Aish Tukad Bekirbi: personal reflections on a Tisha be'Av Kinah

[Jeremy Phillips writes] On Tisha be'Av 5784 I was asked to prepare some comments on Aish Tukad Bekirbi, one of the better-known kinot. A couple of people wanted to discuss these comments with me and/or to get hold of a copy. This is what I said: 

My task is to introduce the 14^th kinah we’re reciting today. Some of you may by now be suffering from Kinah Fatigue. Perhaps you are sitting here out of a sense of duty or respect for tradition, maybe losing attention a little bit and secretly wanting the whole thing to be over and done with. These feelings are natural. We are only human, after all. But is this what we should be feeling?

Incidentally, it’s not just Tisha be’Av and the seemingly endless kinot that we wait to end. Some of our fellow Jews here in Israel have said to me over the past few days that they just wish the Iranians would get on with their revenge attack, so that we can get it over and done with and get back to normal.  But both with kinot and with attacks from our enemies, there is no normal to get back to. Barring a miracle—for which we should be fervently praying—when we wake up tomorrow we will still be missing our Bet HaMikdash. There will still be no korbanot and our Kohanim will still be duchaning here in Rechavia and not down the road in the Ir Atikah.  Likewise, even after Iran and Hizbollah do whatever they do, if they ever do it, we will still have the same enemies and face the same problems. In each case we look forward to The Day After, but do we  have an action plan for what to do with the Day After when it comes?

My Kinah this year—Aish Tukad Bekirbi—is a very special one and I’ll soon tell you why. But first I want to say something about Tisha be’Av last year that applies to this year too. When I introduced my kinah then, I was quite critical of it.  What I was actually trying to say was that Tisha be’Av is a time of national and personal mourning for tragedies that continue to be felt, but my kinah did not move me. It was an elaborate and poetical account of the sincere feelings of someone who was not there at the time of the Churban and it seemed to me to be somehow wrong for me to recite someone else’s feelings in order to conjure up in my heart the emotions evoked by words that were appropriate for him on this day, but that did not work for for me.

We’re not always very good at showing our national grief, and I sometimes wonder if we are not even very good at feeling it. For me the ninth day of the month of Menachem Av is a day for acknowledging the pain we should be feeling in our hearts. It is not the date of the Annual General Meeting of the Jewish chapter of the Dead Poets Society. In saying this, I’ll just quote what R’ Kenigsberg said at se’udat shelishit this week: the recitation of kinot should be “an understandable and meaningful experience”.  Yes, we must ensure that the kinot are “understandable and meaningful”—but we must also make them an “experience”.  Are we experiencing the pain, the anguish, and a sense of loss and of personal failure because our generation hasn’t been able to restore the Beit HaMikdash—or are we just a bunch of comfortable old folk who are going through the motions? We must make that effort to make our recitation of the kinot as moving as the explanations that precede them.

Fortunately I do not have any problems with my kinah for this year. Aish Tukad BeKirbi, is, I believe, the epitome of what an effective and meaningful kinah should be. An anonymous kinah, it has rhyme and rhythm, it is memorable. Being built with words and phrases we know or which we can identify, it needs scarcely any explanatory commentary at all, since so many of the textual allusions are drawn from Tanach. In short, this kinah packs a punch and leaves its mark. More than that, it finishes on a positive note that leaves us on a high, with something to which we fervently look forward: the complete and triumphant return of klal Yisrael to Yerushalayim Ir HaKodesh. This is our scenario for the Day After. And we already have our plan for the Day After: to make the Beit HaMikdash a fit and proper place for the Shechinah to dwell—among us, here in Yerushalayim, the capital of a safe, secure and united Eretz Yisrael. And that is why, in so many congregations, this kinah is sung with defiance and resolution. Yes, we have to accept God’s judgement on us—but we still look forward to His ultimate redemption.

The structure of Aish Tukad BeKirbi is worthy of note. Like many other kinot and piyyutim it is arranged in acrostic fashion, with the verses being ordered from aleph to tav. Although the aleph-bet has only 22 letters, this kinah has 23 verses since it opens with two successive verses that begin with aleph. Each of the 23 verses is split into two halves of equal length. The first half ends with the words betzeti miMitzrayim, “when I went out from Egypt”. The second in contrast ends with betzeti miYerushalayim, “when I went out from Jerusalem”.  In every verse, each of the two lines is itself broken further into two rhyming segments, again both adding power to the metre of each line and making it easier to recite and remember.

The bifurcated arrangement of each stanza, setting off the exodus from Egypt with the long trek from Yerushalayim and into exile, is the reason why this kinah is so clever and so suitable for recitation: we have a Torah mitzvah of remembering the yetziat mitzrayim every day and at the seder we are charged with envisioning ourselves as though it is we who were personally leaving Egypt. In contrast, though there is no Torah mitzvah of remembering the yetziat miYerushalayim, when we recite the second half of each verse we still have the vivid imagery of Yirmeyahu’s depiction of this disaster in Megillat Eicha at the forefront of our minds. So it is not hard for us, or shouldn’t be hard for us, to see ourselves both as marching exultantly into the midbar under the leadership of Moshe Rabbenu and at the same time straggling down the mountain tracks that lead away from our once-impregnable holy city. The contrast between these two treks is actually enhanced and emphasized by the metre and balance of each verse: in stanza after stanza the pounding rhythm of each triumph, each benefit and each gain is precisely cancelled out by the symmetry of the line that follows it and hammers out our loss, our disgrace and our degradation.

I’ve one final thought to leave you with. Most of us here are, shall we say, a little bit on the elderly side. But we were not always so. Many of us, as children of the ’60s and ‘70s, have likely absorbed many messages from that era.  Here’s one that has stuck with me throughout my adult life. Some of you may recall a lyric from a Joni Mitchell number back in 1970, a song called Big Yellow Taxi. There the chorus repeats the words:

“Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone”.

 This refrain hits the nail on the head. Aish Tukad Bekkirbi is the song of how we didn’t know what we’d got till it’s gone. We didn’t realise how good our good times were; we didn’t know how much we appreciated them, till we finally had to accept that we had lost the lot, everything. But, unlike Joni Mitchell, the anonymous author of Aish Tukad Bekirbi reminds us of God’s promise that He will never leave us destitute. In triumph we shall return! And if not this year, please God the next.

Let’s now sing this kinah together. With passion and feeling!