The Cubit Opposite the Door

The Hook

After the Temple was destroyed, the Sages of that generation made four ordinances that have nothing to do with fasting and nothing to do with the ninth of Av. A man plastering his house must leave one square cubit opposite the doorway unpainted. A host setting a table for guests serves slightly less than he meant to and leaves one place obviously short of a dish. A woman having a set of jewelry made omits one piece that belongs to the set. A groom puts ashes on his forehead, on the spot where the tefillin sit.

None of that is grief. Nobody is crying. It happens on ordinary days, in the middle of hospitality and marriage and building, and it is permanent, which the fasts are not. Four times a year the Jewish people stop eating and then start again. Every other day of the year there is a bare cubit of wall facing the door of the house.

The chapter that ends with those ordinances begins by telling you what the fasts are for, and the answer is not what anyone expects. Then it works through the ninth of Av in exhausting physical detail, down to what a man may put in his mouth and whether he may greet a neighbor in the street. And it closes on a sentence that undoes the entire structure: these days will become festivals.

Not Grief, but Diagnosis

The Rambam opens by saying that these are days on which all Israel fasts because of the calamities that happened then, and he gives the purpose immediately: to arouse hearts and open the paths of repentance. The fast is a reminder of our own bad conduct and the conduct of our ancestors, which was like ours and which brought these things upon them and upon us. He quotes the verse about confessing our sin and the sin of our fathers.

Read that carefully, because it is not a memorial. A memorial faces backward and asks you to feel something about people who are gone. What the Rambam describes faces the present and asks a diagnostic question: what in my conduct is recognizably the same as the conduct that produced this? The fast is an instrument for noticing a resemblance. The grief is real, but the grief is not the point, and a person can spend the whole day in genuine sorrow and never once do the thing the day was built for.

Then the catalogue. The third of Tishrei, when Gedaliah was killed and the last ember of Israel went out and the exile became total. The tenth of Tevet, when Nebuchadnezzar sat down outside Jerusalem. The seventeenth of Tammuz carries five: the Tablets broken, the daily offering nullified in the First Temple, the walls breached before the Second Temple fell, a Torah scroll burned by Apostmos, an idol set up in the Sanctuary. The ninth of Av carries five more: the decree that the generation in the desert would not enter the land, the destruction of both Houses, the fall of Betar, and the plowing of the Temple site and everything around it by Tineius Rufus, which fulfilled Micah's words about Zion plowed like a field.

Zechariah names four fasts, and the Rambam lines them up by month. Then he adds the thirteenth of Adar, which is not prophetic but customary, taken on in memory of the fasts in the time of Haman. And here is a detail almost nobody notices. If the thirteenth of Adar falls on Shabbat, the fast is pulled backward to Thursday the eleventh. If any of the other fasts fall on Shabbat, they are pushed forward to Sunday. The same collision, resolved in opposite directions. A fast that belongs to the story of Purim has to happen before Purim or it has missed its own event. A fast that memorializes a destruction can wait a day, because there is nothing it is preparing for.

Between the Oven and the Cooking Range

When Av enters, we reduce our joy. In the week of the ninth itself, no haircut, no laundry, no pressed garment even of linen. It has been accepted as Jewish custom not to eat meat or enter a bathhouse that week, and there are places that hold off from slaughtering entirely from Rosh Chodesh.

The meal before the fast is governed by rules that sound severe and turn out to have a door in them. No meat, no wine, no two cooked dishes; grape juice that has not sat three days is permitted, and salted meat from an animal slaughtered more than three days earlier is permitted. And then: when does all of this apply? Only if you are eating that meal in the afternoon. A man who eats his last meal before noon and then eats nothing else may eat whatever he likes. The restrictions were never about the food. They were about the hour, and about what a body carries into a fast that begins in a few hours.

Then the paragraph that changes the temperature of the chapter. All of the above, the Rambam says, is the practice of the general public, who cannot bear more. The pious of earlier generations did something else. A man would sit alone between the oven and the cooking range. Others would bring him dried bread and salt. He dipped it in water, drank a pitcher of water, and sat there worried and forlorn and weeping, like a man whose dead is lying in front of him. Scholars, the Rambam says, should do something of this kind. And then, in the middle of a code of law, he drops into the first person: we never ate cooked food on the day before the ninth of Av, not even lentils, except on Shabbat.

The day itself is Yom Kippur with a different face. Pregnant women and nursing women complete the fast. No washing in hot or cold water, not so much as a finger. No anointing for pleasure, no shoes, no marital relations. Where the custom is to work, one works; where it is not, one does not; and Torah scholars are idle everywhere, because whoever works on that day never sees a sign of blessing. Scholars do not exchange greetings, and if an ordinary person greets them they answer faintly, in a low tone, like mourners. And Torah study, which is the one consolation always available, is closed: no Scripture, no Mishnah, no halachah, no Talmud, no Aggadah. Job, Eichah, and the prophecies of retribution in Jeremiah. Children stay home from school. Some sages do not put on the head tefillin.

One Dish Short, One Cubit Bare

And then the destruction stops being a day and becomes a set of small permanent facts. No house is built with walls decorated like a palace; you cover them in mortar and whiten them and leave a cubit square opposite the door. But if you buy a house that is already decorated, it stays as it is, and you are not obliged to scrape anything off the wall. The ordinance binds the man who builds. It does not send anyone around with a chisel.

The table short of a dish. The jewelry short of a piece. The ash on the groom's forehead where the tefillin go, and the verse behind all of it, about the right hand losing its skill and the tongue sticking to the palate if Jerusalem is not raised above the height of our joy. No instrumental music at all; even songs over wine are forbidden, though the Rambam records that the whole Jewish people took up the custom of singing praise and thanksgiving over wine anyway, and he records it without complaint. No crowns for grooms and no crowns of silver or gold for brides, though a bride may wear a garland of twisted cords.

Then the rending. A man who sees the cities of Judah in ruins tears his garment, and he tears again for the Temple in ruins. The obligation begins at Tzofim, where the city first comes into view, and he rends a second time when he reaches the Temple; and if he arrives from the desert and meets the Temple first, he tears for the Temple and then widens the same tear for Jerusalem. The tear is made by hand and not with a tool, standing, through every garment he is wearing, until his heart is exposed. And it is never to be mended. It may be stitched, hemmed, gathered, sewn with a ladder stitch, made wearable again in every practical sense. It may never be made whole.

And one more line, easy to read past. A man whose travels bring him to Jerusalem often does not tear his garment if he has come within thirty days of his last visit. After thirty days, he does. The halachah knows that a wound reopened every Tuesday stops being a wound.

The Unifying Principle

Everything in this chapter is built to leave something unfinished, and to leave it unfinished on purpose, in a specific size, with edges. The wall is finished except for a cubit. The table is set except for a dish. The set of jewelry is complete except for one piece. The garment is wearable except that it will never be whole. The year is joyful except for four days, and the four days themselves have a floor under them, since a nursing mother finishes the fast but a man who ate before noon may eat what he wants.

This is the opposite of what mourning does when it is left alone. Left alone, mourning either takes everything or it is repressed and takes everything later. What the Sages did was to give it a shape small enough to live beside, and then require it. Not a mood, which cannot be commanded. A cubit of unpainted plaster, which can.

The Alter Rebbe draws the same line in Tanya with different tools. He separates bitterness from depression and treats them as opposite forces, one of which sharpens a person and one of which flattens him, and he tells a man to appoint a time for a broken heart and then to spend the rest of his hours in joy. The instruction is architectural, not emotional. Give the grief an hour and a wall, and it will do its work; give it the run of the house and it will do nothing but take the house.

The Sfat Emet reads the ninth of Av through the verse in Eichah that calls the day a moed, a festival, and refuses to treat that as irony. Something is planted in the day that is not visible on the day. And the Lubavitcher Rebbe pressed hard on the last line of this chapter, which promises that these fasts will become times of happiness and celebration and festivals. Not abolished. Not replaced with better days. The fourth month, the fifth, the seventh and the tenth, the same four dates on the same calendar, turned. The verse ends by saying they shall love truth and peace, which is the condition that makes the turning possible and not a decoration on it.

Modern Application

Everyone knows how to be sad about something for a while and then let it go, and everyone knows how to be permanently and diffusely damaged by something. Almost nobody knows how to leave one cubit unpainted. The skill this chapter teaches is the middle thing: choosing a small, exact, permanent gap that keeps a loss on the record without letting it run your building.

Notice also who is exempt. A man who buys a decorated house owes nothing. He did not build it and he is not required to deface it. There is an entire way of living that consists of scraping other people's walls, going into rooms you did not construct and insisting they be made properly incomplete. The Rambam closed that door in half a sentence.

And notice the thirty days. A man passing through Jerusalem every fortnight does not tear his garment, and this is not leniency. It is a ruling about what repetition does to feeling. If you want something to keep meaning what it means, you have to leave enough time between encounters for it to be encountered. Grief on demand, daily, is not devotion. It is wear.

The Closing

The last halachah of the chapter is a promise about the four dates, and it does not say they will be cancelled. It says the fast of the fourth month and the fast of the fifth and the seventh and the tenth will be happiness and celebration and festivals for the house of Judah. The days are not the problem. What is in them is the problem, and what is in them can be exchanged without touching the calendar.

Which means the cubit opposite the door was never a scar. It is an unfinished corner in a house that is still being built, left bare so that whoever walks in can see where the work stops. Every practice in this chapter is holding a place open. The tear is stitched and never mended because the garment is not the final garment, and the wall stays white because the paint is coming.