The Cubit Opposite the Door

About This Talk

Chapter 5 opens by stating that the communal fasts exist to arouse hearts toward repentance by making us notice that our conduct resembles the conduct that brought the calamities, and then it catalogues the four prophetic fasts with the five tragedies of the Seventeenth of Tammuz and the five of the Ninth of Av, adds the Thirteenth of Adar by custom, and rules that the Adar fast falling on Shabbat is pulled back to Thursday while every other such fast is pushed forward. The chapter then works through the Ninth of Av in physical detail, from the reduction of joy when Av enters and the meal before the fast whose restrictions apply only in the afternoon, to the pious of earlier generations sitting between the oven and the cooking range with dried bread and salt, to a day observed like Yom Kippur on which scholars do not greet one another and may study only Job, Eichah and the prophecies of retribution. It closes on the permanent ordinances that outlast the fast itself, the square cubit of unpainted wall, the missing dish, the incomplete set of jewelry, the ash on a groom's forehead, the silence of instruments, the tear that may be stitched but never mended and need not be made at all within thirty days of a previous visit, and the promise that these four fasts will become festivals rather than be abolished.