The Joy of Thought

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Winter 2004) 23–26 The Joy of Thought L E O N W I E S E L T I E R EVERY TISHA B’AV I PERMIT myself a fugitive smile. What provokes me to transgress against the lachrymosity of the day is not my satisfaction that no Temple in Jerusalem, no holy slaughterhouse, and no gluttonous clerisy exists to interfere with the refinement of my religion. I am quite sure that my religion would not have developed into the immensity of a civilization had it remained imprisoned in what historians call a ‘‘cultic center.’’ It was in the absence of a Temple that Judaism started to soar, owing to the twin blessings of cosmopolitanism and introversion. The Jews slowly and steadily snatched a spiritual victory from a national defeat . (In their restored commonwealth they may yet snatch a spiritual defeat from a national victory.) How can a humble Maimonidean not agree that sacrifices were a cunning (that is the master’s word) concession to the limits of a primitive religious imagination? I understand that the laws of sacrifices, and the other protocols of the Temple, were included in the Maimonidean code of law; but I cling to the excitement that I experienced when as a young man I studied the third part of the greatest monument to the mind that a Jew ever created and recognized that its author genuinely preferred the motions of the individual’s soul at prayer and study—intellection, regarded spiritually—to the motions of the priest’s blade at the altar. But this, as I say, is not what brings me cheer on the day of dirges. That respite from the recollection of conquest and catastrophe I find in my perusal of the laws of the day. There I am reminded annually of the constraints that the rabbis placed upon study on Tisha B’Av. ‘‘It is forbidden to read in the Torah and the Prophets and the Writings and to study Mishnah and midrash and Talmud, both the laws and the legends,’’ Joseph Karo states in the Shulh .an Arukh, ‘‘[but] it is permitted to study the midrash on Lamentations and the chapter ’Elu Megalh .in [the laws of mourning in the concluding chapter of the tractate Mo‘ed Katan], as well as commentaries on Lamentations and commentaries on Job.’’ The proofThe Jewish Quarterly Review (Winter 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. 24 JQR 94:1 (2004) text that is given here (and in the Talmud) for such restrictions is Ps 19:8: ‘‘The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart.’’ On a day of fasting and grieving there must be no rejoicing of the heart. Joseph Karo took these restrictions from Jacob ben Asher, his medieval model in systematic codification. But then Karo adds a statute that he did not find in the Turim: ‘‘And there is an authority who has forbidden all study that requires thought.’’ That is where I steal my smile. Who was this stringent fiend? Karo does not give the name of his authority in his code, but in his commentary on Jacob ben Asher’s code he identifies his source as Jacob Landau, the fifteenth-century author of the Agur, a survey of Ashkenazic law that Karo often cited. (Landau also composed a mystical record of jurisprudential riddles, one of the most unexpected documents in the history of halakhah.) And Landau’s stringency derives in turn from a responsum of Jacob Molin, the giant of minhag in Germany in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The responsum was a reply to an inquiry on many subjects from a certain Rabbi Isaac, who addresses Molin as his student. At the end of his list of perplexities, Rabbi Isaac wondered whether the distinction between dibbur and hirhur, speech and thought, which is significant in a number of legal and liturgical contexts, pertains to the question of intellectual activity on Tisha B’Av. Might one perform the labors of the mind silently, and thereby not disrupt...