The Cruelty of Calling It Chance

The Hook

Hilchot Ta'aniyot opens with a commandment nobody expects to find in this part of the Mishneh Torah. Not to fast. To make noise. It is a positive commandment of the Torah to cry out and to sound the trumpets over any trouble that comes upon the community, and the Rambam takes the verse in Numbers about sounding trumpets against an attacking enemy and refuses to leave it with armies. Famine. Plague. Locusts. Anything of that kind. Cry out over it and sound the trumpets.

Then he explains why, and the explanation is the whole book in two sentences. This is one of the paths of repentance. When trouble comes and the people cry out and sound the trumpets, everyone will know that it came upon them because of their own conduct, and that knowing is what lifts it. The trumpet is not a request. It is an admission, made loudly enough that the whole city hears itself making it.

And then the third halacha, which is where the chapter stops being gentle. Should the people not cry out, and instead say that what happened to us is the way of the world and this trouble is a chance occurrence, that, says the Rambam, is a cruel way of thinking. Not stupid. Not faithless. Cruel.

The Cruelty of Coincidence

Sit with the word for a moment, because it is doing something very precise. The Hebrew he is working with is keri, the word the Torah uses in the passage he quotes from Leviticus. If you walk with Me be keri, I will walk with you be keri. Keri means happenstance, randomness, the accidental. The verse is usually rendered as indifference, and the Rambam's reading makes the mechanism plain. When I bring troubles upon you so that you will return, and you say this is a chance occurrence, I will add to that a vengeance for the very indifference.

Why cruel? Because the man who says it is a coincidence has just decided that nothing is being asked of him. He can grieve, he can rebuild, he can organize relief, and he never has to change. The Rambam's phrase for the consequence is exact and unsparing. It causes them to remain attached to their wicked deeds, and so this time of distress will bring further distresses. The cruelty is not toward God. It is toward the people who will live through the next one.

There is a version of this that sounds pious and is the same mistake wearing better clothes. A person can accept in principle that everything comes from Above and still treat each particular thing as weather. The Baal Shem Tov's teaching that a leaf turns over in a stream by particular providence is usually quoted as a beautiful thought about leaves. It is really a claim about the person watching, that nothing in front of him is addressed to nobody. The Rambam is legislating that claim into a public act with instruments.

Trumpets, Mondays, and the Sabbath Exception

Having established the commandment, the Rambam builds a practice around it, and the practice is oddly humane. Fasting itself is rabbinic, not scriptural. The trumpets are the mitzvah of the day, which is why in the Temple, where both trumpets and shofar were sounded, the shofar blasts are cut short and the trumpet blasts extended. Outside the Temple the trumpets sound alone.

The fasts do not run consecutively, because the community would not be able to sustain it. Monday, then Thursday, then Monday, and so on until mercy comes. No fast is decreed on a Sabbath or a festival, and on those days there is no shofar, no trumpet, no crying out and no supplication. Then he opens the door he just closed. A city ringed by gentiles or by a river about to break its banks, a ship going down at sea, and even a single person being chased by gentiles or by robbers or by an evil spirit. For these we fast on the Sabbath, we cry out, we plead. The trumpets stay silent unless they are being blown to gather people who can actually go and help.

That last clause deserves more attention than it usually gets. The instrument that exists to declare that nothing is accidental is set down the moment the situation calls for hands instead of horns, unless the horns are what will bring the hands. Pregnant women, nursing women and children are exempt from these fasts entirely. Eating is permitted through the night before, except for the fasts decreed over rain, and permitted until dawn provided one has not gone to sleep, because a person who lay down has closed the day and cannot reopen it with a meal.

He is equally careful about the days a fast may not be launched on. Rosh Chodesh, Chanukah, Purim and the intermediate days of a festival are off limits at the outset. But if the community has already begun fasting over a distress, even for a single day, and the schedule brings a fast onto one of those days, they fast, and they fast the whole day through. A practice that started for the right reason is not dismantled by the calendar.

And there is a whole halacha on how a person carries himself while the fast is running. He should not indulge in pleasures, or be light, or be cheerful and in good spirits. He should be serious, like a mourner, on the verse from Eichah asking what a living man should complain of, each man over his own sins. He may taste as much as a revi'it provided he spits it out without swallowing. If he forgets and eats, he finishes the fast anyway. A man who travels from a town that is fasting to a town that is not still finishes; a man who arrives in a town that is fasting joins them.

The Fast You Have to Accept Before It Starts

Then the chapter turns private, and the rules become strangely formal. An individual fasts for individual trouble the same way a community fasts for public trouble. Someone you love is ill, or lost in the desert, or in prison. You fast, you ask for mercy, you say Anenu in every Shemoneh Esreh of that day.

But a fast that was not accepted before sunset the day before is not a fast at all. The mechanism is a sentence spoken after the afternoon prayer: tomorrow I will fast. Eating that night does not undo it. And if a man resolved on three or four consecutive days and accepted them together, he does not have to repeat himself each afternoon. Conversely, a man who fasted all day, felt something at nightfall, and decided to continue into tomorrow has not made a fast, because he did not accept it while it was still day. Even if he never ate at all.

Which raises the obvious objection, and the Rambam answers it before you can finish forming it. A man who wakes from a disturbing dream fasts that same day with no prior acceptance whatsoever, even on the Sabbath, so that he will be moved to look at his conduct and turn. And having fasted on the Sabbath he owes another fast, for having cancelled the pleasure of the day. He also permits fasting by the hour: a man absorbed in his affairs until noon or until three who decides to carry the rest of the day without food is fasting, and says Anenu, because he accepted the fast before the hours of the fast. A fast is not a quantity of hunger. It is a decision that precedes the hunger.

The Unifying Principle

Every rule in this chapter is protecting one thing: the moment of recognition. The trumpets exist to produce it publicly. The formal acceptance the afternoon before exists to produce it privately, because a person who resolves at four in the afternoon that tomorrow will be different has done something that hunger alone cannot do. The disturbing dream is admitted as an exception precisely because a dream already delivered the recognition, unasked.

The Alter Rebbe writes that the essential avodah is the work of the heart, and that suffering endured without any inner movement leaves the person exactly where it found him. This chapter is that idea given a schedule. Notice how little the Rambam says about food and how much he says about what the community is doing while it is hungry. The court and the elders sit in the synagogue from the end of the morning prayers until noon, going through the conduct of the city. They clear away whatever is causing people to stumble. They warn, they inquire, they investigate the ones who traffic in violence, and the ones who lean on other people and humble them. The fast day is an audit.

The Tzemach Tzedek's famous instruction, think good and it will be good, is often heard as optimism, and it is not. It is the exact inverse of keri. To call something chance is to decide in advance that your thinking about it changes nothing. To think good is to insist that the way you hold a situation is itself an act inside the situation. The Rambam has been saying this for seventeen halachot with trumpets.

And then the halacha that turns the whole chapter over. A community fasting for rain, and the rain starts before noon. They do not complete the fast. They eat, they drink, and they gather to say the Great Hallel, because the Great Hallel is said only when a man's spirit is settled and his stomach is full. If the rain came after noon, most of the day has already passed in holiness and they finish. The same for any distress that lifts, or a harsh decree that falls. Before noon, stop. The Rebbe often pressed the point that in Torah the response to good news is not restraint but a table, and here it is a legal obligation. Break the fast. Eat something. You cannot sing this particular praise on an empty stomach.

Modern Application

Almost nobody in an ordinary week is deciding whether to blow a trumpet. Everybody is deciding, several times a day, whether something that happened is addressed to them. The layoff, the diagnosis, the third time this month the same argument surfaced in the same kitchen. There is a fluent and respectable language for treating every one of these as statistics with a face, and the Rambam's verdict on that language is that it is cruel, because it guarantees the next one.

He is not asking anyone to diagnose the cause. Nothing in the chapter tells you which sin brought which trouble, and the court sitting in the synagogue is not conducting a séance. It is looking at obstacles, at people who coerce others, at what is going wrong in the city that everybody already knows about. The work is not to explain the trouble. It is to let the trouble get your attention and then to go look at what is actually in front of you.

And the last rule is the one to keep. When the thing you were praying about resolves before noon, put down the affliction and eat. Many people are much better at the fasting than at the Hallel. They will hold the worry long after the reason for it has gone, as though vigilance were loyalty. The Rambam legislates against it. The praise requires a full stomach, and refusing the meal is refusing the praise.

The Closing

The chapter that begins by forbidding you to call anything a coincidence ends by ordering you to stop fasting and eat. Both are the same instruction. Something is being said to you, and you are required to answer it, and the answer changes shape depending on what was said. When it is trouble, the answer is a trumpet and an honest look at the city. When it is rain, the answer is bread and the Great Hallel.

The one answer the Rambam will not accept is silence, and the polite name for that silence is coincidence.