ON THE HEAD

The Mishna had stated that they would place ashes on the head of the Nasi and upon the head of
the Rosh Beis Din (Head of the Court). Each person would place the ashes on his own head. The
Gemora questions why the Nasi and Rosh Beis Din do not place the ashes on their head by
themselves. Rabbi Abba answers that being embarrassed by one’s own hand pales in comparison
to being embarrassed by the hands of others and this will help make their prayers more successful.
The Gemora states that they would place the ashes on the place where the tefillin are worn on one’s
head.

PURCHASING FOOD FOR SHABBOS THURSDAY OR FRIDAY?

The Magen Avraham (250:1) quotes the Arizal as saying that it is more preferable to purchase
items for Shabbos on Friday, rather than on Thursday.

Some explain that the reason for this is based on the verse “v’hayah bayom hashishi, v’heichinu
eis asher yaviu” – “And it will be on the sixth day, you should prepare for Shabbos.”

The Magen Avraham concludes by instructing us to analyze the ruling of the Shulchan Aruch
(O”C 572:1) where it is implicit that purchases for Shabbos were done on Thursday and not on
Friday.

The Mishna in Taanis states that they would not decree an initial fast on Thursday because that
would cause an unwarranted price increase. Rashi explains that when the storekeepers will observe
people purchasing food in large quantities, they will assume that a famine is coming and thereby
raise all the prices. The sellers would not realize that people are buying food for two large meals,
one to break the fast this evening and the other for Shabbos.

It is evident from this Gemora that people purchase food for Shabbos on Thursday. A proof to the
Arizal’s viewpoint can be found in the Gemora Taanis (8b). Rabbi Yitzchak said that even during
an extreme drought, rain that falls on a Friday is nothing but a curse since it will inconvenience
those that are shopping for Shabbos.

Rabbi Tzvi Yaakov Abramowitz in the sefer Ta’am Hatzvi answers the Magen Avraham’s
question from our Mishna. Generally, people purchase food for Shabbos on Friday, but when they
are going to the stores on Thursday anyway to buy food for the meal after the fast, they will
simultaneously purchase food for Shabbos. While it is true that the meticulous people will wait for
Friday to prepare for Shabbos, most of the community will not wait and that is why we try to avoid
beginning the first series of fasts on a Thursday.

The chapter ended as follows: Not all are destined to share in the light, nor all in the gladness.
Light shall be for the righteous and gladness for the upright. ‘Light for the righteous,’ for it is
written: Light is sown for the righteous; ‘and gladness for the upright,’ for it is written: And
gladness for the upright in heart.

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The Sheim MiShmuel expounds: The term ‘righteous’ is in reference to someone who has a desire
creep up on him and he bends his yetzer to protect himself, similar to Yosef the Righteous; an
upright person, however, is one whose crookedness (inside of him) is all straightened out and he
has transformed the darkness to light and the bitterness to sweetness. Therefore, a righteous person,
who has overridden his evil inclination, merits the lighting up of the darkness, but the darkness
still inherently exists. An upright person, however, merits gladness as well. The spirit of evil is
completely removed from him, and the ultimate joy will ascend to the world.

THE EFFECT OF AN "AND"

Rav Mordechai Kornfeld writes:

Rebbi Elazar (end of 14b) says that in the future, the kings ("Melachim") of the world will stand
up in respect for the Jewish people, and the officers ("Sarim") will bow down, as the verse says,
"... Melachim will see and they will rise; Sarim, and they will bow down" (Yeshayah 49:7).

The Gemara asks that the verse does not seem to support Rebbi Elazar's teaching. Had the verse
said, "... and Sarim will bow down," it would have provided support for Rebbi Elazar's teaching
by implying that only the Sarim will bow down and not the Melachim. However, the verse says,
"... Sarim, and they will bow down," which implies that the Sarim will do both -- they will stand
up in respect for the Jewish people and bow down to them.

The Gemara's question is difficult to understand. The previous Gemara (14b) says that Moshe's
prayer was answered because he supplicated through "Nefilah" (prostration before Hash-m), while
Yehoshua and Kalev were answered only through "Keri'ah" (tearing their clothes in supplication).
The Gemara asks that the verse says, "and Yehoshua and Kalev... tore their clothes" (Bamidbar
14:6), which implies that they did what was mentioned in the previous verse ("Nefilah") "and"
they also tore their clothes. How can the Gemara now ask that had the verse said, "and Sarim will
bow down," it would have implied that they will only bow down and not stand up? The addition
of the word "and" should link this part of the verse with the first part and imply that the Sarim will
do both what the Melachim will do (stand) and bow down. (RASHASH)

The RASHASH and SEFAS EMES point out that the text of the Gemara as cited by the EIN
YAKOV omits the word "Sarim" in the Gemara's question on Rebbi Elazar. According to that
Girsa, the Gemara says that had the verse said, "they will bow down," it would have meant that
the Sarim will only bow down; but now that it says, "and they will bow down," it means that the
Sarim will do both -- stand up and bow down. Therefore, the Gemara here is consistent with the
Gemara earlier.

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 HALACHAH: FAST DAYS FOR A DROUGHT NOWADAYS

The Mishnah describes the "Seder Ta'aniyos" -- the order of the day on the last seven of the thirteen
public fast days that are declared when no rain falls in the rain season. It describes how the Sefer
Torah is brought into the public area where the people will pray, and how ashes are placed on the
foreheads of the Nasi and Av Beis Din, as well as on the heads of all of the people. It describes the
elder's words of rebuke, the six blessings added to the Shemoneh Esreh, and the blowing of the
Shofar. In addition, the Mishnah later (26a) teaches that on a Ta'anis Tzibur a Tefilas Ne'ilah is
recited, the fasts are 24-hour fasts, work is prohibited, and all five Inuyim (afflictions) of Yom
Kippur are observed (12b).

The Gemara (14b, 19a) teaches that these fast days were practiced not only during times of drought,
but whenever a life-threatening situation existed. The TUR and SHULCHAN ARUCH (OC 579)
record these Halachos at length.

Is this series of thirteen fast days, and all of their related laws, observed outside of Eretz Yisrael
when there is a drought or another life-threatening situation?

(a) The Gemara earlier (12b) cites Shmuel who says that "there is no Ta'anis Tzibur in Bavel except
for the ninth of Av"; that is, the unique severity afforded to these fast days is not practiced in Bavel
(Rashi 11b, DH Ein Ta'anis Tzibur). RASHI in Pesachim (54b) explains that since Bavel is a
naturally wet land (see Ta'anis 10a), drought there is not a life-threatening situation and there is no
need to treat Ta'aniyos for rain with such severity (or to decree fasts for rain in the first place).

The Rishonim point out that if the only difference between Bavel and Eretz Yisrael is that there is
never a shortage of water in Bavel, then when a different type of life-threatening situation arises
the people of Bavel should be obligated to observe the full severity of the fast days. Why does
Shmuel say that there is no Ta'anis Tzibur in Bavel except for Tish'ah b'Av?

The RITVA (12b) explains that Rashi may rule like the RAMBAM (Hilchos Ta'aniyos 3:11, 4:1)
who maintains that fast days instituted for any reason other than lack of rain are not as severe as
fasts for rain. Only fasts for rain have the same degree of severity as the fast of Tish'ah b'Av. Since
Bavel does not need rain, it has no severe fasts other than Tish'ah b'Av. This appears to be Rashi's
view in Pesachim (50b, DH Ta'anis Tzibur; 54b, DH Ein Ta'anis Tzibur). Although it is clear from
the Gemara that in other life-threatening situations the people of Bavel also decree fasts and blow
the Shofar (as the Ramban here and Ritva (ibid.) prove), Rashi and the Rambam apparently
distinguish between the requirement to blow the Shofar and the requirement to observe the Tish'ah
b'Av aspects (that is, the five Inuyim, the prohibition against working, etc.) on a Ta'anis.

The Rambam and Rashi are not in complete agreement, however. Rashi's words imply that only
in Bavel is the severity of these Ta'aniyos not practiced. The Rambam, however, implies that not
only in Bavel but everywhere outside of Eretz Yisrael the fast days are not practiced with the
severity of Tish'ah b'Av. Only for fasts for rain in Eretz Yisrael did the Chachamim institute such
stringent laws.

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(b) The other Rishonim reject this approach and assert that the full severity of these fasts applies
whenever a fast is instituted because of a life-threatening situation. Why, then, is the severity of a
Ta'anis Tzibur not observed in Bavel? The RAMBAN and RAN (end of the first Perek) quote
the RA'AVAD who explains that the above-mentioned practices were not instituted in Bavel
because they are too difficult for the people to observe.

Wearing shoes on fast days in Bavel is not prohibited because the ground there is very damp and
the discomfort experienced there when walking without shoes is far greater than the discomfort
experienced in Eretz Yisrael without shoes. The Chachamim did not institute 24-hour fasts or
prohibit work on a fast day because the people of Bavel were poor and such enactments would
affect them too severely (see end of Kidushin 29b and Rishonim). The Chachamim did not prohibit
them from washing their bodies and smearing oil, since they were generally in a weak state of
health and such enactments would have had detrimental effects on them. Since there was reason
to suspend some of the Inuyim on fast days in Bavel, none of the other five Inuyim were enacted
in Bavel. (The other laws of a Ta'anis Tzibur, such as Ne'ilah, Shofar blasts, and the six additional
blessings of Shemoneh Esreh perhaps do apply in Bavel.)

According to the Ra'avad, only in Bavel is the severity of a Ta'anis Tzibur not observed, but other
places in Chutz la'Aretz are considered like Eretz Yisrael with regard to a Ta'anis Tzibur. (The
Ramban, however, suggests that the Ra'avad maintains that the severity of a Ta'anis Tzibur was
not enacted in any country outside of Eretz Yisrael, because of the countries which are similar to
Bavel.)

(c) The RAMBAN rejects the Ra'avad's explanation as "weak." Instead, he prefers the explanation
of the RA'AVYAH who suggests an entirely different reason for why the laws of Ta'aniyos in
Bavel are not as severe as the laws of Ta'aniyos in Eretz Yisrael. This is also the explanation of
the RITVA, RAN, and ROSH (1:9).

The Yerushalmi teaches that the only time a Ta'anis is practiced with its full severity is when it
has the status of a "Ta'anis Tzibur" by virtue of having been accepted unanimously by the entire
congregation. However, such a unanimous acceptance of an enactment can be accomplished only
through a central judicial authority or through a Nasi. Since there is no Nasi in Bavel and the
members of the Jewish courts there do not have Semichah, any Ta'anis they accept upon
themselves would have to be accepted individually by each person. In that case, however, by
definition the Ta'anis would be only a Ta'anis Yachid! (Even though Rav (12b) says that a Ta'anis
Yachid has the severity of a Ta'anis Tzibur, the Rishonim explain that this is true only in a time
and place in which a Ta'anis Tzibur could be practiced.)

Accordingly, fast days instituted anywhere outside of Eretz Yisrael for any reason do not have the
severity of Ta'aniyos in Eretz Yisrael. However, the Ramban cites a tradition from the Ge'onim
(and for which he provides support from the Gemara) that this applies only to the requirement to
fast for 24 hours, the five Inuyim, and the prohibition against working. The extra prayers (the
Tefilah of Ne'ilah and the six additional blessings in Shemoneh Esreh) and the Shofar blasts should
be observed even outside of Eretz Yisrael.

13
HALACHAH: What is the common practice today in Eretz Yisrael
and in Chutz la'Aretz with regard to a Ta'anis Tzibur?
1. INUYIM. As mentioned above, many Rishonim agree that where there is no Nasi or qualified
Beis Din, every Ta'anis is considered a Ta'anis Yachid and does not have the severity of a Ta'anis
Tzibur. This is the accepted ruling (MISHNAH BERURAH OC 575:25). Therefore, outside of
Eretz Yisrael the requirement to fast for 24 hours, the five Inuyim, and the prohibition against
working are not observed. (See #4 below for the practice today in Eretz Yisrael.)

2. TEFILAH. All of the Rishonim seem to agree that the Tefilah of Ne'ilah, the six additional
blessings in Shemoneh Esreh, and the Shofar blasts should be observed everywhere, even in Bavel
and other lands outside of Eretz Yisrael. However, the RAMBAN and RITVA write that in their
region, the only practices of a Ta'anis Tzibur that were observed were the addition of the six
blessings to Shemoneh Esreh and the blowing of the Shofar (see also Ritva and Ran, beginning of
17a). Ne'ilah was not recited because it may be limited to the fast days which have the laws of
Tish'ah b'Av, which are not practiced outside of Eretz Yisrael (as mentioned in (c) above).
The RAMBAM (Hilchos Ta'aniyos 3:11, 4:1), however, writes that the six additional blessings
are recited only on a fast day for rain in Eretz Yisrael.

3. SHOFAR. The RITVA (later on 12b) mentions that the common practice in France was not to
blow the Shofar on fast days (based on a ruling of Tosfos). Since the Mitzvah is to blow with
Chatzotzeros on a fast day, and the Chatzotzeros do not exist nowadays (as it is unknown exactly
how they are to be made), there is no Mitzvah to blow the Shofar. (See Insights to Ta'anis 14:1.)
The MAGEN AVRAHAM (beginning of OC 576) wonders why it is not the practice to blow the
Shofar on publicly-decreed fast days today as the Torah commands. Although some Acharonim
contend that the Mitzvah applies only in Eretz Yisrael (see RAN to Rosh Hashanah 26b; NESIV
CHAIM, OC ibid.), the BIRKEI YOSEF writes that even in Eretz Yisrael the blowing of the
Shofar is not currently practiced on a Ta'anis. Perhaps the reason why the Shofar is not blown is
because we rely on the minority ruling of the French community mentioned by the Ritva. The PRI
MEGADIM (cited by the MISHNAH BERURAH OC 576:1) answers that perhaps the Mitzvah
to blow the Shofar applies in Eretz Yisrael only when Eretz Yisrael is under Jewish authority.
Alternatively, perhaps it applies only when a majority of the Jewish people faces the same threat.

4. ERETZ YISRAEL. The PE'AS HA'SHULCHAN writes that the Seder Ta'aniyos are
observed in Eretz Yisrael today exactly as they are described in the Gemara and recorded by the
Shulchan Aruch. The BIRKEI YOSEF (OC 575, cited by the Mishnah Berurah ibid.) -- who lived
around the same time as the Pe'as ha'Shulchan -- records that he actually met elderly Jews in
Yerushalayim and Chevron who remembered observing such Ta'aniyos when they were young.
In practice, no Ta'aniyos with the unique severity, prayers, or Shofar blasts of a Ta'anis Tzibur
have been observed in recent years even in Eretz Yisrael. This is consistent with the ruling of
the RAMBAN and other Rishonim that when there is no Nasi, the Ta'aniyos do not have the
severity of a Ta'anis Tzibur anywhere in the world. Although the BIRKEI YOSEF mentions the
possibility that the Gedolim in Eretz Yisrael today are "the delegates of the original Semuchim,"
this apparently is not the present-day practice.

14
This explains why the laws of the Inuyim and Ne'ilah are not observed in Eretz Yisrael today.
Why, though, are the 24 blessings of Shemoneh Esreh not recited today when the people in Eretz
Yisrael observe a day of fast due to a drought? (Perhaps it is because today a drought does not
pose the danger that it once posed, because today food and water can be imported with ease from
other countries. In that sense, Eretz Yisrael today is like the Bavel of old.)

RAV YECHIEL MICHAL TUKACHINSKY zt'l (in SEFER ERETZ YISRAEL) writes that
although in modern times the Seder Ta'aniyos are not observed, one part of the
Ta'aniyos is observed today. During a time of drought in Eretz Yisrael, the prayer of "va'Aneinu
[Borei Olam b'Midas ha'Rachamim...]" is added to the Shemoneh Esreh in the blessing of
"Shome'a Tefilah." (This is the "Hasra'ah b'Peh" mentioned in the Gemara earlier (14a), which is
recited in the Shemoneh Esreh in the blessing of "Shome'a Tefilah." The text of this prayer in most
Sidurim differs slightly from the text recorded by the TUR, and there are different Minhagim as
to which Girsa to follow.) No other changes to the Shemoneh Esreh are made, and no Teki'os are
blown.

Steinzaltz (OBM) writes:4

The second perek (chapter) of Masechet Ta’anit begins on our daf (page). Based on descriptions
of fast days that we find in the Tanach (see I Melakhim 8:35-36 and Yo’el 2:15-19) it is clear that
aside from abstaining from food, fast days were times of prayer and introspection. This chapter
describes the unique prayer services that were established by the Sages for severe fast days, which
include ceremonies intended to inspire the people to repentance, and, in particular, the additional
blessings inserted into the amidah prayer.

Another issue discussed is the circumstances under which fasts cannot be declared. According to
the Mishnah, aside from Shabbat and Yom Tov, the minor holidays that are enumerated in Megilat
Ta’anit are also days on which fasts cannot be established, and, depending on the significance and
level of the holiday, the day before and after them may not be appropriate for fasting either.

Megilat Ta’anit is a little known collection of statements about minor holidays and fasts that
commemorate events which took place during the Second Temple period. On the minor holidays,
fasting and eulogies were forbidden. Most of the events that are commemorated are from the period
of the Hasmonean monarchy – a prime example being the story of Hanukkah – although there are
also events from earlier and later periods included, as well.

This work is set up chronologically, and it includes the date and a brief account of the incident
written in Aramaic, followed by a fuller description of the event in Hebrew.
It appears that this work is the oldest example of the Oral Torah being committed to writing; the
Sages of the Mishnah do not only discuss the rulings that appear in it, but also the language that
was used. (Although it is not part of the standard texts of Talmud, the Steinsaltz Talmud includes
it as an addendum to the volume that contains Masechet Ta’anit).

4 https://www.ou.org/life/torah/masechet_taanit1117/

15
 The Irish Famine by George Frederick Watts

Not everyone's prayer is equal

Mark Kerzner writes:5

An important person should not "fall on his face," - prostrate himself in prayer, unless he is sure
to be answered - just like Joshua did. Otherwise his public spectacle will make him an object of
ridicule, and people will doubt his inner worth.

Similarly, one should not put on sackcloth, like the King Ahab did. In his case, he was
answered. Here is the story: a woman was crying, asking for help from the King. He asked her
what the matter was. She told him that she agreed with her friend to boil and eat her son, and
then the friend's son on the next day, but now the friend hid her son. When the King heard that,
he was so overwhelmed with the realization of how bad the famine was that he put on sackcloth
and started to pray and, even though he was not righteous, his prayer was answered in one day -
flour became plentiful and cheap.

16
How did they conduct the seven most strict fasts? They brought the Torah out into the town
square and put ashes upon the Ark, and upon the head of the leading ruler and the head of the
Court. Then everyone else put ashes on his own head. A Sage among them tried to captivate their
hearts, starting with "Brothers, remember the people of Nineveh: God looked not at their
sackcloth and fast but at their good deeds and stopping to do evil."

They added six special blessings to the regular eighteen, and thus the prayer leader says the
twenty-four blessings in his prayer. The extra ones deal with redemption, remembrance, and
answering prayer.

On our daf we find that the order of the fast day included the placing of ashes on the head of the
congregation.6 One reason offered for this practice is that the ashes will arouse the memory of the
akeidah.

The Tolna Rebbe, shlit”a, once asked rhetorically: “What ashes? Yitzchak was not sacrificed, and
he was certainly not burnt as a sacrifice!” The Rebbe then offered an answer based on an
exchange between the Imrei Emes, zt”l, and Rav Chaim Brisker, zt”l, during a gathering of the
Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah in Poland.

Rav Chaim was bothered by a question he had about the akeidah, and he shared it with all the
Torah giants in attendance at the illustrious gathering. “It says in the verse: When they finally
came to the place designated by Hashem, Avraham built the altar there and arranged the wood.
He then bound his son Yitzchak and placed him on the altar on top of the wood. (Bereshis 22:9)
Hashem told Avraham Avinu to bring Yitzchak as an olah, a burnt offering. But an olah is
slaughtered to the north and not on the altar at all! Why did Avraham Avinu assume that
Yitzchak should be placed on the altar?” The Gedolim offered various solutions but they did not
come to a clear answer. In the middle of their discussion, the Imrei Emes arrived at the conference.

When apprised of the question, he immediately had an answer. “The halacha demands that one
only offer a sacrifice in a holy place. In the Beis Hamikdash, a completely sanctified space, we
could slaughter the olah in the north. However, at the akeidah, the only sanctified place
available to Avraham Avinu was the altar itself. Har HaMoriah was not yet consecrated and
had no revealed holiness.”

“According to this we can now understand the Gemara in Taanis 16,” concluded the Tolna Rebbe.
“Since Avraham consecrated the altar, and the altar is supposed to have an eternal fire burning
upon it, the first thing he did was kindle the flame. This is why the verse tells us that he arranged
the wood. Yitzchak was singed slightly by the fire, perhaps some of his hair was burned, and
generated the ashes of Yitzchak!”

6 https://www.dafdigest.org/masechtos/Taanis%20016.pdf

17
 To Grow Like Dust and Ashes
Reuven Chaim Klein writes:7

When G-d promised Avraham that his descendants will be numerous, He said, “I will make your
descendants like the dirt (afar) of the land, such that if a person could count the dirt (afar) of the
land, so too will your descendants be countable” (Gen. 13:16). In this passage the Torah uses the
word afar, “dirt.” Afar is often paired with eifer, “ashes.” Other similar words include avak,
“dust,” and deshen, which also mean “ashes.” In this essay we explore the similarities and
differences between these words.

In some cases afar and eifer are used together. For example, when Avraham prayed for G-d to
spare the city of Sodom he prefaced his prayers with the admission, “I am but afar and eifer (Gen.

7 https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/to-grow-like-dust-and-ashes/

18
19:27)” — dirt and ashes. Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin (1816-1893), the venerated Rosh
Yeshiva of Volozhin, explains that sometimes prayers are answered in the merit of one’s righteous
forefathers (see Rashi to Gen. 25:21) or one’s righteous descendants (see Ber. Rabbah §29:5).
Avraham therefore prefaced his prayers by appealing directly to G-d’s mercy. He referred to
himself as afar because afar has no useful past, just as Avraham had no righteous ancestry (his
father Terach was an idolater). And he called himself eifer because eifer has no fruitful future, just
like — as far as Avraham could tell — he was not destined to father any righteous descendants, as
Yitzchak had not yet been born.

Another case of afar and eifer is found regarding the Torah’s commandment to cover the blood of
a slaughtered kosher wild animal or bird. In that context the Torah calls for covering the blood
with afar, “dirt” (Lev. 17:13). The House of Shammai argues that only literal afar, “soil,” may be
used, while the House of Hillel maintains that eifer, “ashes,” may also be used (Chullin 88b). The
question at hand is whether afar is a specific term which refers exclusively to “soil,” or a general
term (“dirt”) which includes both soil and ashes. As is usually the case, the halacha follows the
House of Hillel’s opinion, and indeed elsewhere, the Talmud (Shabbat 18a) and Rashi
(to Ta’anit 15a) imply that afar and eifer are synonyms (or at least interchangeable in some
contexts).

19
 Give So You Can Get

Rabbi Jay Kelman writes:8

"If not for my covenant, day and night, the laws of heaven and earth, I would not have created"
(Yirmiyahu 33:25)
Classical Jewish thought saw the spiritual and physical worlds as parallel ones working in tandem.
Weakness in one area impacted on the other. It is readily apparent how physical weakness limits
our ability to grow spiritually—one who is hungry or persecuted is unlikely to have much energy
for spiritual pursuits. But it is a two-way street—spiritual weakness can also have a negative impact
on the physical world. This was not something invented by our Sages, but by G-d Himself. This
motif is most famously expressed in the second paragraph of the shema, where the abundance of
rain or lack thereof (at least in the land of Israel) is attributed to the actions of the Jewish people.
In this worldview, nature was to be viewed as conveying a message to man.
Instead of seeing man as powerless in the face of nature (or history), the Sages taught that our
actions impact not only our surroundings, but also on nature itself. Rather than being viewed as
simple cause-and-effect—something no human can truly know—teachings such as the "Temple
was destroyed because of free hatred" (Yoma 9b) underscore the seriousness with which the rabbis
viewed certain activities. Using their keen analysis and historic insight, they then attempted to link
actual events to the particular shortcomings of their generation. Whether or not the rabbis believed
this literally or used such as a technique to drive home important messages does not really matter.
Nature was to be viewed as conveying a message to man.
If rain was a reward, then the lack of it was a punishment. But for what? One possibility is
suggested by Rav Yochanan, who taught "the rains only stop because of those who publicly
pledge tzedakah, yet do not give" (Ta'anit 8b). Both poor and wealthy are dependent on rain for
their sustenance. All the money in the world won't do any good if there are no crops to harvest.
Yet even when economic times are good, those who do not receive a share in the bounty are
dependent on those who do. It is bad enough when those who can help refuse to do so; but when
they do not come forth with their pledges, the disappointment and despair of the needy is multiplied
many times over. "Better not to pledge, than to pledge and not fulfill" (Kohelet 5:4). As they
deprive others of their needs, they, too, will be deprived of the ingredients that enable success.
In what might appear counterintuitive, Rav Yochanan follows up this teaching with one that says
that the more you give away, the more you will have. While this is readily understood on a moral
and emotional level, Rav Yochanan claims such is true on an economic level as well. "What is the
meaning of the verse 'aser, te'asher'", which details the obligation of the second tithe, Rav
Yochanan asks? Using a play on the word te'asher--which in this context means "to tithe", but if
read with a shin instead of a sin as titasher, it means "to become wealthy", Rav Yochanan teaches
that "aser, tithe, so that titasher, you can become wealthy" (Ta'anit 9a). When we share with
others, the returns are not limited to the wonderful feelings people have when they know they are
making a difference; the act of giving can actually aid in building one's own personal wealth.

8 https://torahinmotion.org/discussions-and-blogs/taanit-9-give-so-you-can-get

20
May I suggest the following explanation. Many studies (and I think one does not need a scientific
study to demonstrate this) have shown that money does not buy happiness, and that many middle-
income people are just as happy or even happier than the super-wealthy; as our Sages phrase it,
"The more money, the more worries" (Avot 2:7). We all can attest that when people feel good
about themselves, they are much more likely to have even greater success. So it should come as
no surprise that those who help others will be acting in the very ways that are likely to lead to their
own personal success. While money can't buy happiness, happiness can "buy" money[1].
The Gemara continues on to tell us that Rav Yochanan, like a concerned uncle, approached his
nephew, the son of Reish Lakish, to teach him some Torah. The young child, whose name is we
are not told[2], quotes him the teaching "aser, tithe, so that titasher, you will become wealthy", or
to use modern parlance, give so that you will get. When Rav Yochanan challenged him, asking
how he knows this, he responded, "Go test it". To this, the Gemara responds, "And is it right to
test G-d? But it is written [in the Torah], "Do not test the Lord" (Devarim 6:16). Amazingly, the
Gemara responds, based on a verse in the Book of Malachai that maaser, tithing, is an exception
to this rule, and one may test G-d in this area. It is this concept that stands behind the rabbinic
teaching that, "one who says this charity is so my child will live, or that I may merit the world to
come—he is a tzadik gamur, totally righteous[3]" (Rosh Hashanah 4a).
Apparently, helping others is so important that G-d Himself is "mochel on His kavod", foregoes
His honour, allowing and even encouraging people to test Him. If only more people would sit for
this test, and make G-d's test harder by giving more to others.

[1] Hebrew is such a rich language: the obligation to give, ‫ונתנו‬, is a palindrome, suggesting that which we give will come back to
us. The liturgical note on the word is a kadama ve'azla, which is shaped like a circle with a small opening on the top and the bottom.
Wealth, our Sages note, is a galgal chozer beolam, a circle with the rich and poor changing positions from one generation to the
next.
[2] As a general rule, the Talmud only quotes by name scholars of the very first rank. However, our Sages understood there was
much wisdom in the common man, and would thus often quote their teachings anonymously. The teaching is more important than
the teacher.
[3] There is a debate amongst the commentaries as to whether this testing only works for actual tithes, or works for all forms of
charity. Perhaps the first view is cognizant of how the intense labor involved in farming makes giving away up to 22% of one's
produce exceptionally difficult, much more so than writing a cheque. Perhaps!

21
 In the Rains, Talmudic Symbols of Goodwill, Punishment, and a
Deep Covenant
The Torah sages study and respond to natural phenomena in an effort to understand our
place on Earth

Adam Kirsch writes:9

“I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before your life and
death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you may live.”

These words from Deuteronomy 30:19 are some of the most famous in the Torah, since they
perfectly summarize the Jewish idea that the service of God through his mitzvot is the key to life
itself. But while the identity of God and life might strike us today as an inspiring metaphor, in its
original context it is anything but metaphorical. Most of Deuteronomy consists of Moses’ final
speech to the Israelites before they enter the Promised Land, and the climax of that speech is an
extremely concrete set of promises and threats. If the Israelites obey God faithfully, they will enjoy
plenty, security, and success in battle; if they stray from God’s path, they will be punished with

9 https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/belief/articles/daf-yomi-87

22
famine, disease, defeat, and exile. Nowhere in the Torah does God’s covenant more clearly
resemble a contract, with built-in penalties for non-performance.

For an agricultural people—as the Israelites became when they settled in the Land of Israel, in
contrast to their cattle-herding ancestors—the single most important blessing, the most overt sign
of divine favor or punishment, was rain. The rain was literally a gift from Heaven, and an essential
one: Without the right amount of rainfall at the right season of the year, the people starved.
Naturally, every human culture developed techniques for urging the gods to send rain—charms,
dances, incantations, rituals. For the Jews, the crucial technique for ending a drought was fasting,
a physical ordeal that symbolized spiritual abjection. If, according to the logic of Deuteronomy,
God withheld the rain as a punishment for sin, then only repentance could bring the rain back.

Only once the close connection between rain and fasting is established can we understand why
Tractate Ta’anit—whose name comes from the Hebrew word for fast-day—begins with a long
discussion of rain. This tractate, which Daf Yomi readers began last week, is devoted to the laws
governing fasts; but we are now 10 pages into chapter 1, and the word “fast” has not yet been
mentioned. Instead, the rabbis begin their discussion by talking about when and how Jews should
pray for rain. This involves figuring out when the rainy season in the Land of Israel starts and ends,
and whether those dates are different in other countries, especially Babylonia, where many of the
sages of the Talmud lived. Along the way, the rabbis engage in a good deal of biblical analysis,
bringing up many passages where rain is mentioned as one of God’s greatest powers.

During the rainy season, the words “He makes the wind blow and the rain fall” are inserted into
the Amidah prayer. This is both an acknowledgment of God’s power over the rain and an implicit
request that he send it at the appropriate time. By the same token, in the summer, when the crops
are growing and additional rain would be bad for them, we do not mention the rain, since we don’t
want to remind God of a blessing that at this time would be a curse. But when do we start and stop
inserting these words into the prayer? When do we want the rain to fall?

The mishna on Ta’anit 2a explains that the timing of the prayer is tied to the festivals. We begin
to “mention the might of the rain,” in the Talmud’s words, on Sukkot, the autumn festival, and we
stop mentioning it on Passover, the spring festival. The rabbis disagree; however, about exactly
what days of these festivals are meant. According to Rabbi Eliezer, we begin to pray for rain on
the first day of Sukkot, while Rabbi Yehoshua says we should begin on the last day. Yehoshua
makes the cogent point that, in fact, we do not want God to start sending rain at the beginning of
Sukkot, because that would make it impossible for us to dwell in the sukkah, which has an open
roof. Indeed, the notes to the Koren Talmud explain that, according to Rashi, when it rains during
Sukkot it is a sign that God is angry at the Jewish people, since he is rejecting their attempt to
fulfill the mitzvah of sukkah.

Eliezer acknowledges the justice of Yehoshua’s objection. However, he maintains that we can still
insert the words “He makes the wind blow and the rain fall” starting on the first day of Sukkot,
because this is not actually a request for rain, simply an acknowledgment of God’s power over the
rain. But Yehoshua is not convinced, and he rebuts Eliezer’s argument, pointing out that by this
logic, we might as well mention rain in the Amidah all year long. No, the mishna concludes, “One
requests rain only preceding the rainy season.” Specifically, we begin to mention rain during the

23
last prayer service on the last day of Sukkot, and we continue to include these words in the Amidah
until the first prayer service on the first day of Pesach.

‘Any Torah scholar who is not as hard as iron is not a Torah scholar.’

The subject of rain naturally leads the Gemara to make a series of meteorological observations.
What is striking about these is that the rabbis are full of practical wisdom about the weather, yet
they never attribute their conclusions to their observation or experience; rather, they manage to
find a scriptural basis for all their maxims. In Ta’anit 9b, for instance, Rabbi Eliezer comes close
to describing what we now know as the water cycle when he says, “The entire world drinks from
the waters of the ocean.” This is basically accurate—ocean water evaporates and turns into
precipitation, returning to the earth in the form of rain. (When Rabbi Yehoshua objects that ocean
water is salty while rainwater is not, Eliezer says that “the waters are sweetened in the clouds.”)
Yet Eliezer’s statement rests not on scientific argument, but on Genesis’s account of Creation:
“And there went up a mist from the earth and watered the face of the whole ground.” It’s a good
question whether Eliezer really derived his theory from this biblical description, or whether he
simply wanted to buttress his scientific principles with scripture, just as the sages regularly tie their
legal reasoning to specific verses.

Less scientifically plausible is the rabbis’ pious notion that God reserves the best rainwater for the
Land of Israel: “Eretz Yisrael drinks first, and the entire world afterward.” Just so, the Gemara
explains, “a person who kneads the cheese after it has curdled takes the food and leaves the refuse.”
Enough of the rabbis had experience of life in Babylonia and the Land of Israel to be able to
compare the rain in the two countries and know that they were not qualitatively different. But their
reverence for the Holy Land leads them to accept this metaphysical difference in rainfall.

Still less empirical is Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi’s remark that “the entire world drinks from the
runoff of the Garden of Eden.” But the Gemara not only accepts this idea, but it also uses it as the
basis for a geographical calculation. Ordinarily, the rabbis argue, “from the runoff of a beit kor, a
half-se’a can be watered.” The Koren Talmud helpfully explains these measurements, which boil
down to the idea that a field is 60 times larger than the area watered by its runoff. By this logic,
the Garden of Eden must be 60 times larger than the Earth. This equation reverses our usual sense
of the Garden of Eden as a particularly choice region of the planet; rather, the planet itself is just
a particular region of the much larger realm that is the Garden. The Gemara goes on to say that,
just as the Garden is 60 times larger than the Earth, so Eden itself is 60 times larger than its Garden;
and Gehenna, the Jewish Hell, is 60 times larger than that. Indeed, “the entire world is like a pot
cover for Gehenna.” This is a disturbing cosmology, in which all of existence is just a tiny fragment
of a much larger hellscape.

During the long discussion of rain, the sages take a moment to turn aside and discuss one of their
favorite subjects, which is the characteristics of sages. This might seem like egotism, and perhaps
it is, but it is also a reflection of the rabbis’ sense that Torah study is the acme of human existence—
a subject so important that it can never be out of place. Thus in Ta’anit 4a, Rava lists several kinds
of precipitation and the benefits they bring: “Snow brings benefits to the mountains; strong rain to
trees; light rain to fruit; and drizzle is even beneficial to a seed under a cloud of earth.” Rava goes
on to compare the Torah scholar to such a seed: “Once he sprouts, he continues to sprout.”

24
This is the cue for the Talmud to mention other sayings about Torah scholars—for instance, “The
Torah scholar who grows angry, it is his Torah study that angers him.” This is in keeping with a
number of other things we have heard about Torah scholars in the Talmud; they are often described
as difficult men, short-tempered and prone to wrath. Rav Ashi seconds the point: “Any Torah
scholar who is not as hard as iron is not a Torah scholar.” No wonder the pupil is supposed to
tremble before his teacher. Yet Ravina goes on to make another point that the Talmud frequently
insists on: “And even so, one is required to teach himself to act gently.” Anger, the Talmud
suggests, is the sage’s standing temptation; after all, he is a pious man surrounded by a lot of Jews
who don’t know or perhaps even care about the law. Who wouldn’t get angry? Yet the temptation
must be overcome, both for the sage’s own sake and because an effective leader can’t be mad all
the time. To combine strength with sweetness is the difficult ideal the Talmud demands of those
who would be its servants.

CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF BRACHAH

What we term “nature” is inextricably linked to our spiritual growth

25
Faigy Peritzman writes:10

“And I will establish My covenant with you, and never again will all flesh be cut off by the flood
waters, and there will never again be a flood to destroy the earth.” (Bereishis 9:11)

With His promise, Hashem establishes the stability and blessing of rain. The Gemara (Taanis 7a)
quotes Rav Yehuda saying, “The day of rains is as great as the day on which the Torah was given,
as it is written (Devarim 32:2): “My lesson [likchi] will come down like the rain,” lekach referring
to Torah.

The Anshei Knesses Hagedolah, when compiling the siddur, placed the petition for rain adjacent
to the brachah of techias hameisim, because both are above the laws of nature. Although rain
camouflages itself as nature, we must realize we need our tefillos to release this brachah. (Rabbi
Yakov Barros)

Seminary year, after Succos, I started waiting for those freezing rains I’d been warned about. Yet
well into Cheshvan, the country was still enjoying a long, balmy Indian summer.

Perhaps we Americans were enjoying the weather, of the mindset that rain should “go away and
come another day.” But the Israelis knew the lack of rain boded no good.

The Gemara in Chullin (60b) cites a seeming contradiction between two verses. “And the earth
brought forth grass” (Bereishis 1:12), on the third day of Creation. Then it is written: “No shrub
of the field was yet in the earth” (Bereishis 2:5), speaking about the sixth day of Creation, before
Adam was created. Rav Asi explains that the grasses were prepared to sprout on the third day, but
waited for man to be created and pray for rain.

This is an astonishing testament to the part we play in empowering a “natural phenomenon.”

This was in 1990, when Saddam Hussein was poised, waiting to unleash his destruction on his
nemesis, Israel. And it wasn’t raining.

It wasn’t long before the worry wormed inside me. “The Scuds have not yet fallen, yet neither
have gishmei brachah!” I heard at a chizuk rally.

I began davening the special tefillah for rain, scanning the sky every morning, begging for clouds
to appear on the horizon. As tensions heightened, my worries were focused on the bright blue skies
that seemed to mock me, highlighting just how displeased Hashem was with us. I may have been
a newcomer to this land, but never was I more conscious of Hashem’s promise in Shema — when
He’s angry, there’ll be no rain, and we’ll be banished from our Land.

10 https://mishpacha.com/cloudy-with-a-chance-of-brachah/

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The Gemara in Taanis [9b] explains how rain works. The pasuk in Bereishis (2:6) says, “And there
went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground.” Thus the entire world
drinks rain from the evaporated waters of the ocean.

But Rabi Yehoshua said, “The waters of the ocean are salty, whereas rainwater is sweet.” Rabi
Eliezer answered, “The waters are sweetened in the clouds, before they fall to the earth.”

The Chasam Sofer elaborates on this Gemara, saying that rain is partly created by the collective
exhalations of humans who breathe, speak, and laugh. When speech is sullied by lashon hara,
ridicule, or heresy, the vapor of our breath becomes spiritually polluted. The rain formed from
such vapor has the power to contaminate the whole world.

Therefore, in such a situation, Hashem mercifully withholds rain. Then we begin to daven and do
teshuvah, reversing the damage our speech would have inflicted on the rain.

According to the Midrash, originally the world was actually meant to be irrigated by water
springing from the ground. But Hashem created a system in which rain falls from the sky, to teach
us to look heavenward for this most essential of blessings. What we term “nature” is inextricably
linked to our spiritual growth.

The Scud missiles fell, but with them came tefillah; thus we merited miracles, including the miracle
of rain.

Since that seminary year, I’ve never taken that miracle for granted. Every Cheshvan I anxiously
scan the skies, praying we’ll be deserving of this tangible sign of His pleasure .

A short while ago the first blessed rain came down, swirling the torrents of summer dust as it
pounded the earth. Elated, I ran outside with my children. Yitzi, infected by my excitement, began
dancing in the rain, improvising loudly, “Thank You, Hashem, for the rain today! Please send lots
more our way!”

Together, we lifted our faces heavenward, drinking in the sweetness of Hashem’s blessings. It was
a moment drenched in love.

The Public Square

Sue Parker Gerson writes:11

The second chapter of Tractate Taanit starts on today’s daf with a very long mishnah enumerating
the rituals of a public fast day — or more specifically, as the Gemara will explain, the rituals
performed only after several earlier fasts have failed to achieve their desired result.

11 Myjewishllearning.com

27
The mishnah itself is too long to quote in its entirety, but the basic framework is as follows: First,
the Holy Ark would be brought into the public square, after which burnt ashes would be placed
upon it and the heads of community leaders and then on the heads of the other members of the
community. Next, an elder would recite biblical “verses of reproof,” followed by prayers that
included an elongated Amidahwith 24 blessings, including additional passages from the High
Holiday liturgy. Then, with some exceptions, the fast would continue for the rest of the day.

An interesting question arises about the first of these requirements: bringing the Torah ark into the
public square. Normally, the ark is kept in the synagogue. Broadcasting the calamity of drought
by taking it out of the synagogue, setting it up in the town square and sprinkling it with ashes
surely emphasized the gravity of the disaster. But a statement at the top of tomorrow’s daf suggests
a deeper reason for this ritual.

And why do they remove the ark to the city square? Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said: This is done
as though to say: We had a modest vessel (which was always kept concealed) but it has been
publicly exposed due to our transgressions.

The 15th-century Italian commentator Bartenura expands on this idea: “The ark which the Torah
scroll is placed in is a modest utensil which was despised by our sins. And why is it brought to the
city street? To say, we cried out in private in the synagogue and we were not answered; we will
despise ourselves in public in the city street.”

As we have seen, the rabbinic view of droughts was that they were brought about not by natural
climatic changes, but by the sins of the people. The response, as Tractate Taanit describes, was to
decree a public fast. But if no rain had come even after several cycles of fast days, more drastic
action was needed.

The ritual of bringing the Torah out of the private enclave of the synagogue was one of these
drastic actions, undertaken only after days of prior fasting had not brought the rains. It was a public
acknowledgement that the community’s private prayers had failed. It was seen as an act of
humiliation, the public exposure of an otherwise “modest vessel,” much as uncovering one’s head
or other body parts might have been. That humiliation was furthered by putting ashes on the ark,
on the leaders and on the congregants.

These days, we no longer sprinkle ashes on a Torah ark during times of drought. But several times
in the past decade alone, rabbinic leaders in Israel have called for public fasts, prayers and Torah
readings in the face of extreme weather conditions. To be sure, today’s solutions to a lack of rain
include scientific advancements that were beyond the rabbis, such as desalination and drilling for
underground water sources. But fasting, prayer and public Torah readings continue to be practiced
right alongside them.

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Rabbi Johnny Solomon writes:12

We are taught in the Mishna (Ta’anit 2:10) in our daf (Ta’anit 15b) that a communal fast may not
be decreed on Rosh Chodesh, Chanukah & Purim. However, if a series of fast days have already
been decreed and one falls on Rosh Chodesh, Chanukah or Purim, they are still observed.

Significantly, the Mishna (Ta’anit 2:8) previously referred to ‘Megillat Ta’anit’ which is a
document from the second Temple period that provides a list of the minor festivals when fasting
and eulogizing are forbidden, and while most of the days listed there are no longer observed as
minor festivals (see Rosh Hashanah 18b), both Chanukah & Purim are still observed as days of
joy on which eulogizing and fasting is forbidden.

As it happens, tomorrow night is the first night of Chanukah, and we very much hope that there
should be no reason to need to eulogise or fast during this upcoming festival. But in addition to
this, I saw a marvelous practice recorded by Rav Neventzahl (Yerushalayim B’Moadeha:
Chanukah p. 270) quoting the essay Netivot Ohr written by R’ Yitzchak Blazer (recording the
practices of R’ Yisrael Salanter and other Torah leaders and published alongside the Ohr Yisrael)
concerning Rav Yosef Zundel Salant (1786-1866) who, based on the above-mentioned law, had
the personal practice of avoiding listening to any negative news on Chanukah and Purim.

Undoubtedly, this personal practice is a stretch from the original law. Still, as Rav Moshe
Sternbuch explains (Moadim U’Zmanim Vol. 8 p. 36), given that the underlying rationale against
eulogizing and fasting on Chanukah & Purim is that these are days of joy, then by the same logic
we should do what we can to maintain our sense of joy on these days which – for R’ Yosef Zundel
Salant - meant not listening to any negative news.

Yet, I think we can add an extra layer to this idea based on the Mishna in our daf where we are
taught that while a communal fast may not be decreed on Rosh Chodesh, Chanukah & Purim, if a
fast has already been decreed falls on these days, then it is still observed. By this logic, if someone
is unfortunately already dealing with things that bring them strife, this does not necessarily mean
that they should be avoided at all costs during Chanukah or Purim. Still, what it does mean is that
we should avoid adding more negativity to our life during these days.

With this in mind, perhaps we can take a leaf out of the book of R’ Yosef Zundel Salant and,
during these upcoming 8 days of Chanukah, focus more on the good in our world. Instead of
sharing negative stories, perhaps we can work a little harder to share good news stories. And in
doing so, not only will we be honoring the law found in today’s daf, but we will also be consciously
bringing a little more light into the often dark world in which we live.

12 www.rabbijohnnysolomon.com

29
Rav Moshe Taragin writes:13

Though kri'at ha-Torah occupies a prominent position within the liturgy, there are only

three occasions on which we read from the Torah during Mincha - Shabbat, Yom Kippur, and

general fasts. Quite probably, the afternoon reading during Yom Kippur stems either from its

nature as a fast or from its identity as a form of Shabbat (Yom Kippur is referred to as Shabbat

Shabbaton). Hence, we can reduce our discussion to two different forms of Torah reading during

Mincha – Shabbat and ta'anit. The source for Torah reading during mincha on Shabbat can be

located in the gemara Bava Kama (82a): After witnessing the deleterious effects of spending three

days without Torah study Moshe installed public reading from the Torah every Monday, Thursday

and Shabbat afternoon. What is the source and essence of the mitzva to read from the Torah during

Mincha of a ta'anit tzibbur?

To help locate a source, we will begin by assessing the nature of kri'at ha-Torah on fasts in

GENERAL. We will then question the unique character of fasts in that the Torah is read during

mincha as well.

Possibly the most appropriate starting point is a gemara in Megilla (22a) which questions

the number of people who are called to read from the Torah during a ta'anit (both Shacharit and

Mincha). The gemara weighs two positions. Instinctively, we should not call more than three

13 https://etzion.org.il/en/talmud/seder-moed/massekhet-taanit/torah-reading-mincha-fast-days

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since a ta'anit does not obligate an extra korban Mussaf. In the mikdash an extra korban Mussaf

was sacrificed on Yom Tov, Shabbat and Rosh Chodesh. This extra korban, and the unique

kedusha of the day which it reflects, should understandably mandate an extra 'aliya.' A ta'anit

which does not enjoy this extra korban, is ostensibly not more holy than a regular day and this

does not warrant an extra aliya.

However, the gemara also considers a possibility that a ta'anit deserves an extra aliya since

it has a 'Mussaf tefilla' – an extra tefilla. There exists some debate regarding the identity of this

extra tefilla. According to Rashi, it refers to the addition of Aneinu in Shemoneh Esrei (an extra

passage added during the berakha of Shema Koleinu petitioning Hashem to accept our

prayers). The Ramban in Ta'anit (15) argues and claims that the gemara refers to the tefilla of

Ne'ila - an extra tefilla which was added on a ta'anit tzibbur in the afternoon. In the days of the

Mikdash, authentic ta'aniyot tzibbur were far more common than they are in our day. A true ta'anit

tzibbur might include prohibitions which extend beyond merely eating and drinking and requires

an extra tefilla during the afternoon. The only contemporary incidence of tefillat Ne'ila occurs on

Yom Kippur.

Whether we accept Rashi's view or the Ramban's, the same question emerges: Why should

the additional tefilla obligate an extra aliya? An extra korban logically obligates an extra aliya (or

several extra aliyot on Yom Tov) since it mirrors a higher level of kedusha on those days. This

kedusha is expressed partially through the extra korban and partially through the prohibition of

working. Hence, it makes sense to augment the number of aliyot. However, ta'anit tzibbur

seemingly has no extra halakhic level of kedusha, does not obligate an extra korban, nor does any

prohibition from work apply. Why should the presence of an extra tefilla (or, according to Rashi,

an addition to the Tefilla) possibly obligate an extra aliya?

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 The answer to this question quite possibly lies in understanding a gemara in Megilla

(22b). The gemara says that any day which is 'more' than its counterpart receives an additional

aliya. For example, the kedusha of Yom Kippur is qualitatively different from that of Yom Tov

and hence the number of aliyot on Yom Kippur is increased from 5 to 6. Does this formula apply

only to days which enjoy increased kedusha? Does the formula merely suggest that the number

of aliyot reflect the hierarchy of days in terms of kedusha? If this were true, then ta'anit tzibbur

would be left out in the cold since it has no increased kedusha and is excluded from the

hierarchy. Alternatively, is the gemara suggesting that any day which contains ANY special,

extended status deserves an extra aliya to reflect that unique experience? Generally, the special

status takes the form of higher kedusha. On fasts, however, no kedusha exists but certainly the

day has a unique status which might be reflected by an extra aliya. If this latter interpretation is

accepted, we have grounds to add an aliya on a ta'anit. All that remains is to identify that unique

character or facet of ta'anit.

Day of Teshuva

The Rambam in Hilkhot Ta'anit (1:1-2) highlights a fast day as one of teshuva. The

constraint upon eating is intended to focus attention upon our behavior and the resulting

crisis. (Keep in mind that, ideally, a ta'anit is called in response to an actual crisis – famine, war,

plague etc; our ta'aniyot based upon past tragedies are extensions of those original fast days.) Rav

Soloveitchik claimed that not only is the day dedicated to teshuva but the READING FROM THE

TORAH PARTICIPATES in that experience. Nechemia chapter 9 (verses 1-3) describes a public

fast day called immediately upon the return from Bavel addressing the wide-scale intermarriage

which had occurred. After confessing their sins, the public gathered for a general recital from the

32
Torah. Evidently, the reading from the Torah forms an integrated part of the ta'anit/teshuva

experience.

That kri'at ha-Torah on fasts participates in teshuva can be witnessed in the choice of what

is read. Though the mishna in Megilla (30b) lists the berakhot and kelalot (the tokhacha in

parashat Bechukotai), the beraita (31a) substitutes "Va-yekhal Moshe" (from parashat Ki Tisa) as

the selected reading. Though the tokhacha graphically describes our penchant for errant behavior

and the tragedies which will ensue, parashat Ki Tisa actually describes the first teshuva process. It

might be more suitable to promote the process of teshuva.

The role of kri'at ha-Torah within teshuva can also be deduced from a fascinating dispute between

the Tana'im about the number of aliyot. The gemara cited earlier considers ADDING an aliya due

to the extra tefilla. There exists a dispute among the Tana'im (22b) even about the minimum

number of three aliyot. According to Rav Yosi, the minimum three are called on every

ta'anit. According to the Tana Kama, however, three are only called if a ta'anit occurs on Monday

or Thursday – since they would be called even if it were not a ta'anit. If, however, a ta'anit occurs

on Tuesday only one person is called to read from the Torah. How might we define kri'at ha-Torah

on fasts in a manner which would justify calling LESS than three?

Quite possibly, this position also reflects the unique nature of reading from the Torah on a

ta'anit. Standard kri'at ha-Torah is an exercise in learning from the Torah in public. Reading from

the Torah on a ta'anit, however, is meant to catalyze the process of teshuva. As such the reading

of the haftara may be seen as more effective in this aim and hence more central to the day. Unlike

the portion from the Torah which describes our historical sins, and records the first public teshuva,

the chapters from Nevi'im actually exhort us to perform teshuva. In fact, one of the basic features

of Nevi'im is the constant chastising which we receive from the prophets as they admonish us and

33
urge us to repent. If teshuva is the order of the day and the purpose of reading from Scripture, we

might accent the reading of the haftara in place of reading from the Torah. This might be the

position of the Tana Kama. Essentially, the reading from the Torah is merely the prelude to the

more crucial reading from Nevi'im. Halakha still demands that every reading from Nevi'im be

preceded by a reading from the Torah (see the gemara - 23a).

Since the Torah reading is only a preamble, one aliya suffices. Even Rav Yosi who

required the standard 3 aliyot might have viewed teshuva as the ultimate goal of our public

reading. In addition, he might also have highlighted the reading of the Nevi'im over reading from

the Torah. However, the basic structure of Torah reading must be retained even if that reading

merely introduces the reading of Nevi'im and three aliyot must be called.

SUMMARY:

We have suggested that Torah reading on fasts contributes to the environment of teshuva

which constitutes the true purpose of the day. This might be reflected in the section which is read

as well as the number of aliyot. Ironically, the same concept - that the reading should promote

teshuva - might mandate an extra aliya (given the added role which teshuva plays) or might tolerate

a reduction in the number of aliyot (the position of the Tana Kama).

This concept might also be reflected in a famous question raised by R. Akiva Eiger. Can

someone who is not fasting (even for legitimate reasons) be called to an aliya on a ta'anit? Why

should such a restraint be placed? Someone who flaunts the community by rejecting the ta'anit

certainly does not deserve an aliya but what about someone who has a valid heter (permission not

to fast – for example a health issue)? Quite possibly, if we view the reading as part of the teshuva

process we might better understand this halakha. The teshuva of a ta'anit is performed through

fasting and the reading is integrated into that experience. Though we might not blame someone

34
who is excused from the fast, he might not be best suited to broker the teshuva by representing the

tzibbur in reading from the Torah. Had kri'at ha-Torah on fasts been merely incidental to the day,

we would not adopt such a limitation.

Recognizing a ta'anit as a day dedicated to teshuva and the kri'at ha-Torah as an integral

part of that repentance, we might better understand the extra aliya. If extra aliyot are not merely

the product of EXTRA KEDUSHA but also of EXTRA OR EXTENDED EXPERIENCES, fasts

(as well as Yom Tov) might enjoy an extra aliya. In general, kri'at haTorah is merely an

opportunity to study Torah in a public setting. For this experience three aliyot suffice. However,

on fasts the reading from the Torah plays an additional role - it prompts the teshuva process. The

gemara itself, when questioning the number of aliyot on a ta'anit, might have been questioning the

criteria for adding aliyot. Does only Yom Tov receive extra aliyot due to its ascending levels of

kedusha indicated by korban Mussaf? Or does any day with unique experiences and

SUPPLEMENTARY or EXTENDED roles for kri'at ha-Torah receive extra aliyot to reflect the

transformed experience? If the latter were true, then fasts would easily qualify for extra

aliyot. [The fact that today we do not add an aliya on a ta'anit does not disprove our understanding

of an extended function of kri'at ha-Torah on ta'anit; it merely implies that this extended role is

possibly not enough to require extra aliyot.]

Mincha

Having designated the unique element of kri'at ha-Torah on ta'anit we might return to our

original question: Why does ta'anit warrant reading from the Torah during mincha? In general,

we recognize Mincha-time as the critical moments of teshuva during a ta'anit. The pasuk in Ezra

(9:5) declares this when Ezra writes "During the Mincha time I arose from my ta'anit, tore my

clothing, bowed on my knees, spread my hands upward to Hashem my God." After all, the extra

35
tefilla of Ne'ila can only be recited in the afternoon, further confirming the afternoon as the crucial

period for tefilla and teshuva. If kri'at ha-Torah were truly part of the teshuva process, it should

certainly be performed in the afternoon as well.

In fact, according to some positions, kri'at ha-Torah of ta'anit is performed ONLY during

Mincha. The gemara in Megilla (30b) describes the schedule for ta'anit "half the day was

designated for public moral inventory, the next quarter for reading from the Torah and Nevi'im

and the final quarter for pleading for mercy." The impression from the gemara is that kri'at ha-

Torah was only performed in the afternoon and not in the morning during Shacharit. Of course,

Halakha does not accept this ruling [see, for example, the Lechem Mishneh in his comments to the

Rambam Hilkhot Ta'anit (1:17)]. However, some vestige of this gemara remains in that we only

recite a haftara during Mincha and not during Shacharit. If indeed haftara from Nevi'im plays a

more crucial role in promoting the teshuva, it might be better recited in the afternoon - the period

of the day designated for teshuva.

In conclusion, although we do not accept the opinion of adding an aliya on a ta'anit, the

principle which motivated that position still holds true: The day is one devoted to teshuva. Kri'at

ha-Torah on ta'anit gives expression to this theme of promoting teshuva. It is thus logical that we

read not only the Torah, but the haftara too, at Mincha, which is the height of the teshuva aspect

of the day.14

14 Note: The above shiur was loosely based on ideas expressed by Rav Soloveitchik in a shiur delivered about Kri'at Ha-Torah.

36
 ASHES
Morris Jastrow, Jr., Crawford Howell Toy, Marcus Jastrow, Louis
Ginzberg, Kaufmann Kohler write:15

The usual translation of the Hebrew "efer" which occurs often in expressions of mourning and in
other connections
It is a symbol of insignificance or nothingness in persons or words (Gen. xviii. 27; Isa. xliv. 20;
Mal. iii. 21 [iv. 3]; Job xiii. 12, xxx. 19). In the Red Heifer ritual, for purification from defilement
by contact with a corpse (Num. xix.), the Ashes of the offering are to be put into water, some of
which is then to be sprinkled on the unclean person; their virtue is, of course, derived from the
sacred material of the offering.
A mourner cast Ashes (or dust) on his head (II Sam. xiii. 9), or sat (Job ii. 8; Jonah iii. 6) or lay
(Esth. iv. 3) or rolled himself (Jer. vi. 26; Ezek. xxvii. 30) in Ashes (or dust). The rendering "ashes"
for the Hebrew word in question is, however, in some cases doubtful. In a number of passages in
which it occurs (in all, indeed, except those relating to the Red Heifer), it might as well or better
be translated "dust"; so where a person is said to eat, feed on, sit in, lie, or wallow in the "efer"; or
put it on his head; or where it is used to represent finely attenuated matter (Ps. cxlvii. 16). Its use
appears to be substantially identical with that of the word "'afar," commonly rendered "dust." The
sense of humiliation is expressed by sitting or rolling in the "'afar" or dust (Isa. xlvii. 1; Micah i.
7, vii. 17; Ps. lxxii. 9); grief and suffering by putting dust on the head (Josh. vii. 6; Job ii. 12). The
word symbolizes attenuation and annihilation or extinction (Job xxx. 19; Ps. xviii. 43 [42]); it is
even employed to designate the burnt remains of the Red Heifer (Num. xix. 17). The two words
are synonyms, and in the expression "dust and ashes" are combined for the sake of emphasis (with

15 https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/1944-ashes

37
paronomasia: "'afar we-efer."). There is, however, a difference in the usage: in expressions of
mourning it is only the latter ("efer") that occurs in combination with "sackcloth" (Jer. vi. 26; Isa.
lviii. 5; Dan. ix. 3; Esth. iv. 1, 3), while the former is used for the physical material of the soil
(Gen. ii. 7; Job xx. 11, and elsewhere). The word ("deshen") in the sacrificial ritual rendered in A.
V. "ashes," means "fat"; so in I Kings xiii. 3, 5; Lev. i. 6, iv. 12, vi. 3, 4 [10, 11]; and also in Jer.
xxxi. 40, whence it appears that sacrificial Ashes were carried to the valley south of Jerusalem.
Still another word translated by "ashes" in A. V. (Ex. ix. 8, 10) is "piaḦ," which appears to mean
"soot" (of a furnace).

Symbolical Significance in Mourning

It is not clear what was the precise idea or feeling which it was intended to express by the use of
dust (or Ashes) in acts of mourning. The custom in the Old Testament may be ancient, and the
result of the convergence of several sorts of procedure. It is a well-known usage in some savage
tribes, in mourning for the dead, to smear the body with clay, the purpose being, perhaps, merely
to have a visible sign of grief as a mark of respect for the deceased. Possibly, at a later time, the
dust of mourning was taken from the grave in token that the living felt himself to be one with the
dead (compare W. R. Smith, "Religion of the Semites," 2d ed., pp. 322-336, and Schwally, "Leben
nach dem Tode," p. 15). When religious ideas became more clearly defined, the old customs were
naturally interpreted in the light of the newer conceptions. The dust, occupying the lowest place
and trodden under foot, might well symbolize the downcast state of the afflicted; and, as misfortune
was regarded as the result of the displeasure of the Deity (Ruth i. 20; Job vi. 4, ix. 17), the sufferer
would humiliate himself by prostration; thus also repentance would be expressed (Job xlii. 6). To
this, no doubt, there was added the idea that man was made of dust (Gen. ii. 7), and was to return
to the dust of the grave and of Sheol (Gen. iii. 19; Job vii. 21; Ps. xxii. 16 [15]). Compare the
Babylonian representation of dust as the food of the inhabitants of the underworld ("Descent of
Ishtar").
The ordinary Semitic term for "dust" is "'afar," a form which is found in Assyrian, Aramaic,
Hebrew, and Arabic (it does not occur in this sense in the current Ethiopic texts); its primary
meaning is, perhaps, "a minute thing, a bit." Probably the primary signification of "efer" is the
same; outside of Hebrew it is found only in African Semitic dialects (Ethiopic or Amharic), where
(in the form "afrat") it signifies "dust" (Dillmann, "Lexicon Æthiopicum"). Each of the terms might
thus be used for any finely divided thing, as "dust," or "ash," or "refuse." The Septuagint employs
a number of words in rendering "efer" and "'afar," varying the word according to the connection.
In "'afar" there is a trace of the sense "fat": Ethiopic "'efrat," "unguent" (Dillmann); Arabic
"ta'affara," "become fat" (Lane); compare also Assyrian "ipru," "food" (Friedrich Delitzsch,
"Assyrisches Wörterbuch"). Whether there is any connection between this sense and the Hebrew
use of "deshen" for "ashes" is not clear.

—In Rabbinical Literature:

The Midrash remarks (Gen. R. xlix. 11; Ḥul. 88b), in reference to the only use of Ashes in the
Biblical ritual—namely, the Ashes of the Red Heifer (Num. xix. 9 et seq.)—God said to Abraham:
"Thou spakest in thy lifetime, 'I am but dust and ashes' [Gen. xviii. 27]; but just these things shall
serve as means of atonement for thy children; for it is written, 'And a man that is clean shall gather

38
up the ashes [Num. l.c.].'" Ashes were also used to cover the blood of slaughtered fowl, for the
Rabbis maintained that in the Biblical passage referring to the ordinance (Lev. xvii. 13) the
word signified earth and Ashes (Ḥul. l.c., an interpretation ascribed to Hillel's school;
compare also Beẓah i. 2).
Authentic records testify to the use of Ashes as a sign of grief in Talmudic times. In the Mishnah
(Ta'an. ii. 1) it is recorded that during the fast-days proclaimed in consequence of drought the Ark
of the Covenant, as well as the people participating in the procession, were sprinkled with Ashes—
a custom still prevalent in the fourth century in Palestine, where earth could be used as a substitute
for Ashes (Ta'an. 16a; Yer. Ta'an. ii., beginning; Gen. R. l.c.). On such occasions as public fasts,
Ashes were strewn upon the holy Ark set up in the public place and upon the heads of the nasi and
the ab bet din, while the rest strewed them upon their heads themselves. That part of the forehead
where the phylacteries were placed was selected (Ta'an. 16a). The reason given for covering
oneself with Ashes is either that it should serve as an expression of self-humiliation, as if to say,
"We are before thee as ashes" (Gen. xviii. 27; Job xlii. 6), or it is to bring before God the memory
of Abraham, who said, "I am but dust and ashes" (Gen. xviii. 27), or the memory of the offering
of Isaac, whose Ashes, according to the rabbinical opinion, lay piled up before God upon the altar
as if he had actually been sacrificed as a holocaust (Ta'an. 16a; Yer. Ta'an. ii., beginning; Gen.
R. l.c.). It is difficult to say whether the remark of Tos. Ta'an. 15b, 16a, that the Ashes to be used
in such cases should be of incinerated human beings, rests on tradition or on imagination.
Ashes, as a symbol of mourning, were also sprinkled upon the bridegroom during the wedding
ceremony, in order to remind him, at the height of his felicity, of the destruction of Jerusalem (B.
B. 60b). This custom is even to-day observed among some of the orthodox. In memory of the same
national disaster the Jews also ate bread sprinkled with Ashes at the last meal before the fast-day
of the Ninth of Ab (Yer. Ta'an. iv. 69c; Lam. R. to iii. 16; ShulḦan 'Aruk, OraḦ Ḥayyim, 552, 6
gloss).
Raba says that if sifted Ashes are strewn round the bed, the footprints of night-demons can be
observed in them in the morning (Ber. 6a). Unworthy disciples are called "white pitchers full of
ashes" (ib. 28a).

Bibliography:
• Schwally, Leben nach dem Tode, 1892;
• W. R. Smith, Religion of the Semites, 1894;
• Benzinger, Hebräische Archäologie, 1894;
• Nowack, Lehrbuch der Hebräischen Archäologie, 1894;
• Frey, Tod, Seelenglaube und Seelenkult im Alten Israel, 1898;
• Grüneisen, Ahnenkult und die Urreligion Israels, 1900;
• Talmud, Ta'anit.
• For Greek usage: [Pseudo-] Lucian, De Luctu, 12.
• Jastrow, Earth, Dust, and Ashes as Symbols of Mourning Among the Ancient Hebrews, in Journal of American Oriental
Society, xx. 133-150.

39
 Dust, Earth, and Ashes as Symbols of Mourning among the Ancient
Hebrews

Morris Jastrow, Jr. writes:16

16 https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/592320.pdf Journal of the American Oriental Society , 1899, Vol. 20 (1899),

40
41
42
43
44
The use of ash having been inherited from ancient funerary practices and applied to communal
grief and mourning, allows us to explore the metaphor of ash and the alchemical power it has
to provide a space for transformation of grief and despair into a healing process through inner
work.

45
 Why I decided to become an artist who doesn’t sell work (and what
this has to do with grief).
Hunting for seasonal change

Janine Marriott writes:17

It’s a cold December day, 2016, and I’m trudging back from dropping my son at school; making
my ritual return journey through Arnos Vale down the hill towards my home. More recently this
has taken a bit longer than usual, as I’m looking for seasonal changes in the Ash tree cycle. I take
photos and gathering scattered Ash keys along the way. I’ve already collected leaves, buds and
flowers throughout the year so this completes my collection.

Image by Jo Bushell
Playing with shadows

I’m using these fallen specimens to create a series of projections. I am using an old-school OHP
projector, which I picked up from a charity shop. I place a piece of card on the glass. It has a large
circle cut in its centre to allow the light to pass through. I begin to arrange the keys so that they
create a border of key-shaped silhouettes around the inside-edge of the circle. Then I flick the
switch and to my joy the projected light creates an impressive design on the opposite wall. I play
17 https://arnosvale.org.uk/using-art-to-transition-and-transform-grief-and-loss/

46
with the key shapes until I’m happy. Next I change into a long dress (I’ve painstakingly made for
a later installation) and climb onto a stool. My shadow falls in the centre of the halo of light. I
start to play with movement while taking images to complete the documentation of the process.

Inspiring Ash and its loss

I have decided to experiment with these ideas for a short film. This becomes part of a 6 month
community project three of us as artists are working on . This project culminates in two
community woodland performances. These projection experiments kick off the process. The
performance will celebrate the value, myth and uses of the Ash over the centuries. We weave this
with the science behind its demise, as the tree becomes increasingly threatened by the Ash Dieback
disease. Final product Used with the kind permission of Courage Copse Creatives and Shimnix
Films.

I am particularly interested in creating projections around the life-cycle of the tree as I experiment.
This is not just because it is beautiful and fascinating but because this tree stands at the centre of
the Nordic creation story – Yggdrasil.

I’m interested in drawing from stories, theories and myths like this; the type which map out cycles
of life and shine a light on stages of transition. This interest began at a point of change in my own
life when I had to deal with a deep loss bringing . This loss brought with it a significant and sudden
change of location, lifestyle and new community. I am suspended in a mode of grief and I spent
years feeling rootless. The loss became a strange but alienating comfort as it still linked me to the
past. I was fine on the face of it; I was meeting new people, working, supporting my kids with the
transition but in truth I was stuck. I was struggling to transition and transform grief and loss for
myself.

47
Making earth pigments and transformation

Hunting in the rocks for Bideford Black

Sometimes what seems like a fairly insignificant meeting actually resets the course you are heading
on. I met a group of artists, at this time, on the streets of the local market town demonstrating how
to make paint from earth pigments. They had dug them up along the local coastline. There was
something about the idea of digging up these raw, organic materials that tapped into something
innate and authentic within me. It gave me an urge to connect with the earth. Taking the map
coordinates they kindly gave me, I set off a few days later to locate and dig up the pigments for
myself.

The act of clambering up across the craggy cliff line and down onto the beach, finding the seam
of exposed pigment and scraping it lump by lump from its secret seam made me feel more alive
than I had felt for a long time. The pigment I’d chosen to find first was Bideford Black. This is a
sticky black substance, which now covered my hands and marked my clothes.

I can honestly say this was a transformative moment in my life. For me this wasn’t just a foraging
trip – the trip felt like an intentional performance, a passage that enabled me to step entirely into
my grief. I was in some sort of partnership with the natural world. The hidden layer of dark matter
was evidence of the journey of the earth – a huge and very lengthy transition from Jurassic era to
present day. This blacker-than-black pigment emerging through the cliff-face somehow spoke to
me about my own hidden grief and its need to be unearthed.

48
Playing with pigments

As I began to experiment with making the pigment into paint at home; pounding it down, removing
debris, refining it and mixing it with a medium; I knew that whatever I eventually did with this
paint would need to be part of a physical process, not just painting on canvas. It would be a way
of marking the inner shift I was making. I was bringing the moment out into the world. I created
instinctual patterns with the paint and took images of these in order to project them onto my
body. It was a brave but necessary response to the need I had to mark my grief.

With the help of a photographer friend we captured the powerful images of the black patterns as
they fell onto my skin and following the contours and gestures of my body. It was a profound
process that was unlike anything I’d experienced before. There was a synergy with the journey of
the natural world, it’s longevity, it’s deep knowledge of change . This allowed me to safely connect
with myself in a way that counselling never quite had.

Bideford Black art by Jo Bushell

Using the experience to transition and transform grief and loss

Since this experience I have read extensively on the subject of transition including areas of depth
psychology and deep ecology. It’s helped me to understand why I had felt the need to work through
this transition in such a physical way. This route connects my body to myth and the life-cycles of
the land (I have since had similar experiences in water). This has led me to develop art processes
for others who are facing significant transitions. This includes taking small groups into private

49
woodlands for 12 hours to mark their own encounters with grief; processes that enable them to
move through grief. They are not forgetting the loss but acknowledging it’s place in the journey
beyond.

High Noon by Emma Holbrook @holpictures

Grief, loss and Growth

When we get stuck in any part of the cycle of life, we are then holding on to a permanence that
can’t be sustained. The cycles of natural world, of life, teach me that growth and grief are both
necessary. In fact it is the ability to embrace the constant of change that makes us fully alive. It
enables me to navigate life differently. It is on a personal level, as a community and even into the
huge shifts of a pandemic, climate change and beyond. This is why I choose to work with
impermanence. This impermanence allows us to transition and transform grief and loss.

From collecting Ash keys to digging up earth pigments I continue to work with impermanent
processes rather than creating permanent pieces of art. I enjoy the use of natural materials that get
left behind, the dialoguing with others, the projections in wild and urban spaces. This is the art and
this art draws people in (sometimes alone and sometimes with others). Then when that moment

50
ends we are left with the memories, sometimes images . Of course, the changes embraced in the
process.18

In Memoriam

Robert Bly
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TP3HWLIL1Aw

In 1986 the New York Times review of Robert Bly’s Selected Poems was headlined “Minnesota
Transcendentalist”. It was perceptive to note his link with the New England poets of the 19th
century, which was strong, but within a few years it would look absolutely prescient. For although
he was one of the outstanding poets of his generation, Bly, who has died aged 94, may be
remembered, like the two most enduring of the original Transcendentalists, for facets of his work
other than poetry.

Just as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s legacy is as an essayist, the influence of Bly’s essays on poetic
theory and his many translations have resonated with readers and his fellow poets. But Bly is more
likely to be seen as a 20th-century parallel to Henry David Thoreau. Like Thoreau, he made his

18
For further reading on embracing change, transition and transform grief and loss
–https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200930-why-embracing-change-is-the-key-to-a-good
life?fbclid=IwAR3ehqrqHlo6z9L17DZZF0r-DPLB0VYadzirVuBs0Bu7oxy_vT_XVzlZrXU

51
mark with civil disobedience, and later with a hugely popular prose work concerned with the
denaturing effects of civilisation.

Bly’s early poetry in the 60s was his best, although its quality was often subsumed by controversy
surrounding his anti-war positions. In 1966, he co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam
War. The following year, when he won the National Book award for The Light Around the Body,
he donated the prize money to draft resistance. But his entire poetic career was thrown into the
shadows by the remarkable success of Iron John: A Book About Men (1990).

His entire poetic career was thrown into the shadows by the remarkable success of Iron John: A
Book About Men

A meditation on his vision of American manhood being torn from its natural roots because fathers
fail to initiate their sons properly into masculinity, Iron John spawned a movement combining
encounter-group sensitivity with primal tree-hugging survivalism. Yet with his imagistic, often
spiritual, poetry, his deep interests in mysticism, his rustic dress and his nasal, high-pitched voice,
Bly often seemed an unlikely prophet of masculinity.

Bly called his poetic technique “deep image”, and his highly visual, quietly surreal poems, often
in rural settings, reflected his upbringing in Scandinavian-settled Minnesota. He was born in Lac
qui Parle county, where his parents, Alice (nee Aws) and Jacob Bly, Norwegian immigrants, were
farmers. At 18, after graduating from high school in Madison, he enlisted in the US navy.

Discharged in 1946, he enrolled at St Olaf’s College in Northfield, Minnesota, but after a year
transferred to Harvard, where he joined a precocious group of undergraduate writers,
including John Ashbery, Richard Wilbur, John Hawkes, George Plimpton and, at
Radcliffe, Adrienne Rich. It was at Harvard that he read a poem by WB Yeats, and resolved to “be
a poet for the rest of my life”.

After graduation in 1950, he moved to New York, writing and struggling to support himself with
a succession of menial jobs and meagre disability payments for the rheumatic fever he contracted
while in the navy.

In 1954, he returned to the midwest, as a graduate student in the University of Iowa’s writers’
programme, teaching to pay his way. Again he found himself in a writer’s hothouse; his fellow
students included Philip Levine, Donald Justice and WD Snodgrass, with Robert Lowell and John
Berryman on the faculty. The proliferation of creative writing programmes on American campuses
today owes much to the collective success of this group, the level of which, it could be argued, has
never been repeated.

He married the writer Carol McLean in 1955, and returned to Minnesota. The next year, he
received a Fulbright grant to travel to Norway to translate poetry. There he discovered not only
such Swedish poets as Tomas Tranströmer, Gunnar Ekelöf and Harry Martinson, but also, in
translation, other writers relatively unknown in English: Georg Trakl, Pablo Neruda and César
Vallejo. His translations of Tranströmer continued throughout both their careers, and the affinity
between their poetry makes these some of the most effective ever done.

52
On his return to America, Bly started a magazine to publish such writers. The Fifties, co-edited
with William Duffy, would change its name decade by decade, and had an immense effect on
American poetry, defining the deep image style. Through the magazine, Bly became close to a
similarly inclined poet, James Wright, and with him translated Twenty Poems of Georg Trakl
(1961). He also translated Knut Hamsun’s novel Hunger from the Norwegian in 1967.

Deep image arose from the way the poets Bly admired drew on almost subconscious imagery, yet
used it in a very deliberate way. He called it “leaping” poetry, once describing it as surrealism with
a centre holding it all together. Out of these influences, in 1962, came Bly’s first book of poems,
Silence in the Snowy Fields, whose bonding with the countryside would be echoed by later
generations of creative writing professors in poems about chopping wood in denim shirts. But in
Bly’s hands, the quiet of the northern landscape provided a deep, personal beauty. It was an
immediate success, and led to a Guggenheim fellowship.

Bly drew on almost subconscious imagery, yet used it in a very deliberate way
Those poems gave no hint of the despair that became evident in The Light Around the Body, which
not only reflected his feelings about the Vietnam war, but also his years of struggle in New York.
They drew on the same imagery as his first book, but used it in a far more ferocious way. Studying
Jung’s theories of mythic archetypes led to Bly’s mixing them into his politics in Sleepers Joining
Hands (1973), whose long poem, The Teeth Mother Naked at Last‚ is a powerful condemnation
of war as an affront to the Great Mother Culture. He placed a long essay, I Came Out of the Mother
Naked‚ at the centre of this book, and prose poems would soon become an integral part of his
poetics, culminating in This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopher Wood (1977).

After a divorce from Carol in 1979, in 1980 he married Ruth Ray, a Jungian psychologist, and
moved to Moose Lake, Minnesota. He began working with men’s and women’s groups, producing
books of poetry that reflected the transactional experience, most notably the love poems in Loving
a Woman in Two Worlds (1985).

Around 1992 I attended a men’s workshop with Robert Bly, The Jungian analyst James
Hillman, Sir Laurence Olivier’s son Richard (founder of Olivier Mythodrama)19 and a Mexican
Shaman (Martin Prechtel)20 in southern England, where I was introduced to the inner work of
recovery and healing from grief.

It led me further into understanding the mythic power of midrash (thanks to Professor
Fishbane’s workshops21) and the use of midrash in healing (as in Mordechai Rotenberg’s
work)22. This trajectory allowed me to find my voice in healing texts later on, and the healing
power of Hassidic texts.

19
https://www.oliviermythodrama.com/why-mythodrama/our-people/richard-olivier
20 https://www.floweringmountain.com/books.html
21 https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004285484/B9789004285484_005.xml
22 https://www.routledge.com/Rewriting-the-Self-Psychotherapy-and-Midrash/Rotenberg/p/book/9780765805676

53
American writer Robert Bly is regarded as “one of the legends of contemporary poetry,” according
to David Biespel, “the prototypical non-modernist the one who set in motion a poetics of intensity
for generations to come.”23 The author of dozens of books of poetry and translation, Bly’s work is
based in the natural world, the visionary, and the realm of the irrational. As a poet, editor, and
translator, he profoundly affected American verse, introducing many unknown European and
South American poets to new readers. In addition to his poetic endeavors, he gained attention for
his anti-war protest efforts, his theories on the roots of social problems, and his efforts to help men
reclaim their healthy masculinity and channel it in a positive direction. Bly’s poetry was often
categorized as part of the Deep Image school of writing, in which the poet employs a system of
private imagery; however, Bly’s wish was not to create a personal mythology, but rather to
describe modern American life through powerful metaphors and intense imagery. Two of his major
inspirations in this regard were Spanish-language writers César Vallejo and Federico Garcia
Lorca. Hugh Kenner, writing in the New York Times Book Review, remarked that “Bly is

23 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-bly

54
attempting to write down what it’s like to be alive, a state in which, he implies, not all readers find
themselves all the time.”

Bly was born in western Minnesota and grew up in a community dominated by Norwegian
immigrant farmers. After two years in the Navy, he attended St. Olaf College in Minnesota before
transferring to Harvard, where he associated with other graduates who went on to make their name
as writers, including Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, John Hawkes, George Plimpton,
and Kenneth Koch. After his graduation in 1950, Bly spent some time in New York City before
studying for two years at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, along with W.D.
Snodgrass and Donald Justice. In 1956, he traveled on a Fulbright grant to Norway, where he
translated Norwegian poetry into English. Translation helped shape the scope of Bly’s career.
While in Norway, he discovered the work of many poets who would influence him greatly,
including Pablo Neruda, Vallejo, and Gunnar Ekeloef. He founded his literary magazine and
publishing house, The Fifties (which later changed its name to reflect the passing decades), as a
forum for translated poetry. Returning to Minnesota, he took up residence on a farm with his wife,
the short story writer Carol Bly, and their children.

Bly’s first widely acclaimed collection was Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962). In an author’s note,
Bly stated that he was “interested in the connection between poetry and simplicity. ... The
fundamental world of poetry is an inward world. We approach it through solitude.” He added that
the poems in this volume “move toward that world.” Writing for the New York Times Book
Review, Wallace Fowlie said, “Mr. Bly’s poems name delicate, humble things, and at the same
time describe man assuming his existence, beginning over again the test of illusions. At the end of
each poem there is silence, without complaint.”

Bly’s second book, The Light around the Body (1967), won the National Book Award. Unlike the
meditative “deep images” of nature that had filled Silence in the Snowy Fields, The Light around
the Body included poems attacking US involvement in the Vietnam War. The book showed Bly
attempting to unite public and private realms in poetry, a project that would continue to influence
both his own work and his role as a public poet. In 1966, Bly cofounded American Writers against
the Vietnam War, led much of the opposition among writers to that war, and even contributed his
National Book Award prize money to the antiwar effort. The 1970s were a prolific decade for him,
in which he published 11 books of poetry, essays, and translations. In books such as Sleepers
Joining Hands (1973) and This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years (1979), Bly returned to
both the bucolic tradition of his first book and the antiwar themes that had marked his second, as
well as celebrating the power of myth, Indian ecstatic poetry, meditation, and storytelling. He was
strongly influenced by the work of Robert Graves, and his poetry showed his interest in mythology,
Jungian psychology and pre-Christian religion. Bly’s most popular books from the 1980s
include The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981), which contains several prose poems and
meditations on father-son relationships; Selected Poems (1986); and Loving a Woman in Two
Worlds (1987), a volume that explores love, intimacy and relationships.

In 1979, Bly and Carol Bly divorced, an event which precipitated a serious crisis of the soul for
the poet. His emotional journey eventually led him to begin, with James Hillman and Michael
Meade, a series of seminars for men. Participants were encouraged to reclaim their male traits and
to express their severely repressed feelings through poetry, stories, and other rites. Bly’s work in

55
this area led to the character of “Iron John.” Based on a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, the figure
came to stand for an archetype that could help men connect with their psyches and eventually
became a book by the same name. In Iron John: A Book about Men (1990), Bly argues that modern
men are greatly damaged by an absence of intergenerational male role models and initiation rituals.
Some critics found Bly’s work to be anti-feminist; he replied by acknowledging and denouncing
the dark side of male domination and exploitation. And while some continued to argue that Bly
was advocating a return to traditional gender roles for both men and women, others assailed what
they saw as Bly’s indiscriminate, New Age-influenced salad of tidbits from many traditions. But
still others found great value in the book, stressing its importance to contemporary culture’s
ongoing redefinition of sexuality. As Deborah Tannen put it in the Washington Post Book
World, “This rewarding book is an invaluable contribution to the gathering public conversation
about what it means to be male—or female.” Iron John was at the top of the New York Times
best-seller list for ten weeks and stayed on the list for more than a year. Bly revisited this concept
with The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine (1998), written in collaboration
with psychotherapist Marion Woodman, using an ancient Russian myth as their origin story.

Bly contributed other social criticism in future books, including The Sibling Society (1997). The
book contends that Americans are like a race of perpetual adolescents, and as a result lack empathy
or sympathy. The root of these problems, in Bly’s opinion, was both an erosion of respect for
authority and a lack of cross-generational support. John Bemrose, reviewing The Sibling
Society in Maclean’s, remarked that Bly “brings a unique ability to bear on the subject as an
interpreter of folktales and great literature,” explaining the way “a constant bombardment of
advertising keeps the hunger for new goods raging, and as corporations convince politicians that
they must be allowed to do what they like (essentially taking over the leadership of society), people
succumb to an infantile need for instant gratification.” The book was popularly praised.

Throughout his career, Bly maintained his devotion to translating the world’s visionary poetry,
often in an attempt to counteract what he has seen as the dry or lifeless qualities of high
modernism. In addition to the poets he introduced through his influential series of decade journals
(The Fifties, Sixties and Seventies), Bly translated poets as various as Rainer Maria Rilke, Antonio
Machado, Tomas Tranströmer, Francis Ponge, Rumi, Hafez, and Kabir. The Winged Energy of
Delight: Selected Translations (2004) gathered together 22 of the poets translated by Bly over his
50-year career. In the Bloomsbury Review, Ray Gonzalez acknowledged the debt English language
poetry owes Robert Bly, writing that Bly “has opened the doors of experience, insight, and
language, lifting them toward a universal understanding of what poetry means in the lives of people
throughout the world.”

Bly continued to publish many books of poetry and translation. Following the practice of his
friend William Stafford, Bly wrote a poem every morning, which produced a collection Morning
Poems (1998). The collection garnered much critical praise. Reviewing the book for the Times
Literary Supplement, Ian Tromp maintained that “This book offers much that is touching and wise,
and these poems seem a culmination of a journey away from the cant of so many of Bly’s earlier
poems, a journey towards humility, simplicity and ease, culminating here in verse of unusual grace
and humanity. The Morning Poems are the best Robert Bly has written.” His new and selected
poems Eating the Honey of Words (1999) was also widely praised. His later collections
include The Urge to Travel Long Distances (2005), the collection of ghazals My Sentence was a

56
Thousand Years of Joy (2005), Stealing Sugar from the Castle: Selected and New Poems, 1950-
2013, and Collected Poems (2018). Reviewing the last book for the New York Times, Biespiel
remarked, “Bly rejects décor. What you see throughout Collected Poems, this 505-page
retrospective of 14 books and some 600 poems,” Biespiel went on, “is that he is not interested in
covering an entire poem with incidents, but in hierarchies of emphasis, beginning with longing.
He offers little interest in the hedonism of thought championed by his Harvard classmate John
Ashbery. Instead, Bly’s precinct of the imagination is like a womb of consciousness.”

Michiko Kakutani observed in the New York Times, “What has remained constant in his work ...
is Mr. Bly’s interest in man’s relationship with nature, and his commitment to an idiom built upon
simplified diction and the free associative processes of the unconscious mind.” Peter Stitt of
the New York Times Book Review also emphasized the importance of free association in Bly’s
poetry. “Bly’s method,” Stitt wrote, “is free association; the imagination is allowed to discover
whatever images it deems appropriate to the poem, no matter the logical, literal demands of
consciousness.” M.L. Rosenberg, writing in Tribune Books, noted in Bly’s work a blending of
European and South American influences with a decidedly American sensibility: “Bly is a genius
of the elevated ‘high’ style, in the European tradition of Rilke and Yeats, the lush magical realism
of the South Americans like Lorca and Neruda. Yet Bly’s work is truly American, taking its
atmosphere of wide empty space from the Midwest, and its unabashed straightforward
emotionalism and spiritualism.”

The Place of Eating Ashes - Grief and the Soul's Work

Oscar C. Pérez writes:24

24 https://www.tendingthefires.com/post/2015/11/05/the-place-of-eating-ashes-grief-and-the-souls-work

57
Sometimes the road ahead of us gets dark. The dreams we had of what life would be when we
were young start to dim, and we come face to face with the reality that we are human beings. This
can come as a shock. For most people it does.

I remember being younger and thinking that the sky is the limit in the possibilities for my life. I
thought that I could and would accomplish anything. After a period of descent, where I collapsed
into a deep depression and brought the world crashing down on me I started an upward climb that
seemed unstoppable. In two short years I went from being a college dropout that had nothing going
for him to getting offered a fully funded doctoral program at an Ivy-league university. I went from
being living in a tiny town in New Mexico and not knowing much of the world to living in Rio de
Janeiro, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. After feeling completely alone I was
surrounded by amazing friends and gorgeous women.

This transition in my life made me feel like I could do anything. I had climbed out of a place of
sorrow and helplessness and found my way into an exciting world where everything seemed
possible. In fact, it was like life handed me whatever I wanted whenever I wanted it. I thought this
was it, the Holy Grail, and it was in my hands for good.

But regardless of what anyone tells you, life does not unfold on a linear path. None of us ever has
it all together all the time. Life moves us through the cycles that we need to experience. It is never
a consistent ascent or descent, but a fluctuation balance of the two. Anyone who tells you otherwise
is selling something.

In our world today there is an excess of people trying to convince everyone that positive thinking
can solve the problems we face. Don’t get me wrong, positive thinking definitely helps, but we are
not made to live on only one side of the spectrum of emotion in life. As self-aware, experiential
beings we are here to experience the vast prism of emotion that life has to offer us. This does not
mean that we should always expect perpetual happiness.

The challenges that we face in life are our rites of passage. They are the places where our spirit
and our will become forged into something stronger than before, or they break. When we live in a
world that refuses to accept adversity out of a childlike desire to experience only pleasure, these
challenges can crush a person. And yet, life will always test us. At some point or another, we will
be faced with extremely difficult situations that we must accept as the crucible for our own growth.
Imagine my disillusionment when I realized, halfway through my fancy doctoral program, that
almost every professional I met in that field was miserable. People that had dedicated their lives
to being illustrious scholars had sacrificed everything for the recognition that didn’t seem to satisfy
them. Relationships with children, spouses, and friends all fell by the wayside, second to the desire
to be established as a distinguished scholar. All of this in fields that were so highly specialized that
they had little to no impact on the world. Islands unto themselves, these groups of academics would
sacrifice their lives to seeking recognition from each other, and play at being influential forces in
the world.

The second great descent in my life started when I decided that I would not be one of these people.
I decided that I wanted to dedicate my life to helping others in a tangible way, doing something
that allowed me to see the impact on the lives of people I know and care for. So I left academia.

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After completing a PhD I walked away from it to start building my work as a life coach and
spiritual advisor.

Poet Robert Bly talks about the descent that happens in each of our lives. He says that in order to
become fully formed human beings we must fall into the place of “eating ashes.” That is, we must
go through a period of knowing grief so that we may mature as human beings. Cultures throughout
the world have known this for hundreds, even thousands of years. It is through grief that the heart
and soul are cracked open so that new life can grow from us, or death can take us.
From flying high on the illusion that every door would open at my beck and call I realized that life
had other plans. Though the best of my intentions was to help others live better lives, I soon found
that few people want to do the difficult work of facing this descent, just as I was going through it
myself. My descent was into a place of financial and emotional insecurity. I had many skills, but
seemingly little opportunities to apply them. And letting go of my illusions of how life should meet
me was very difficult.

In this place of eating ashes we find that all of our skills are insufficient for facing the challenges
that have shown up on our doorstep. We struggle to make our skills sufficient so that we can
overcome what is right in front of us, but they just seem to fall short. And yet there is much beauty
in knowing how to open up to that vulnerability. All spiritual traditions across cultures have this
period of surrender in their stories. There comes a moment when it is absolutely necessary for us
to let go and ask for help. This rite of passage is a place of great transformation. It shows us that
we cannot live independent of our community, and therefore we are indebted to it. When we have
the awareness to see that we are in the place of “eating ashes,” we can accept that this time in our
life is here to strengthen us, to shape us into better human beings.

When I was in my twenties, the possibilities of life seemed to be handed to me on a silver platter.
As I go into my mid-thirties I realize that life is more than silver platters and ivory towers. Life is
a testing ground that will forge us into human beings, one way or the other. It is through these
testing periods that we learn to be truly compassionate. It is also through these times that we learn
how important our community is to us, and how important we are to it.

My work now is about helping people through this time of “eating ashes.” It arises for each of us
in a different way. For some it is the loss of a job or a relationship, for others it is illness, death of
a loved one, divorce or separation, financial ruin, even exile from a community. These are the
times when the soul beckons for our attention. It has something to teach us. When we listen and
allow the soul to do its work we become better equipped to be of service to others. We learn that
there is something more precious in life than material gain or financial success. The soul has been
within us all along, and the time of eating ashes forces us to tend to it or die.

Psychologist Francis Weller says:

“Grief is soul work. It requires courage to face the world as it is and not turn away, to not burrow
into a hole of comfort and anesthetization. Grief deepens our connection with soul, taking us
into territories of vulnerability, exposing the truth of our need for others in times of loss and
suffering.”

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This world needs people who have done soul work. May we all find the guides to help us through.
May I be a guide to many as they go through the place of eating ashes.

The Wild Edge of Sorrow: The Sacred Work of Grief

Francis Weller writes:25

“Where there is sorrow,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “there is holy ground.” These gatherings are an
invitation to enter the sacred ground of grief and encounter the ways it enables us to walk in this
world with its attendant harsh realities of loss and death. We discover how sorrow shakes us and
breaks us open to depths of soul we could not imagine. Grief offers a wild alchemy that transmutes
suffering into fertile ground. We are made real and tangible by the experience of sorrow, adding
substance and weight to our world. We are stripped of excess and revealed as human in our times
of grief. In a very real way grief ripens us, pulls up from the depths of our souls what is most
authentic in our beings. In truth, without some familiarity with sorrow, we do not mature as men
and women. It is the broken heart, the heart that knows sorrow that is also capable of genuine love.

25 https://www.francisweller.net/the-wild-edge-of-sorrow-the-sacred-work-of-grief.html

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Beginning in 1997, I began to offer grief rituals as a way for communities to attend the large and
small losses that touch each of our lives. What has become clear is how difficult it is for us to
attend to our grief in the absence of community. Carried privately, sorrow lingers in the soul,
slowly pulling us below the surface of life and into the terrain of death.

Grief has always been communal, always been shared and consequently has traditionally been
regarded as a sacred process. Too often in modern times our grief becomes private, carrying an
invisible mantle of shame forcing our sorrow underground, hidden from the eyes that would offer
healing. We must restore the conversation we need to have concerning the place of grief in our
lives. Each of us must undertake an apprenticeship with loss.

Mark Poul writes:26

I am in the middle of reading Robert Bly’s book Iron John. Frankly, I am surprised to only have
recently learned about it (thanks Tim) as it sat upon the NYT Best Sellers list for sixty-two weeks
after being published in 1990. The book essentially addresses the issues around masculine rites of
passage (or the lack thereof, in North American culture). In it Bly exegetes the Brothers Grimm
fairy tale which tells of a young prince’s journey into manhood. The book is full of prose, poetry,
myth, legend and Jungian psychology. In short, it is making me think, which I enjoy, on the whole.

One of the things he addressed is the idea of sitting or living in ashes. Ashes are often used as
metaphor for grief, loss, a going down. Job sat in ashes, young Danish vikings would live in the
ashes of their longhouse fireplaces in between being boys and becoming men.

I have been told on an occasion or perhaps two, that my ability to discern my own emotions, let
alone those of others is stunted. Just recently I have become aware, through the honesty (about
frickin time) of a few that I am a bit of a control freak. Put another way, I am still in a place of
self-discovery even at the ripe age of fifty. I think one of my issues, among many, is that I still
haven’t learned the art of grieving.

It hasn’t just been Bly’s book that has revealed this insight. A number of people in my life have
made note of this deficiency in the past couple of months. Despite my own myopic self-
26 https://www.poulmark.ca/what-i-do

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perspective, I must admit that it is not something that I am familiar with. Perhaps I need some time
in the ashes?

One incident where I feel like I became acquainted with grief was in 2011 when I visited Burundi.
I made a trip to the impoverished African country as a coffee consultant with Food for the Hungry.
I actually went reluctantly at the time, and most likely would still have the same reservations today.
With that said, I encountered at the same time, a spirit of resilience and a crushing poverty on that
trip. One evening I called home to talk to Michelle, standing in the middle of rural Burundi I
sobbed uncontrollably as I recounted to her how broken the country I was visiting was. Even now,
as I think back on that experience, I am confounded by my own response to what I was
experiencing. What is interesting, in hindsight, is the fact that my trip to Burundi was my last trip
to origin until last February. In many ways, Burundi was for me, the straw that broke the camel’s
back. It was if my subconscious had had enough of poverty, injustice, and suffering. Visiting Costa
Rica last February was the first time I returned to a coffee producing country in seven years.

So I am a man very infrequently acquainted with grief it seems. Despite personal loss, death, and
failure, I seem to not know how to grieve. Despite almost a decade of living with a warrior wife,
who suffers daily, I remain on the fringes of knowing grief. This post offers up no answers. I am
not offering up solutions, nor dispensing wisdom in this regard. I am still a young boy in this aspect
of my journey. In the Grimm tale, the young prince sets free a hairy wild man, which sets in motion
a series of events which leads to maturation. Perhaps having turned fifty, I am finally about to
become a man? At minimum, I need to spend more time in the ashes, learning how to discern the
emotions in my chest, and in turn, having the courage to look that guy in the face, despite the
clouded mirror, and acknowledge the wounds, and learn to grieve.

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 Grief
Martin Prechtel writes:27

"Grief is a form of gratitude for being alive, because if you didn't miss it ,then you weren't here,
and if you don't cry for it it no longer has any position in life...

Your mortality is in your face every time you praise realistically. If you're praising something,
your grief has to be present for the stakes to be high enough for that praise to be legitimate. If true
praise is coming along then it has to contain the notion that you're mortal, and that the praiser is
mortal, and the beauty is that in this moment we're all together at this place to be together, and
there's a grief in that that makes the magic of the praise very real, because the stakes are extremely
high. You gotta love the thing you lost just like you gotta love the thing you got. When you're
grieving for the thing you got - it's praise; and when you’re praising the thing you lost - that's called
grief.

The word in Maya for 'song' and the word for 'weeping' is the same... and the slang term for a
shaman is a 'weeper' or a 'singer' - those that can sing the prayers: you gotta make that sound that
draws them to your heart. [When I do it] even the dogs will weep, they'll howl, even the trees will
weep, everything will weep. We praise everything - it has to weep: the stone has to weep, the

27 https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=martin+prechtel+grief+and+praise

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rainbow has to weep, the sky has to weep, the otter has to weep, the dog has to weep, the house
has to weep, the people have to weep, our ancestors will have to weep, everything will weep, we'll
make everything weep! And that's not grandiosity - that's praise of life. So if you don't praise,
you're killing life. And if you don't praise the youth, you're killing the youth. And if you don't teach
them how to grieve, you're killing your grandkids. Because it's gonna jump down. And it's not
your fault. It's just the way it is. This is the way this culture has come around this time : it's all
about being able to measure something, and you cannot measure grief, and you cannot sell it. You
can sell medications and solutions - but there is no solution to grief. There's no solution to life. It
just is what is. It has to happen, it's a natural thing, a wonderful thing. And praise has to happen
too. You have to learn it; you have to be taught. You have to raise the people's love.

……..the ability to laugh and the ability to grieve live in the same house

"[Being] out of control for attention - no good. That's uninitiated behaviour. Out of control for its
own sake - no good. That's uninitiated behaviour. Weeping and having to say what needs to be
said - yeah. We don't want to resolve it. we don't care about the content - it's irrelevant to us. What
is relevant to us is the fact that your beauty is enraged by having a loss. And that you beautifully
express this in a way that is magnificent and deep from your soul, and that there are people around
to keep you from dying while you do it.

…….shamans are not holy people - they are people who are in love with the sacred, they are not
paragons of virtue, they're not pedestal beings - they're a bunch of rascasls…

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