I was talking to someone at work about the ways that we are sad during the 9 days, he had never considered things this way before so I thought I would share them with my readers as well.
1) We don't eat meat. This is to remind us of the korban shlomim, which was considered the ultimate happiness.
2) We don't listen to live music. This is to remind us of the levites who would sing in concert every day.
3) We don't go into water for pleasure. This is to remind us of the water that we entered to become spiritually pure before entering the Beis haMikdash (BhM).
4) We don't drink wine because of the wine that was poured on the altar.
Joe Settler wrote on the Muqata blog that he has a hard time with forced seasonal emotions, such as becoming sad during the 9 days. In a lot of ways he is correct because in our reality nothing has changed from last week to this week. There was no BhM then and there is no BhM now.
What we are doing by adding on these symbols of sadness is more then just making our lives less comfortable, we are putting the things that we are missing in front of us and saying, look this is what we used to have and we don't have it anymore.
With that you can begin to feel the loss, not because of an artificial forced sadness, but a sadness based on a reality check that we imposed on ourselves so that we remember what we lost.
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7 comments:
I read an article on Aish that I enjoyed. It was explaining what a world with the loss of the shechina is compared to a world where we feel G-d's presence. It started my nine days in an appropriate perspective.
I had a good greek salad today. It wasn't very sad. I'm glad they didn' used o bring up greek salads on the altar or I wouldn't have been able to eat it.
I have a question about the water one. Can you tell me the source for that? My family's supposed to be going to the beach on Friday, and I said I didn't think it was appropriate, and they wanted a source for it.
Not going into water is a "yesh nohagim" in the shulchan aruch. taf koof noon aleph, number 16. אורח חיים סעיף תקנא סעיף ט"ז
As far as I know, this is an accepted practice in religious communities. Day camps and overnight camps don't go swimming during the 9 days.
I left out washing clothes.
It is to remind us of the special clothes that the kohanim wore in the BhM
i challenge the washing clothes bit. I thought the custom was not to wear freshly laundered clothes. (...but then why don't we do laundry until the middle of the 10th... hm.)
The shulchan aruch specifically says no washing clothes even if you are not going to wear them.
Can you look it up or do I need to provide the source? There is a discussion on whether our washing is considered the washing that they used to do, but I believe the poskim have decided that a washing machine is "geihutz"
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