When the Trouble Is Addressed to You

The Hook

The second chapter of the Laws of Fasts is full of numbers, and at first they look like administration. Three deaths in a city of five hundred men. Six in a city of a thousand. Sixty percent of the real value of linen. Forty days without rain. A reader in a hurry files this under procedure and moves along to something warmer.

Look again and the numbers are not measuring severity. They are measuring pattern. Three men dead on three consecutive days is a plague and the trumpets are sounded. The same three dead on a single day is not a plague. The same three spread across four days is not a plague. The Rambam has taken the most frightening thing that can happen to a town and made the response depend not on how many were lost but on the shape the losses made. This is a chapter about when a community is permitted to conclude that something is being said to it.

Three on Three Consecutive Days

He opens with the list: the distress that enemies cause the Jews, the passage of an armed force, plague, a wild animal on the rampage, the various species of locusts, the black blight and the yellow blight, falling buildings, epidemic, the collapse of the community's livelihood, and rain. Ten headings, and then the rest of the chapter is spent narrowing each one until it becomes difficult to satisfy.

Plague comes first. Three deaths on three consecutive days in a city of five hundred men. If those three die on one day, it is not a plague. If they die across four days, it is not a plague. A city of a thousand needs six across three consecutive days by the same ratio, and the ratio scales to any size. Then a sentence that quietly rewrites the arithmetic for every town that ever counted itself: women, children, and older men who no longer work are not included in the census in this context. The five hundred was never five hundred souls. It is five hundred working men, which in a real village means the town is considerably smaller than it thinks, and the threshold for a plague correspondingly lower.

Then the reach. A city in distress fasts and sounds the trumpets, while the settlements around it fast without trumpets and ask for mercy on their neighbors' behalf. If there is a plague in the land of Israel, communities in the diaspora fast on behalf of its inhabitants. If there is a plague in one country and caravans travel regularly between it and another, both fast, however far apart they stand. The circle of obligation is drawn along the trade routes.

The second heading is stranger than the first. An armed force passing through counts even when it has no quarrel with anyone in the town. Gentiles are at war with other gentiles, and their column happens to pass a Jewish settlement; nobody is threatened and nothing is demanded. It is still a time of distress calling for a fast, because the blessing says that a sword will not pass through your land, and from this, says the Rambam, we understand that seeing war is itself a form of distress. Not being harmed by war. Seeing it.

Against that, notice how much the chapter refuses. A rampage of snakes and scorpions, or of birds that injure people, gets no fast and no trumpets, only crying out, and needless to say the same for hornets and mosquitoes. Of the locust species, one swarm anywhere in the land of Israel obliges the whole country to fast, and the smallest quantity of govai does the same, but for chagav there is no fast and no trumpet, only crying out. A dry itch running through an entire community is met with crying out, while running sores on the majority are treated as boils and bring a full fast. The chapter is not measuring how much anyone is suffering.

The Animal That Was Only Hungry

The wild animal is where the method becomes impossible to miss. A beast is a cause for fasting only if it is meshulachat, sent, and the Rambam builds a graded test out of where it was and what it did. Seen in a city during the day, it is on a rampage. Seen in a field during the day, meeting two men and not fleeing, it is on a rampage. If the field lies near a swamp, meeting them is not enough; it must pursue them. If it is actually in the swamp, then even pursuing them is not enough. It must kill both of them and eat only one.

And then the clause that ought to stop a reader entirely. If it ate both of them in the swamp, it is not on a rampage, for this is its place, and it killed them because it was hungry and not because it was sent. Two men are dead either way. The town buries two men either way. But an animal that ate both was feeding, and an animal that killed two and ate one was doing something in excess of feeding, and only the excess is legible as a message. The Rambam is reading the beast the way one reads a sentence, looking for the word that could not have arrived there by nature.

The next halacha is harder still. Where houses have been built in deserts and abandoned places, which is the natural home of bands of wild animals, an animal is on a rampage only if it climbs onto a roof and takes an infant out of a cradle. Short of that, nothing counts. And the reason is given without softening: the fault lies with these people, who endangered their lives and came to a place where wild animals live. A lion in the street of a town at noon is a summons. The same lion at the same hour outside a house someone built in the wilderness is a lion at home.

The same instinct governs the buildings. A fast is called when many strong walls begin to fall in a city, and the Rambam specifies that they must not be walls standing on the bank of a river, because a wall on a riverbank falls for reasons anyone can name. Earthquakes and destructive winds qualify. A blight that has taken even an oven's mouth of grain qualifies at once, because blight does not stay where it starts. In every case the question is the same. Is this the world behaving as the world behaves, or is this the world departing from itself?

Sixty Percent, and the Trumpets That Stay Silent

Two headings at the end of the chapter show the method under pressure. The first is the loss of livelihood, and the definition is startlingly commercial. The articles on which most of the town depends, linen in Babylon, wine and oil in the land of Israel, have fallen so far that a merchant must offer them at sixty percent of their real value before anyone will buy. That is communal distress, and it is the one distress in the entire chapter for which we cry out to God even on the Sabbath.

And in the same breath the Rambam takes back half of it. We do not cry out or sound the trumpets on the Sabbath, he says, except for the loss of livelihood; in that case we cry out even on the Sabbath, but we do not sound the trumpets for it on the Sabbath. Everyone remembers the exception and forgets that it is only half an exception. The voice is permitted and the instrument is not. A town in real economic terror may say so out loud on Shabbat and may not make it sound like an emergency.

The second heading is rain, and it holds the most generous line in the chapter. Too much rain is a genuine distress and prayers are recited, and there is no greater trouble, the Rambam says, than houses falling and becoming the graves of the people inside them. Then: in the land of Israel we do not pray for abundant rain to stop. It is a mountainous country and its houses are built of stone, abundant rain there is a benefit, and we do not fast in order to make a benefit pass. The identical weather is a catastrophe in Babylon and a gift in Judea, and the difference is the ground and the masonry.

The Unifying Principle

Two things happen in this chapter at once, and they pull against each other in a way worth sitting with. The first is a theology of reading. The Rambam is convinced that events can be addressed to a community, and the whole architecture of fasts and trumpets assumes that a town can and must ask what is being said to it. The second is a fierce discipline about when that question is legitimate.

The Baal Shem Tov's teaching that every leaf turning in the wind turns by particular providence is often taken to mean that everything is a personal message. This chapter would not deny the providence for a moment and would be very slow to grant the message. The lion in the swamp was hungry. The wall on the riverbank was undermined by water. The men who built in the wilderness chose the wilderness. Providence is total and legibility is rare, and confusing the two is precisely the error the halacha is engineered to prevent.

The Alter Rebbe, in the letters of the Iggeret HaKodesh that the calendar happens to place in these same weeks, teaches that a person receives whatever befalls him with joy, because the concealment is itself a higher light and there is nothing else besides Him at all. That is written to an individual about his own heart. It is not a license to interpret in public. A man may accept anything. A community may not proclaim a fast over anything, because a fast is a public statement about what God is doing, and a public statement that is wrong about that does real damage.

Hence the thresholds, and every one of them has the same shape. Three deaths must fall on consecutive days, because consecutive is a pattern and simultaneous is an accident. The beast must exceed its hunger. The wall must not stand where walls fall. Give a community permission to read every misfortune as a summons and you produce a town that fasts constantly and hears nothing, which is another way of not listening at all. The discipline is not skepticism. It is what makes the hearing possible.

Modern Application

Most of us run the failure in both directions in the same week. On Monday the difficulty is obviously random, there is nothing to learn from it, and we do not intend to look. On Thursday a small inconvenience is obviously aimed at us personally and we spend the evening decoding it. The Rambam would recognize both moves as the same refusal to do arithmetic.

Try his actual test on something in your own life. Did this happen on consecutive days, or once? Is the thing behaving out of character, or is it doing exactly what a thing like it does? Did I build in the wilderness? That last question has teeth, because a great deal of what we would like to treat as visitation is the predictable consequence of where we chose to put the house, and the Rambam names it without cruelty and without letting anyone off.

And the sixty percent is worth keeping. A community is permitted to treat its economic collapse as a matter for prayer and not only for strategy, permitted to cry out about it even on Shabbat, and required to keep the trumpets down. There is a way of holding a real crisis that speaks it plainly and refuses to let it set the volume of the day. That is a harder skill than either denial or alarm, and it is the one the chapter actually teaches.

The Closing

It is the seventh of Elul, the month of accounting, which is exactly the season in which a person is most likely to over-read his own life. Every setback becomes evidence and every closed door becomes a verdict, and by the middle of the month a person can be fasting over things that were only weather. This chapter is a discipline for precisely that, and it is not a discipline of dismissal. The Tzemach Tzedek's answer to a chassid crushed by his own accounting, that he should think good and it will be good, was never optimism about outcomes. It was a refusal to hand a frightened man a verdict he has no standing to issue about himself. The Rambam wants the town to hear. He wants it to be right.

Count the days before you count the losses. Ask whether the thing exceeded its own nature, or whether it was simply hungry in the place where it lives. And if it turns out that you built the house in the wilderness, that is not a message either, but it is something you can move.