Thirteen and Not One More

The Hook

The rains have not come. It is the seventeenth of Marcheshvan, the sky over the town is clear, and nobody in the market knows that anything has begun. Something has begun. The Torah scholars have started fasting, Monday and then Thursday and then Monday, and they have not announced it. No decree of the court, no trumpet, no proclamation from the steps of the synagogue. Any student who wishes to accept it upon himself is fit to. The rest of the town goes about its business.

Two weeks later, on Rosh Chodesh Kislev, the court decrees and now everyone fasts. Three more days without rain and the fasts turn severe. Three more and the trumpets come out, prayer moves from the synagogue into the street, an elder stands in front of the whole town and says what nobody wants to hear, and the shops are shut. Thirteen days in all. And then, with the sky still empty and the fields still dry, the Rambam stops. No more than thirteen communal fasts are decreed for a lack of rain. The escalation he has built with such care has a ceiling written into it from the start, and the chapter turns out to be at least as interested in the ceiling as in the climb.

The Fast Nobody Was Told About

Begin with who fasts first, because the order is the argument. The opening three fasts belong to the Torah scholars alone, and they are not decreed on anybody. The Rambam's phrase is that all students are fit to accept these upon themselves, which is to say the fast is an offer rather than an order, and it is taken up by the people who spend their days inside the texts. The town is not asked. The town is not even informed.

This is not modesty and it is not elitism. It is a claim about where a trouble first becomes legible. Drought is slow, and it is deniable for a long time. The seventeenth of Marcheshvan has arrived and the rain has not, and there is nothing to see out the window yet that a reasonable person could not explain away. Somebody has to be watching the calendar rather than the sky. The people whose work is to know when the season turned are the people who fast when the season turns, and they do it quietly for a fortnight and more while nothing visible has gone wrong.

On Rosh Chodesh Kislev the court decrees and the fasts become communal. Eating and drinking at night are permitted, which is the ordinary shape of a fast, and the entire population comes into the synagogue to pray and cry out and make supplication. There is an exemption written into this stage that tells you something. The men serving in the weekly priestly watch do not fast at all, because they are occupied with the service of the Temple. The community's most concentrated act of standing before God is not to be interrupted so that people can fast about standing before God. Whoever is actually doing the work is excused from the ritual about the work.

The Day the Stores Close

The second set of three is where the chapter changes temperature. Now the eating stops while it is still daylight on the day before, in the manner of Yom Kippur. Work is forbidden by day and permitted at night. Washing the whole body in hot water is out, though the face and hands and feet are allowed, and the bathhouses are simply closed for the duration. Anointing is out except to remove filth. Marital relations are forbidden. Shoes are forbidden inside the city and permitted on the road, which is a small mercy for anyone who has to travel.

And a ruling sits inside this stage that has nothing to do with rain and everything to do with what a fast actually is. On a fast where the eating must cease while it is still day, once a man has stopped eating and decided that he is finished, he may not change his mind and eat again, even though there are hours of daylight left and the fast has technically not begun. The clock did not close that meal. He did. And the Rambam will not let him reopen what he shut, because the entire apparatus exists to produce a decision, and a decision a person can revisit at will is not one.

Then the final seven, and here the fast comes outdoors. The trumpets are sounded, and only on these. Prayer moves into the street of the city. An elder is called upon to stand in front of the people and admonish them, and the language of that is not gentle. Six additional blessings are added to the morning and afternoon prayers, so that the Amidah runs to twenty-four. The stores close. Pregnant and nursing women, exempt from every fast until now and told only not to indulge themselves, fast on these seven. The men of the priestly watch, who did not fast at all at the beginning, now fast the entire day.

The store rules are worth a moment because they show the Rambam refusing to let a decree turn into theater. On Mondays the doors may be set slightly ajar toward evening and then opened for business. On Thursdays they may be opened the whole day, so that people can buy food in honor of the Sabbath. A shop with two entrances opens one and closes the other. A shop with a display area in front of it may simply open in the normal way on Thursday and nobody is to worry about it. The town is starving for rain, and the town still has to eat on Shabbat.

Thirteen, and the Smaller Life

If the seven pass and nothing comes, the response is not more fasting. It is less living. Commerce is reduced. Building associated with joy is reduced, and he is specific about what that means: the decorative plasterwork on a ceiling, the patterns on a wall. Plantings associated with joy, and he names the myrtle. The pitching of tents. Betrothals and marriages are reduced, with one exception that cuts straight through the passage: unless a man has not yet fulfilled the obligation of being fruitful and multiplying. The town, at the deepest point of its grief, still marries off the man who has no children. Whoever has already fulfilled it is forbidden relations in a year of famine.

Greetings are reduced too. Ordinary people greet one another less. The Torah scholars do not exchange greetings at all, and the Rambam's image for their condition is that they conduct themselves as people who have been rebuffed by God and put out of the house. When a common person greets one of them, he answers, and he answers in a weak and worried voice. Notice that he answers. The most extreme posture available in this chapter still does not permit a man to leave another man's hello hanging in the air.

The scholars alone go on fasting, Monday and Thursday and Monday, and the community does not. This runs until the month of Nisan has passed, reckoned by the spring season. They do not fast on Rashei Chodashim and they do not fast on Purim. Then, when the sun enters the sign of the bull, they stop. Not because they have given up hope, and not because the drought has broken. Because rain arriving at that point in the year, after a whole season of nothing, would be a sign of a curse rather than an answer, and there is no sense fasting for a thing you would not want if you got it.

The Unifying Principle

The chapter is built like an instrument with a range, and what is striking about an instrument with a range is that it has both ends. Everyone reads a chapter like this for the crescendo, for the trumpets and the shut stores and the old man rebuking the town in the open street. The Rambam is at least as careful about the first note, which nobody hears, and about the last one, which is a decision to stop playing.

Both ends are made of the same material. The opening three fasts are undecreed and unannounced because a trouble that has not yet declared itself does not get to conscript a town. The thirteenth fast is the last one because a request made thirteen times in escalating form has been made. And the cutoff after Nisan is the sharpest of the three, because it says that the object of prayer was never the commodity you asked for but the blessing the commodity was supposed to carry. Rain out of season is water with the blessing taken out of it. The Rambam would rather the town stop asking than receive it.

The Alter Rebbe is uncomfortable throughout the Tanya with a service of God organized around getting, and he keeps drawing the line between a request and a relationship, on the grounds that a person who has arranged everything around outcomes has not actually arranged a relationship at all. The Baal Shem Tov is quoted as saying that a father is gladdened less by giving the child what he asked for than by the child coming near enough to ask, and that reading turns a chapter of escalating deprivation into something other than pressure applied upward. Thirteen fasts are not thirteen attempts to move a verdict. They are a structure for coming close thirteen times, and once the structure has run, it has done what a structure can do.

The Sfat Emet reads the seasons themselves as a lesson in exactly this, that the time when a thing is possible is part of the thing, and that asking outside the season is asking for something that no longer exists in the form you wanted. The Rambam gives the identical idea in his flattest legal register. The sun enters the bull, and they cease.

Modern Application

We are not good at the first fast. The instinct now is to announce the emergency at the top of the escalation, to open with the trumpets and the shut stores and the man rebuking everybody, and to do it early, because attention is the currency and it goes to whoever shouts first. The Rambam's order is the reverse. The people who noticed first do the least visible thing available, privately and voluntarily, for weeks, and the noise arrives only after the quiet has been given its chance. A town that starts with trumpets has nowhere left to go and no way to tell a serious week from an ordinary one.

We are far worse at the ceiling. Nobody wants to be the one who says that the campaign has run its course, that thirteen was the number and there is no fourteenth, that the season for this has passed and continuing is no longer devotion but momentum. The Rambam builds the ending into the beginning. The thirteen are counted from the outset. The stopping point is fixed by the calendar rather than by how anyone happens to feel when it arrives, which is the only way a stopping point ever survives contact with people who care.

And the exception for the childless man is the humane center of the whole chapter. Everything joyful contracts and exactly one thing does not, and it is the one thing that would be lost outright rather than postponed. A community that knows how to grieve properly still knows which single door has to stay open while the rest are shut. Ask which door that is in a hard season, and notice how quickly a general policy of restraint will close it along with everything else if nobody names it out loud.

The Closing

This chapter falls on the eighth of Elul, the Friday before Ki Teitzei, and the season of asking is opening rather than closing. Elul is the month the Alter Rebbe pictured as the King walking through the field, when the asking is supposed to be near and easy and unceremonious. The third chapter of Hilchot Ta'aniyot is the discipline that keeps that from turning into noise. It gives asking a shape: a beginning quiet enough that nobody is conscripted into somebody else's alarm, a middle loud enough to be unmistakable, and an end fixed in advance so that stopping is not a confession.

The trumpets are not the chapter. The number thirteen is the chapter. Whatever you have been asking for since Marcheshvan, ask it in the order the Rambam gives, quietly first and out loud later, and set the ending before you begin. The town that already knows when it will stop is the only town that can afford to cry out at all.