Daf Ditty Pesachim 54: Die Niemandsrose

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Praised be thou, NoOne . . .
A Nothing
we were, we are, we will
remain, flowering:
the Nothing-, the
NoOnesRose.

Paul Celan

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MISHNA: This mishna continues the previous discussion of customs. In a place where people
were accustomed to perform labor on the Ninth of Av, one performs labor. In a place where
people were accustomed not to perform labor, one does not perform labor. And in all places
Torah scholars are idle and do not perform labor on the Ninth of Av, due to the mourning over
the Temple’s destruction. Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel says: With regard to the Ninth of Av, a
person should always conduct himself as a Torah scholar and refrain from performing labor.

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GEMARA: Shmuel said: The only communal fast in Babylonia during which all the
stringencies of a communal fast are observed is the Ninth of Av. The Gemara asks: Is that to say,
based on the parallel he drew between them, that Shmuel holds that the Ninth of Av is as stringent
as communal fast days, in that during twilight on the Ninth of Av all activities prohibited on the
Ninth of Av are prohibited? But didn’t Shmuel say: During twilight of the Ninth of Av all
activities prohibited on the Ninth of Av are permitted, and the Sages did not decree any
prohibitions during this time? And if you say that Shmuel holds: With regard to every
communal fast, during twilight those activities considered to be afflictions are permitted, didn’t
we learn in a mishna with regard to a public fast day: One may eat and drink while it is still
day? The Gemara analyzes this statement: What does the expression: While it is still day, come
to exclude? What, isn’t it to exclude twilight of a communal fast day, when these activities are
prohibited? The Gemara rejects this: No, it is to exclude the time after dark, when these afflictions
are certainly in effect.

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The Gemara suggests: Let us say that this baraita supports Shmuel’s opinion: The only
difference between the Ninth of Av and Yom Kippur is that with regard to this, Yom Kippur,
its uncertainty is prohibited, as eating and drinking on Yom Kippur is prohibited by Torah law,
whereas with regard to that, the Ninth of Av, its uncertainty is permitted, as the afflictions of
the Ninth of Av are rabbinic decrees.

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The Gemara explains the support for Shmuel’s opinion: What is the meaning of the expression:
With regard to that, the Ninth of Av, its uncertainty is permitted? Is it not referring to twilight,
with regard to which there is uncertainty whether it is day or night? Apparently, it is permitted to
eat during twilight on the Ninth of Av. The Gemara rejects this: No, it is as Rav Sheisha, son of
Rav Idi, said in a different context: It is referring to uncertainty with regard to the determination
of the first day of the new month, which would require observance of the Festival for two days.
Here, too, the baraita is referring to uncertainty with regard to determination of the first day of
the new month. Since the Ninth of Av is a fast of rabbinic origin, there is no requirement to observe
two days.

Rava taught: Pregnant women and nursing women fast and complete the fast on the Ninth of
Av in the manner that they fast and complete the fast on Yom Kippur, and during twilight on
the Ninth of Av it is prohibited to eat or drink. And they likewise said so in the name of Rabbi
Yoḥanan. The Gemara asks: And did Rabbi Yoḥanan actually say that? Didn’t Rabbi Yoḥanan
say: The Ninth of Av is not like a communal fast decreed to pray for rain? What, isn’t it
referring to the matter of twilight? Apparently, Rabbi Yoḥanan holds that it is permitted to eat and
drink during twilight on the Ninth of Av. The Gemara answers: No, it is referring to performing
labor, which is prohibited on the Ninth of Av, in contrast to other fasts.

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The Gemara expresses surprise: It is referring to performing labor? We already learned explicitly
in the mishna: In a place where people were accustomed to perform labor on the Ninth of Av,
one performs labor; in a place where people were accustomed not to perform labor, one does
not perform labor. Apparently, the prohibition against performing labor on the Ninth of Av
depends on local custom and is not an outright prohibition. And even Rabban Shimon ben
Gamliel only said that one may conduct himself as a Torah scholar and refrain from performing
labor because when one sits and does not perform labor, it does not appear as
presumptuousness on his part. It does not create the impression that he actually considers himself
a Torah scholar because others may simply think that he has no work to do. However, in terms of
prohibiting the performance of labor, he does not prohibit performing labor on the Ninth of Av.

Rather, what is the meaning of the expression: The Ninth of Av is not like a communal fast? It
was stated with regard to the closing prayer.

On a communal fast day there are four prayers, and on Yom Kippur there are five prayers, but on
the Ninth of Av there are only three prayers, like an ordinary weekday.

But didn’t Rabbi Yoḥanan say: If only a person would continue to pray throughout the entire
day?

This indicates that according to Rabbi Yoḥanan, a person may recite additional prayers if he so
chooses.

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Summary

MISHNAH: The Mishnah discusses the different customs related to working on Tisha B’Av and
a dispute whether one should conduct himself like a talmid chacham and avoid work.

4) Tisha B’Av Shmuel stated: There are no public fast days in Bavel other than Tisha B’Av. The
Gemara assumes that Shmuel is teaching that one may eat during bein ha’Shemashos. Shmuel’s
statement is unsuccessfully challenged. Rava ruled: Pregnant and nursing women must fast on
Tisha B’Av, and one is prohibited to eat during bein ha’Shemashos. This is also the position of R’
Yochanan.

The Gemara incorrectly assumes there is a contradiction between two rulings of R’ Yochanan. The
position of Rava and R’ Yochanan is unsuccessfully challenged from a Beraisa. The previously-
cited Beraisa indicates that it is prohibited to bathe even one’s finger on Tisha B’Av. This position
is unsuccessfully challenged.

Even if the custom is to work on Tisha B’Av, Torah scholars should not engage in labor.

Wherever the custom is to perform work on Tisha B’Av, one can perform work. If the custom is
not to perform work on Tisha B’Av, one cannot perform work. Even where the custom is to work,
Torah scholars should not work, because they feel the loss of the Bais HaMikdash more than
others. Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel maintains that even a commoner should view himself like a
Torah scholar regarding working on Tisha B’Av and he does not have be concerned that he will
appear arrogant for abstaining from work.

The only difference between Yom Kippur and Tisha B’Av is regarding establishing the new
month. Shmuel said that only Tisha B’Av in Babylonia is the equivalent of a public fast day with
all of the stringencies similar to a public fast for rain in Eretz Yisroel. This statement implies that
Shmuel would maintain that one is forbidden to eat and work during twilight of Tisha B’Av. This
implication is contradicted from a statement of Shmuel that one can eat and work during the
twilight of Tisha B’Av. One cannot say that Shmuel maintains that one can eat and work at twilight
of all public fasts, because the Mishnah states that one can eat and drink on the day prior to a fast
day only while it is still day, and this would seem to exclude twilight, when one is forbidden to eat
and work.

The Gemara rejects this supposition, stating that the Mishnah only excludes eating and working
after dark which is forbidden. Thus, both of Shmuel’s statements are reconciled, because Shmuel
maintains that one can eat during twilight of a public fast day and during twilight of Tisha B’Av.

The Gemara attempts to offer proof that twilight of Tisha B’Av is permitted because a Baraisa
states that the only difference between Tisha B’Av and Yom Kippur is that the doubts of Yom
Kippur are forbidden and the doubts of Tisha B’Av are permitted.

The Baraisa thus refers to twilight prior to Tisha B’Av and this teaches us that one can eat and
work at twilight. The Gemara rejects this proof, because this Baraisa refers to establishing the new

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month. If before Yom Kippur there was uncertainty as to which day the court had decreed to be
Rosh Chodesh Tishrei, Yom Kippur would have to be observed for two days. If there was s
uncertainty regarding the establishment of Rosh Chodesh Av. However, only one day of Tisha
B’Av need be observed.

Mourning on the Ninth of Av

Steinzaltz (OBM) writes:

One halakha that is dependent on the local custom is whether or not one can work on the fast day of
the Ninth of Av, which commemorates the destruction of both the first and second Temples.
According to the Mishna, even in places where the custom was to permit people to work on Tisha
B’Av, Torah scholars refrained from working. Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel taught that it would be
appropriate for everyone to consider himself a scholar with regard to this custom, i.e., that anyone
who can, should refrain from work on the fast day.

Most of the special rules and regulations that apply on the Ninth of Av stem from traditions
of aveilut – mourning. Just as someone who is in aveilut for a parent refrains from wearing leather
shoes, engaging in sexual relations or learning Torah, similarly the community that is in mourning
for the Temple refrains from these activities. Rabbi Shlomo Adani in his Melekhet Shlomo points
out that the Sages did not establish work as one of the things that is forbidden on Tisha B’Av, even
though someone who has a personal aveilut does not work, because the communal mourning over
the Temple is aveilut yeshana – it is commemorative mourning over a historical event, not a recent
one.

In , Shmuel rules that the only true ta’anit tzibur – communal fast – in Babylon is Tisha b’Av. The
other fast days do not begin in the evening, nor do they encompass other rules aside from the fast
itself. This also indicates that the fast days enumerated in Massekhet Ta’anit on the occasion of
drought, will never be established in the Babylonian exile.

The rishonim differ in their explanations of Shmuel’s ruling. Rashi explains that in Babylon there
was no need to establish fast days for drought, since most of the local water needs were supplied
by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The Me’iri adds that the ruling applies to other locations in
the Diaspora, whose traditions are modeled after Babylon, even if there is a need for rain in those
places. The Ra’avad argues that Shmuel intended that his ruling apply to all Diaspora
communities, because the people in those communities were weak from their travails and the Sages
desired to lighten their burdens regarding fast days.

According to the Ramban, the Diaspora communities are not considered a true tzibur, they are seen
as a group of individuals, so any decision to establish a public fast would not have the full
stringencies of a ta’anit tzibur.

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When Tisha Be-Av Falls on Shabbat

Rav Yair Kahn writes:1

1. The Status of Shabbat

This year, the ninth of Av falls on Shabbat. Since it is prohibited to fast on Shabbat, the fast is
pushed off until Sunday, the tenth of Av. However, there are many things prohibited on Tisha Be-
Av aside from fasting, and it is usually permissible to refrain from these things on Shabbat. Do
these laws apply on Shabbat, despite the fact that the fast is delayed?

This question was debated by the poskim. The Shulchan Arukh (OC 554:19) rules that none of the
laws of Tisha Be-Av apply on Shabbat, while the Rema argues that those laws of mourning that
can be observed in private apply on Shabbat as well.

The position of the Rema is based on a comparison between the laws of Tisha Be-Av and the laws
of general aveilut (mourning). The gemara (Yevamot 43b) refers to various laws of Tisha Be-Av
as “aveilut yeshana,” historical mourning, as opposed to mourning over the passing of a relative,
which is termed “aveilut chadasha,” mourning due to an immediate and current event. In the
context of aveilut chadasha, during the Shabbat of shiva, the mourner only observes those aspects
of mourning that are private. Public display of mourning is avoided on Shabbat (YD 400:1). Since
Tisha Be-Av is a day on which we mourn the destruction of the Beit Ha-Mikdash (aveilut
yeshana), it would make sense to apply the rules of general mourning to the case of Tisha Be-Av
as well. Therefore, the Rema rules that private expressions of mourning should be observed when
Tisha Be-Av falls on Shabbat.

As noted above, the Mechaber rejects this position and rules that even private expressions of
mourning are permitted when Tisha Be-Av falls on Shabbat. Apparently, he felt that since one
cannot observe the fast on Shabbat, Tisha Be-Av was simply uprooted from Shabbat and replanted
on Sunday. Consequently, all the mourning aspects of Tisha Be-Av are only observed on Sunday
the tenth of Av as well (see Rosh, Ta'anit 4:32).

The question of whether Tisha Be-Av is uprooted from Shabbat, or whether it remains in effect
(but with the fasting postponed until Sunday), has a number of other ramifications. There are
certain laws of mourning that apply to the week in which Tisha Be-Av falls. (Ashkenazim follow
the minhag recorded by the Rema that these laws are observed beginning on Rosh Chodesh Av.)
When Tisha Be-Av falls on Shabbat, are these laws observed from the previous Sunday? If Tisha
Be-Av was uprooted and replanted on the tenth of Av, then the week preceding Shabbat would not
be considered the week in which Tisha Be-Av falls (see Shulchan Arukh, OC 551:4). When the

1
https://www.etzion.org.il/en/when-tisha-be-av-falls-shabbat

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ninth of Av falls on Shabbat, what day would be considered Erev Tisha Be-Av – Shabbat
(see Magen Avraham 553:7) or Friday (see Taz 551:16)?

2. Determining Which Prohibitions Might Apply on Shabbat

According to the Rema, who rules that private mourning is observed when the ninth of Av falls on
Shabbat, we must define which laws of mourning are considered private and which are public. In
general, the distinction between public and private mourning is not only a question of location.
Certain laws of mourning, by their very nature, are defined as private, while others are considered
public. The classic example of private mourning is avoidance of marital relations. On the other
hand, sitting on the floor or removing one's shoes as an expression of aveilut is prohibited on
Shabbat.

The Taz (OC 554:9) rules that washing with hot water is a private act and is therefore prohibited
according to the Rema when Tisha Be-Av falls on Shabbat. The claim that washing is a private
expression of mourning (as opposed to not wearing shoes) certainly makes sense. However,
limiting this prohibition to hot water is puzzling. After all, the Shulchan Arukh (OC 554:7) rules
that one may not wash with hot or cold water on Tisha Be-Av. Does the Taz maintain that
refraining from using cold water is more public than avoiding hot water? Consider the laws of
general mourning, where the Mechaber (YD 400:1) rules that washing is considered private,
without distinguishing between cold water and hot.[1]

In order to appreciate the position of the Taz, we must take a deeper look at the nature of the
prohibitions of Tisha Be-Av in general, with a specific focus on how that relates to the case of
Tisha Be-Av that falls on Shabbat.

The Brisker Rav, Rav Velvel Soloveitchik zt"l, noted that the prohibitions of Tisha Be-Av can be
divided into two basic categories. One of the categories, which was noted above, is that of
mourning. The gemara at the end of Ta’anit (30a) states that all the laws of mourning apply to
Tisha Be-Av. The other category is that of a fast day. Our Daf compares Tisha Be-Av to a public
fast, which is similar to Yom Kippur, insofar as the fast includes refraining from washing,
anointing, wearing leather shoes, and having marital relations (see Mishna Ta'anit 1:6). Some of
the laws of Tisha Be-Av, such as the prohibition of learning Torah, are based solely on the
comparison to aveilut, while others, such as the prohibition of eating and drinking, are only due to
the status of Tisha Be-Av as a fast day. However, some of the laws of Tisha Be-Av, such as the
prohibition of washing and wearing shoes, are rooted both aspects – that of a day of mourning and
that of a fast day.

Let us analyze the prohibition of washing on Tisha Be-Av based on this categorial distinction.
With regard to the laws of mourning, one is permitted to wash his hands and face with cold water,
but washing with hot water is forbidden (YD 381:1). On Yom Kippur, on the other hand, washing
hands in cold water is prohibited as well (OC 613:1). As noted above, on Tisha Be-Av, washing
one's hands in cold water is forbidden. Are we to conclude from this that the prohibition of washing
on Tisha Be-Av is rooted in its status as a fast day and unconnected to the laws of mourning?

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According to Rav Velvel, if one were to wash his hands in cold water on Tisha Be-Av, he would
only violate the aspect of the fast day. However, if one were to wash his hands in hot water, he
would violate both aspects – the fast day as well as the mourning component.

Let us return to the case of Tisha Be-Av that falls on Shabbat. Which aspect of Tisha Be-Av applies
and which is postponed? The reason that the fast is pushed off until Sunday is not only that one is
obligated to eat on Shabbat, but also that a fast day and Shabbat are halakhically
incompatible.[2] Therefore, none of the fast day aspects of Tisha Be-Av can apply on Shabbat.
Only the mourning elements of Tisha Be-Av can apply on Shabbat, at least with respect to the
private expressions. Therefore, the Taz ruled that only washing with hot water is prohibited on
Shabbat, as that prohibition is rooted in the mourning aspect of the day.

3. Separating the Fast from the Aveilut

In light of the above, we can return to the halakhic debate between the Mechaber and the Rema.
We noted that according to the Mechaber, when Tisha Be-Av falls on Shabbat, it is totally uprooted
and replanted on Sunday. The Rema, on the other hand, maintained that Shabbat retains the
mourning aspect of Tisha Be-Av. Rav Velvel’s distinction may help us to explain these two
approaches.

As we noted above, Rav Velvel distinguished between the mourning aspect of Tisha Be-Av and
the fast day aspect. What is the relationship between the two? To put the question differently: Can
these two aspects be separated? Is the aspect of the fast totally distinct from that of mourning,
insofar as the laws of mourning can be observed independent of the fast? Or are the two organically
integrated, so that they cannot be separated?

Even if we concede the distinction between the components that combine to form the laws of Tisha
Be-Av, as proposed by Rav Velvel, a holistic approach will lead us to the position of the Mechaber.
If the two aspects cannot be separated, then all elements of the day are uprooted to Sunday.

A fast day is a day of prayer and repentance. When a national calamity occurs, such as war or
famine, a fast is instituted. The Rambam (Hilkhot Ta’aniyot, ch. 1) notes that the primary purpose
of establishing the fast is to acknowledge that a calamity is the medium through
which Hashem communicates our failings. The second purpose, which is a direct result of the first,
is to lead us to repent and cry out to Hashem so that the divine decree should be repealed. Similarly,
the Rambam notes that one can accept upon himself a private fast when facing a private calamity,
such as the sickness of a loved one. However, if that loved one should chas ve-shalom pass away,
prayer stops and mourning begins. Through prayer and repentance, we attempt to alter the divine
decree. The idea of mourning is surrender to Hashem's inscrutable will and acceptance of the
divine decree. It is therefore easy to understand why the element of Tisha Be-Av as a fast day
could be separated from the mourning component, as the Rema maintains.

On the other hand, if we move from the individual perspective back to a national one, it is clear
that the destruction of the Beit Ha-Mikdash is the parallel to the passing of a loved one. Therefore,

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Tisha Be-Av, the day on which we recall and relive the destruction of the Beit Ha-Mikdash, is
essentially a day of mourning, not of prayer. On Tisha Be-Av, we recite kinnot, which express our
grief over the churban, while on a standard fast day we recite selichot and the
Thirteen Middot of Rachamim, an expression of prayer and repentance. It seems reasonable to
suggest that the status of Tisha Be-Av as a fast day is a way of expressing the depth of our
mourning over the Mikdash. Therefore, although we apply the rules of a standard fast day, on Tisha
Be-Av the fast itself is an expression of profound grief and mourning. If so, one might claim that
since Shabbat is totally incompatible with the fast day component of Tisha Be-Av, this negatively
affects the institution of Tisha Be-Av as a day of mourning. As a result, the entire mourning over
the Beit Ha-Mikdash was postponed to the tenth of Av, the day on which the major part of the
destruction actually occurred (see Ta’anit 29a).

Reflections of Rav Soloveitchik zt” l on Tisha B’Av

Rabbi Konigsberg2 writes:3

The customs we observe on the day of Tisha B’Av are strikingly similar to those of an avel
(mourner), one whose close relative has recently passed away. We abstain from washing ourselves
and putting on perfume, from wearing leather shoes and talking frivolously. We even refrain from
studying parts of Torah which are unrelated to the events and the mood of the day. Instead, we sit
on the floor or a low chair and solemnly contemplate the loss of the Beit HaMikdash, the First and
Second Temples in Jerusalem.

On Tisha B’Av the sense of mourning and sadness is palpable. But, in truth, the observances of
mourning begin long before Tisha B’Av itself. Already from the Seventeenth of Tamuz, at the start
of the “Three Weeks” period, Ashkenazic communities minimize their involvement in pleasurable
activities like getting married, taking haircuts and buying new clothing. From the beginning of the
month of Av through Tisha B’Av, a period commonly referred to as the “Nine Days,” we refrain
as well from doing laundry and from wearing freshly laundered clothing. Many men refrain from
shaving. Tisha B’Av itself is certainly the most restrictive of the entire Three Weeks period, but
the observances of aveilut (mourning) are not limited to that day alone.

Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik zt” l, (1903-1993) known to his many Talmidim as the Rav, used to
say that these three periods of time mirror the three periods of mourning that a child observes when
losing a parent. Tisha B’Av is like the seven-day period of shiva when the sense of mourning is
most intense. The “Nine Days” beginning with Rosh Chodesh Av are similar to the period of
2
Rosh Yeshiva at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary of Yeshiva University, and the editor of two volumes of the
Shiurei HaRav series, an annotated collection of Rav Soloveitchik’s lectures published by the Mesorah Commission of the
Orthodox Union. One of his volumes deals with mourning and Tisha B’Av.
3
https://www.ou.org/holidays/what_mourning_means_reflections_of_rav_soloveitchik_ztl_on_tisha_bav/

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shloshim (30 days of mourning), and from the Seventeenth of Tammuz until the month of Av we
observe laws of mourning similar to the twelve-month period of aveilut that a child observes after
losing a parent.

What’s interesting, though, is that the order of observances is reversed. The child who loses a
parent observes shiva first, then shloshim and then the twelve-month period of aveilut, while
during the “Three Weeks” we first observe the aveilut of the twelve-month period, then shloshim,
and only on Tisha B’Av do we keep to the restrictions of shiva. Why is the order changed when
we mourn the loss of the Beit HaMikdash?

Differences in Mourning
The Rav explained that there is a fundamental difference between aveilut chadasha (newly
occurring, personal mourning), as the Rabbis refer to it (Yevamot 43b), and aveilut yeshana
(ancient, annual mourning for the Beit HaMikdash). When a close relative passes away, the grief,
the pain, the sense of loss come naturally and easily. It is therefore most appropriate to begin the
observances of aveilut with shiva, the most intense expression of mourning. But after seven days,
the avel is ready to take a step back. Although his loss is still very much on his mind, nevertheless
his emotions have tempered; his feelings of sorrow have lessened. For him, the observances of
shloshim are more fitting. By the end of thirty days, the avel has gained perspective on his loss.
For most relatives, he is now able to conclude the observances of aveilut. Even for a parent, while
he continues to mourn, he still reduces his aveilut once again.

In the case of aveilut yeshana, on the other hand, this progression is out of place. We have become
so used to living in a world without the Beit HaMikdash, that it would be unfair to expect anyone
to begin the “Three Weeks” with the observances of shiva. It simply would be unnatural for anyone
to suddenly break down and cry over the loss of the Beit HaMikdash. The sense of mourning for
the destruction of the Beit HaMikdash can be internalized only through gradual increments. Only
by slowly increasing our observances of aveilut from the Seventeenth of Tamuz through the Nine
Days, while at the same time reflecting on the significance of this Three-Week period, can we hope
to approach the day of Tisha B’Av with the right frame of mind. By engaging in this three-week
learning experience, we prepare ourselves mentally so that when the day of Tisha B’Av finally
arrives, we are ready to grieve appropriately.

Crying on Tisha B’Av

The Rav added that in certain ways aveilut yeshana for the Beit HaMikdash is even more stringent
than aveilut chadasha. Although the Talmud (Moed Katan 27b) mentions that the first three days
of shiva are days of crying, there is no obligation for a mourner to cry. The Talmud simply says
that during the first three days of shiva it is natural for a mourner to want to cry. But on Tisha
B’Av, crying is one of the motifs of the day.

As the prophet Jeremiah (9:16-17) says, in the Haftarah we read the morning of Tisha B’Av, “Call
the dirge women…let our eyes run with tears and our eyelids flow with water.” Mourning for the
destruction of the Beit HaMikdash requires an expression of raw emotion; it obligates us to show
how overcome we are with our longing for the Beit HaMikdash. That is why we spend much of

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the morning of Tisha B’Av reciting kinnot (lamentations) which bemoan the loss of the Beit
HaMikdash and describe the pain and suffering the Jewish people has endured as a result. The
kinnot are designed to awaken our emotions until we cry out uncontrollably because only by crying
can we properly mourn the loss of the Beit HaMikdash.

How Much Should One Mourn

There is another important difference between the observances of aveilut yeshana and those of
aveilut chadasha. The rabbis never placed any limitation on how much a person is allowed to
mourn for the Beit HaMikdash. To the contrary, one who mourns the loss of the Beit HaMikdash
incessantly is praised. In fact, the very last kina we recite on Tisha B’Av is Eli Tzion Va’era, in
which we ask Jerusalem and her surrounding cities to continue to cry for the destruction of the
Beit HaMikdash. The Talmud Yerushalmi (Ta’anit 4:6) records that some Amoraim (sages of the
Talmud) fasted on both the ninth and the tenth days of Av because the Beit HaMikdash was set on
fire on the ninth day of Av but it continued to burn on the tenth. How was it permissible for these
rabbis to add an extra fast day; aren’t we prohibited from adding to any mitzvot?

The Ramban (Torat Ha’adamah, p. 242) answers that mourning for the Beit HaMikdash is
different. Not only is one allowed to add to the mourning, but such behavior is praiseworthy. An
avel who cries or mourns too much for his relative is criticized. As the Talmud says (Moed Katan
27b), “Anyone who grieves excessively over his dead will ultimately weep over another deceased.”
But one who weeps bitterly for the Beit HaMikdash is rewarded. What is the difference between
these two types of aveilut?

An Unnatural Event

The Rav explained that an avel is enjoined from crying too much for his relative because, as the
Rambam writes (Hilchot Avel 13:11), death is minhago shel olam; it is part of the natural course
of events in this world. But the destruction of the Beit HaMikdash was an unnatural event. The
Beit HaMikdash was much more than a physical structure. It symbolized the relationship between
Hashem and the Jewish people. It was the focal point of spirituality in the world. When we mourn
the loss of the Beit HaMikdash, we are not crying for the wood and the stones. We mourn the fact
that we no longer see Hashem’s presence as clearly in the world and that our relationship with Him
is strained. We long for the day when the Jewish people will reunite with Hashem and feel his
closeness once again. In other words, we hope for the day when the world will return to its natural
state. That is why we are obligated to cry on Tisha B’Av and there is no limit to our mourning
because the loss of the Beit HaMikdash is a reality we can never come to terms with.

Consolation on Tisha B’Av

And yet, after chatzot (midday) on Tisha B’Av, we get up from the floor, put on our tefillin and
recite the bracha of Nachem, asking Hashem to console Jerusalem and us. Where is there room for
consolation on such a dark day? The Rav explained that our comfort lies in the fact that Hashem
took out his wrath on the Beit HaMikdash and not on the Jewish people (see Tosafot, Kiddushin
31a). Paradoxically, it is precisely at the time of the minchah prayer, when the Beit HaMikdash
started to burn (Ta’anit 29a), that we feel comforted because that act of destruction was really a

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demonstration of love. It showed that Hashem wants the Jewish people to survive; he wants them
to flourish and ultimately to reunite with Him. If Hashem punishes us only out of love, like a father
disciplines his child, then there is hope for the future. We can look forward to the Day of
Reconciliation when Hashem will return to us and reveal His glory to the entire world.

Reflections on Fasting (and not Fasting) of Tisha b’Av (2018)

Shaul Magid4 writes:5

I am lucky. I fast pretty easily. I always have. Once in 1978 when I was a steadfast macrobiotic
and living in Albuquerque, New Mexico I fasted 52 hours, no food, no water, just to see what it
would be like. It’s a story for another time. I’ve been fasting on Tish b’Av for forty years. Some
years ago, Rabbi Tuvia Friedman of the Masorti Movement in Jerusalem published an interesting
responsa of a half day fast for Tisha b’Av. Built on a creative rendering of rabbinic and medieval
sources, the upshot was that today with the state of Israel the reality of exile simply is not what it
was before. He was not making a messianic claim as much as an empirical one. With the state of
Israel and the fact that over 90% of Jews live in democratic countries and are free to practice their
religion, to enact Tisha b’Av without any recognition of that is, for him, dissonant. I recall a story
David Hartman used to talk about Tish b’Av in 1967 when he was a rabbi in Montreal and how he
got up and forcefully challenged his congregation how they could fast in light of such miraculous
circumstances. I don’t recall whether he observed Tish b’Av that year or not, but he certainly
questioned its relevance.

I always thought the half day fast responsa was an interesting although I did not abide by it. I am
not sure how much traction it actually had, or has, in the Conservative Movement. Jews tend to be
weird about fasting, even a rabbinic fast like Tish b’Av. I left Orthodoxy years ago but continued
fasting for years, not only Tish b’Av but minor fast days as well. Fasting served a religious, and
not only a halakhic, function for me. But my suggestion here is clearly a post-halakhic one and for
those who fast purely as a halakhic precept I am quite sure it will be unacceptable.

Given a variety of events today, especially in Israel, the abduction of a Conservative rabbi for
performing marriages in Israel, and more pointedly the Nation-State bill that undercuts Israel as a
democratic state, I have thought about curtailing my fast this year as act of protest.

Why? First, I know that many things I have read respond to these events as a stronger reason to
fast, fasting to mourn the demise of Israel’s democracy, the humanitarian crisis among Palestinians
etc. I can respect that. But I find that is simply holding onto a halakhic precept and then adding

4
Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Professor of Jewish Studies and Religious Studies at Indiana University, rabbi of the Fire Island
Synagogue, and Kogod Senior Research Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
5
https://www.tikkun.org/fasting-an-act-of-mourning-protest

18
new reasons to maintain it. This itself is quite traditional as we read in the Tisha b’
‘Av Kinnot (prayers of supplication) where the medieval sages added new tragedies to be included
in Tish b’Av reflections. For me, many of the new reasons give, even as they are subversive, seem
a bit too convenient. There are always things worth fasting for. My suggestion is something else.

I find it the epitome of hypocrisy, on the one hand, to use one’s power to marginalize, persecute,
and de-legitimize minorities in the country where you have ultimate power – and then sit down
and lament and mourn your victimhood. When I think of anyone who voted for, defends, or
supports the Nation-State Bill fasting on Tisha b’ Av, I think of Isaiah’s crushing critique of the
Israelites, saying that God doesn’t need their New Moon festivals or their sacrifices. God doesn’t
need your fasting when you take the opportunity to have a humanistic nation-state and make it into
an ethno-centric, spiteful, and nationalistic polity.

I personally feel unable to mourn with a collective who spit at the opportunity given us to be better
and to be a “light unto the nations” and instead choose to mirror the xenophobic turn among too
many nations. I find it difficult to mourn with a people who I believe are simply on the wrong side
of history. Some may accuse me of a misappropriation of tradition here so let me be clear. I am
not making an argument from tradition; in some way I am making a counter-traditional argument.
I cannot allow the tradition I have devoted my life to, to be used hypocritically to oppress another
people, to make that the law of the land. If that's not "traditional" so be it. I'll take that up with my
maker in due time

And yet, Tisha b’Av is more than that. But it is also that. So, this year I am taking Rabbi Tuvia
Friedman’s teshuva and “queering it” as it were. He suggested a half day fast to recognize Jewish
sovereignty. I suggest a 2/3 fast, until “plag ha-minha” (about 4 or 5 pm) to mark both the
recognition of exile and to protest the abuse of power and the hypocrisy of exercising that abuse
of power and then acting like victims. This is my Isaiahean compromise. You cannot be the
oppressor and the victim simultaneously, at least not in such egregious and cynical ways. You
cannot feel piety in your fasting while you victimize another people while claiming it is you who
are the victim.

At 4 or 5pm on Tisha b’Av I will eat and drink in protest, not with joy, but with sorrow. I will eat
while sitting on the ground the way Jews do for the meal before Tisha b’Av. You may disagree.
And I respect that. But sometimes the world just crashes in on one’s religious life and there is
nothing to do but recognize it.

This is madness. I will not sit in mourning with oppressors. At least not on their terms.

19
 Paul Celan
1920–1970

Paul Antschel, who wrote under the pseudonym Paul Celan, was born in Czernovitz, in Romania,
on November 23, 1920. The son of German-speaking Jews, Celan grew up speaking several
languages, including Romanian, Russian, and French. He also understood Yiddish. He studied
medicine in Paris in 1938, but returned to Romania shortly before the outbreak of World War II.
His parents were deported and eventually died in Nazi labor camps; Celan himself was interned
for eighteen months before escaping to the Red Army.6

In 1945, he moved to Bucharest and became friends with many of the leading Romanian writers
of the time. He worked as a reader in a publishing house and as a translator. He also began to
publish his own poems and translations under a series of pseudonyms. In 1947 he settled on the
pseudonym Celan—an anagram of Ancel, the Romanian form of his surname. He lived briefly in
Vienna before settling in Paris in 1948 to study German philology and literature. He took his
Licence des Lettres in 1950, and in 1952 he married the graphic artist Gisele de Lestrange. They
had a son, Eric, in 1955.

6
https://poets.org/poet/paul-celan

20
Celan's first book was published in 1947; it received very little critical attention. His second
book, Mohn und Gedaechtnis (Poppy and Memory), however, garnered tremendous acclaim and
helped to establish his reputation. Among his most well-known and often-anthologized poems
from this time is "Fugue of Death." The poem opens with the words "Black milk of daybreak we
drink it at evening / we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night" and it goes on to offer
a stark evocation of life in the Nazi death camps.

In 1959, Celan took a job as a reader in German Language and Literature at L'École Normal
Superieure of the University of Paris, a position he would hold until his death in 1970. His poems
from this period grew shorter, more fragmented and broken in their syntax and perceptions. In
1960 he received a Georg Buchner Prize.

During the 1960s he published more than six books of poetry and gained international fame. In
addition to his own poems, he remained active as a translator, bringing out works from writers
such as Henri Michaux, Osip Mandelstam, Rene Char, Paul Valéry, and Fernando Pessoa. In 1970,
Celan died by suicide. He is regarded as one of the most important poets to emerge from post-
World War II Europe.

21
How Paul Celan Reconceived Language for a Post-Holocaust World
Ruth Franklin writes:7

Once, while reading the poetry of Paul Celan, I had an experience I can describe only as mystical.
It was about twenty years ago, and I was working at a job that required me to stay very late one or
two nights a week. On one of those nights, trying to keep myself awake, I started browsing in John
Felstiner’s “Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan.” My eye came to rest on an almost
impossibly brief poem:
Once,
I heard him,
he was washing the world,
unseen, nightlong,
real.
One and infinite,
annihilated,
they I’d.
Light was. Salvation.

In a dream state or trance, I read the lines over and over, instilling them permanently in my
memory. It was as if the poem opened up and I entered into it. I felt “him,” that presence, whoever
he might be, “unseen” and yet “real.” The poem features one of Celan’s signature neologisms. In
German, it’s ichten, which doesn’t look any more natural than the English but shows that we’re
dealing with a verb in the past tense, constructed from ich, the first-person-singular pronoun—
something like “they became I’s,” that is, selves. The last line echoes Genesis: “Let there be light.”
As I repeated the poem, I suddenly understood it—more, I felt it—as a vision of a second Creation,
a coming of the Messiah, when those who have been annihilated (the original is vernichtet,
exterminated) might be reborn, through the cleansing of the world.

From his iconic “Deathfugue,” one of the first poems published about the Nazi camps and now
recognized as a benchmark of twentieth-century European poetry, to cryptic later works such as
the poem above, all of Celan’s poetry is elliptical, ambiguous, resisting easy interpretation. Perhaps
for this reason, it has been singularly compelling to critics and translators, who often speak of
Celan’s work in quasi-religious terms. Felstiner said that, when he first encountered the poems, he
knew he’d have to immerse himself in them “before doing anything else.” Pierre Joris, in the
introduction to “Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), his new
translation of Celan’s first four published books, writes that hearing Celan’s poetry read aloud, at
the age of fifteen, set him on a path that he followed for fifty years.

Celan, like his poetry, eludes the usual terms of categorization. He was born Paul Antschel in 1920
to German-speaking Jewish parents in Czernowitz (now Chernivtsi). Until the fall of the Habsburg
Empire, in 1918, the city had been the capital of the province of Bukovina; now it was part of
Romania. Before Celan turned twenty, it would be annexed by the Soviet Union. Both of Celan’s
parents were murdered by the Nazis; he was imprisoned in labor camps. After the war, he lived

7
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/23/how-paul-celan-reconceived-language-for-a-post-holocaust-world

22
briefly in Bucharest and Vienna before settling in Paris. Though he wrote almost exclusively in
German, he cannot properly be called a German poet: his loyalty was to the language, not the
nation.

“Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language,” Celan once said.
But that language, sullied by Nazi propaganda, hate speech, and euphemism, was not immediately
usable for poetry: “It had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through
the thousand darknesses of murderous speech.” Celan cleansed the language by breaking it down,
bringing it back to its roots, creating a radical strangeness in expression and tone. Drawing on the
vocabulary of such fields as botany, ornithology, geology, and mineralogy, and on medieval or
dialect words that had fallen out of use, he invented a new form of German, reconceiving the
language for the world after Auschwitz. Adding to the linguistic layers, his later works incorporate
gibberish as well as foreign phrases. The commentaries accompanying his poetry in the definitive
German edition, some of which Joris includes in his translation, run to hundreds of pages.

No translation can ever encompass the multiplicity of meanings embedded in these hybrid,
polyglot, often arcane poems; the translator must choose an interpretation. This is always true, but
it is particularly difficult with work as fundamentally ambiguous as Celan’s. Joris imagines his
translations as akin to the medical diagrams that reproduce cross-sections of anatomy on plastic
overlays, allowing the student to leaf forward and backward to add or subtract levels of detail. “All
books of translations should be such palimpsests,” he writes, with “layers upon layers of unstable,
shifting, tentative, other-languaged versions.”

Joris has already translated Celan’s final five volumes of poetry in a collection that he called
“Breathturn Into Timestead” (2014), incorporating words from the titles of the individual books.
The appearance of “Memory Rose Into Threshold Speech,” coinciding with the centennial of
Celan’s birth, as well as with the fiftieth anniversary of his death—he drowned himself in the
Seine, one rainy week in April—now brings into English all the poems, nearly six hundred, that
the poet collected during his lifetime, in the order in which he arranged them. (The exception is
Celan’s first collection, published in Vienna in 1948, which printing errors forced him to withdraw;
he used some of those poems in his next book.) Not only are many poems available in English for
the first time but English readers also now have the opportunity to read Celan’s individual
collections in their entirety, as he intended them to be read. What Celan demands of his reader,
Joris has written, is “to weave the threads of the individual poems into a text that is the cycle or
book of poems. The poet gives us the threads: we have to do the weaving—an invitation to a new
kind of reading.”

Celan grew up with a multilingualism natural to a region where borders were erased and redrawn
like pencil lines. “It was a landscape where both people and books lived,” he recalled. After a few
years at a Hebrew grade school, he attended Romanian high schools, studying Italian, Latin, and
Greek, and immersing himself in German literary classics. On November 9, 1938, the date now
known as Kristallnacht, he was on his way to France, where he intended to prepare for medical
studies. His train passed through Berlin as the pogrom was taking place, and he later wrote of
seeing smoke that “already belonged to tomorrow.”

23
After Celan returned to Czernowitz for the summer, the outbreak of the Second World War trapped
him there. He enrolled in Romance studies at the local university, which he was able to continue
under Soviet occupation the following year. All that came to an end on July 6, 1941, when German
and Romanian Nazi troops invaded. They burned the city’s Great Synagogue, murdering nearly
seven hundred Jews within three days and three thousand by the end of August. In October, a
ghetto was created for Jews who were allowed to remain temporarily, including Celan and his
parents. The rest were deported.

“What the life of a Jew was during the war years, I need not mention,” Celan later told a German
magazine. (When asked about his camp experience, Celan would respond with a single word,
“Shovelling!”) His parents were deported during a wave of roundups in June 1942. It is unclear
where Celan was on the night of their arrest—possibly in a hideout where he had tried to persuade
them to join him, or with a friend—but, when he came home in the morning, they were gone. His
reprieve lasted only a few weeks: in July he was deported to a labor camp in the south of Romania.
A few months later, he learned of his father’s death. His mother was shot the following winter.
Snow and lead, symbols of her murder, became a constant in his poetry.

“Deathfugue,” with its unsettling, incantatory depiction of a concentration camp, was first
published in 1947, in a Bucharest literary magazine. One of the best-known works of postwar
German literature, it may have persuaded Theodor Adorno to reconsider his famous
pronouncement that writing poetry after Auschwitz was “barbaric.” Felstiner called it “the
‘Guernica’ of postwar European literature,” comparing its impact to Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et
Decorum Est” or Yeats’s “Easter 1916.” The camp in the poem, left nameless, stands for all the
camps, the prisoners’ suffering depicted through the unforgettable image of “black milk”:

Black milk of morning we drink you evenings

we drink you at noon and mornings we drink you at night
we drink and we drink
we dig a grave in the air there one lies at ease

In phrases that circle back around in fugue-like patterns, the poem tells of a commandant who
orders the prisoners to work as the camp orchestra plays: “He calls out play death more sweetly
death is a master from Deutschland / he calls scrape those fiddles more darkly then as smoke you’ll
rise in the air.” The only people named are Margarete—the commandant’s beloved, but also the
heroine of Goethe’s “Faust”—and Shulamit, a figure in the poem whose name stems from the
Song of Songs and whose “ashen hair” contrasts with Margarete’s golden tresses. The only other
proper noun is “Deutschland,” which many translators, Joris included, have chosen to leave in the
original. “Those two syllables grip the rhythm better than ‘Germany,’” Felstiner explained.

Each of his early poems, Celan wrote to an editor in 1946, was “accompanied by the feeling that
I’ve now written my last poem.” The work included an elegy in the form of a Romanian folk
song— “Aspen tree, your leaves gaze white into the dark. / My mother’s hair ne’er turned white”—
and lyrics and prose poems in Romanian. He also adopted the name Celan, an anagram of “Ancel,”
the Romanian form of Antschel. After two years working as a translator in Bucharest, he left
Romania and its language for good. “Only in the mother tongue can one speak one’s own truth,”

24
he told a friend who asked how he could still write in German after the war. “In a foreign tongue
the poet lies.”

Celan liked to quote the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam’s description of a poem as being like a
message in a bottle, tossed into the ocean and washed up on the dunes many years later. A wanderer
happens upon it, opens it, and discovers that it is addressed to its finder. Thus, the reader becomes
its “secret addressee.”

Celan’s poetry, particularly in the early volumes collected in “Memory Rose into Threshold
Speech,” is written insistently in search of a listener. Some of these poems can be read as responses
to such writers as Kafka and Rilke, but often the “you” to whom the poems speak has no clear
identity, and could be the reader, or the poet himself. More than a dozen of the poems in the book
“Poppy and Memory” (1952), including the well-known “Corona” and “Count the Almonds,”
address a lover, the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann. The relationship began in Vienna in 1948
and continued for about a year via mail, then picked up again for a few more years in the late
fifties. The correspondence between the two poets, published in an English translation by Wieland
Hoban (Seagull), reveals that they shared an almost spiritual connection that may have been
overwhelming to them both; passionate exchanges are followed by brief, stuttering lines or even
by years of silence.

The Bachmann poems, deeply inflected by Surrealism, are among the most moving of Celan’s
early work. Bachmann was born in Klagenfurt, Austria, the daughter of a Nazi functionary who
served in Hitler’s Army. She later recalled her teen-age years reading forbidden authors—
Baudelaire, Zweig, Marx—while listening for the whine of bombers. The contrast between their
backgrounds was a source of torment for Celan. Many of the love poems contain images of
violence, death, or betrayal. “In the springs of your eyes / a hanged man strangles the rope,” he
writes in “Praise of Distance.” The metaphor in “Nightbeam” is equally macabre: “The hair of my
evening beloved burned most brightly: / to her I sent the coffin made of the lightest wood.” In
another, he addresses her as “reaperess.” Bachmann answered some of the lines with echoes in a
number of her most important poems; after Celan’s suicide, she incorporated others into her novel
“Malina,” perhaps to memorialize their love.

Most of Celan’s poems to Bachmann were written in her absence: in July 1948, he went to Paris,
where he spent the rest of his life. Even in a new landscape, memories of the war were inescapable.
The Rue des Écoles, where he found his first apartment, was the street where he had lived briefly
in 1938 with an uncle who perished at Auschwitz. During the next few years, he produced only a
handful of publishable poems each year, explaining to a fellow-writer, “Sometimes it’s as if I were
the prisoner of these poems . . . and sometimes their jailer.” In 1952, he married Gisèle Lestrange,
an artist from an aristocratic background, to whom he dedicated his next collection, “Threshold to
Threshold” (1955); the cover of Joris’s book reproduces one of Lestrange’s lithographs. The
volume is haunted by the death of their first child, only a few days old, in 1953. “A word—you
know: / a corpse,” Celan wrote in “Pursed at Night,” a poem that he read in public throughout his
life. “Speaks true, who speaks shadows,” he wrote in “Speak, You Too.”

The poems in “Speechgrille” (1959) show Celan moving toward the radical starkness that
characterized the last decade of his work. There are sentence fragments, one-word lines,

25
compounds: “Crowswarmed wheatwave,” “Hearttime,” “worldblind,” “hourwood.” But
“Tenebrae,” the volume’s most effective poem, is one of the simplest in syntax. Celan compared
it to a Negro spiritual. It begins as a response to Hölderlin’s hymn “Patmos,” which opens (in
Richard Sieburth’s translation):

Near and
hard to grasp, the god.
Yet where danger lies,
grows that which saves.

There is no salvation in Celan’s poem, which reverses Hölderlin’s trope. It is the speakers—the
inmates of a death camp—who are near to God: “We are near, Lord, / near and graspable.” Their
bodies are “clawed into each other,” “windbent.” There is no mistaking the anger in their voices.
“Pray, Lord, / pray to us, / we are near,” the chorus continues, blasphemously. The trough from
which they drink is filled with blood. “It cast its image into our eyes, Lord. / Eyes and mouth gape,
so open and empty, Lord.” The poem ends on a couplet, whether threatening or mournful, that
reverses the first: “Pray, Lord. / We are near.” A more searing indictment of God’s absence during
the Holocaust—a topic of much analysis by theologians in the decades since—can hardly be
imagined.

Celan’s turn to a different kind of poetics was triggered in part by the mixed response to his work
in Germany, where he travelled regularly to give readings. Though he was welcomed by the
public—his audiences often requested “Deathfugue”—much of the critical reaction ranged from
uncomprehending to outright anti-Semitic. Hans Egon Holthusen, a former S.S. officer who
became a critic for a German literary magazine, called the poem a Surrealist fantasia and said that
it “could escape the bloody chamber of horrors and rise up into the ether of pure poetry,” which
appalled Celan: “Deathfugue” was all too grounded in the real world, intended not to escape or
transcend the horrors but to actualize them. At a reading held at the University of Bonn, someone
left an anti-Semitic cartoon on his lectern.

Reviewing “Speechgrille” for a Berlin newspaper, another critic wrote that Celan’s “store of
metaphors is not won from reality nor serves it,” and compared his Holocaust poems to “exercises
on music paper.” To a friend from his Bucharest days, Celan joked, “Now and again they invite
me to Germany for readings. Even the anti-Semites have discovered me.” But the critics’ words
tormented him. “I experience a few slights every day, plentifully served, on every street corner,”
he wrote to Bachmann.

Poetry in German “can no longer speak the language which many willing ears seem to expect,”
Celan wrote in 1958. “Its language has become more sober, more factual. It distrusts ‘beauty.’ It
tries to be truthful. . . . Reality is not simply there, it must be searched and won.” The poems he
wrote in the next few years, collected in “The NoOnesRose” (1963), are dense with foreign words,
technical terms, archaisms, literary and religious allusions, snatches from songs, and proper names:
Petrarch, Mandelstam, the Kabbalist Rabbi Löw, Siberia, Kraków, Petropolis. In his commentary,
Joris records Celan’s “reading traces” in material ranging from the Odyssey to Gershom Scholem’s
essays on Jewish mysticism.

26
The French writer Jean Daive, who was close to Celan in his last years—and whose memoir about
him, “Under the Dome” (City Lights), has just appeared in English, translated by Rosmarie
Waldrop—remembers him reading “the newspapers, all of them, technical and scientific works,
posters, catalogues, dictionaries and philosophy.” Other people’s conversations, words overheard
in shops or in the street, all found their way into his poetry. He would sometimes compose poems
while walking and dictate them to his wife from a public phone booth. “A poet is a pirate,” he told
Daive.

“Zürich, Hotel Zum Storchen,” dedicated to the German-Jewish poet Nelly Sachs, commemorates
their first meeting, in 1960, after they had been corresponding for a number of years. Celan
travelled to Zurich to meet Sachs, who lived in Sweden; she had received a German literary prize,
but refused to stay in the country overnight. They spoke, Celan writes, of “the Too Much . . . the
Too Little . . . Jewishness,” of something he calls simply “that”:

There was talk of your God, I spoke

against him, I
let the heart I had
hope:
for
his highest, his death-rattled, his
contending word—

Celan told Sachs that he hoped “to be able to blaspheme and quarrel to the end.” In response, she
said, “We just don’t know what counts”—a line that Celan fragmented at the end of his poem.
“We / just don’t know, you know, / we / just don’t know, / what / counts.”
In contrast to “Tenebrae,” which angrily addresses a God who is presumed to exist, the
theological poems in “The NoOnesRose” insist on God’s absence. “Psalm” opens,“NoOne
kneads us again of earth and clay, / noOne conjures our dust. / Noone.” It continues:

Praised be thou, NoOne . . .

A Nothing
we were, we are, we will
remain, flowering:
the Nothing-, the
NoOnesRose.

If there is no God, then what is mankind, theoretically, as he is, created in God’s image? The
poem’s image of humanity as a flower echoes the blood of “Tenebrae”: “the corona red / from the
scarlet-word, that we sang / above, O above / the thorn.”

Some critics have seen the fractured syntax of Celan’s later poems as emblematic of his
progressively more fragile mental state. In the late fifties, he became increasingly paranoid after a
groundless plagiarism charge, first levelled against him in 1953, resurfaced. In his final years, he
was repeatedly hospitalized for psychiatric illness, sometimes for months at a time. “No more need
for walls, no more need for barbed wire as in the concentration camps. The incarceration is

27
chemical,” he told Daive, who visited him in the hospital. Daive’s memoir sensitively conjures a
portrait of a man tormented by both his mind and his medical treatment but who nonetheless
remained a generous friend and a poet for whom writing was a matter of life and death. “He loves
words,” Daive writes, recalling the two of them working together on translations in Celan’s
apartment. “He erases them as if they should bleed.”

Reading Celan’s poems in their totality makes it possible to see just how frequently his key words
and themes recur: roses and other plants; prayer and blasphemy; the word, or name, NoOne. (I
give it here in Joris’s formulation, although Celan used the more conventional structure Niemand,
without the capital letter in the middle.) As Joris writes, Celan intended his poems to be read in
cycles rather than one at a time, so that the reader could pick up on the patterns. But he did not
intend for four books to be read together in a single volume. The poems, in their sheer number and
difficulty, threaten to overwhelm, with the chorus drowning out the distinct impact of any
particular poem.

Joris, whose language sometimes tends toward lit-crit jargon, acknowledges that his primary goal
as translator was “to get as much of the complexity and multiperspectivity of Celan’s work into
American English as possible,” not to create elegant, readable versions. “Any translation that
makes a poem sound more accessible than (or even as accessible as) it is in the original will be
flawed,” he warns. This is certainly true, but I wish that Joris had made more of an effort to
reproduce the rhythm and music of Celan’s verse in the original, rather than focussing so single-
mindedly on meaning and texture. When the poems are read aloud in German, their cadence is
inescapable. Joris’s translation may succeed in getting close to what Celan actually meant, but
something of the experience of reading the poetry is lost in his sometimes workaday renderings.

Still, Joris’s extensive commentary is a gift to English readers who want to deepen their
understanding of Celan’s work. Much of the later poetry is unintelligible without some knowledge
of the circumstances under which Celan wrote and of the allusions he made. In one famous
example, images in the late poem “You Lie Amid a Great Listening” have been identified as
referring to the murders of the German revolutionaries Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg and
to the execution of the conspirators who tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944.

The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer argued that the poem’s content was decipherable by any
reader with a sufficient background in German culture and that, in any event, the background
information was secondary to the poem. J. M. Coetzee, in his essay “Paul Celan and His
Translators,” counters that readers can judge the significance of that information only if they know
what it is, and wonders if it is “possible to respond to poetry like Celan’s, even to translate it,
without fully understanding it.”

Celan, I think, would have said that it is. He was annoyed by critics who called his work hermetic,
urging them to simply “keep reading, understanding comes of itself.” He called poems “gifts—
gifts to the attentive,” and quoted the seventeenth-century philosopher Nicolas Malebranche:
“Attention is the natural prayer of the soul.” Both poetry and prayer use words and phrases, singly
or in repetition, to draw us out of ourselves and toward a different kind of perception. Flipping
from the poems to the notes and back again, I wondered if all the information amounted to a

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distraction. The best way to approach Celan’s poetry may be, in Daive’s words, as a “vibration of
sense used as energy”—a phenomenon that surpasses mere comprehension. ♦

Death Fugue

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 Paul Celan - 1920-1970

translated by Pierre Joris

Black milk of morning we drink you evenings

we drink you at noon and mornings we drink you at night
we drink and we drink

A man lives in the house he plays with the snakes he writes

he writes when it darkens to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete
he writes and steps in front of his house and the stars glisten and he whistles his dogs to come
he whistles his jews to appear let a grave be dug in the earth
he commands us play up for the dance

Black milk of dawn we drink you at night

we drink you mornings and noontime we drink you evenings
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with the snakes he writes
he writes when it turns dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margarete
Your ashen hair Shulamit we dig a grave in the air there one lies at ease
He calls jab deeper into the earth you there and you other men sing and play
he grabs the gun in his belt he draws it his eyes are blue
jab deeper your spades you there and you other men continue to play for the dance

Black milk of dawn we drink you at night

we drink you at noon we drink you evenings
we drink you and drink
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamit he plays with the snakes
He calls out play death more sweetly death is a master from Deutschland
he calls scrape those fiddles more darkly then as smoke you’ll rise in the air
then you’ll have a grave in the clouds there you’ll lie at ease

Black milk of dawn we drink you at night

we drink you at noon death is a master from Deutschland
we drink you evenings and mornings we drink and drink
death is a master from Deutschland his eye is blue
he strikes you with lead bullets his aim is true
a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete
he sets his dogs on us he gifts us a grave in the air
he plays with the snakes and dreams death is a master from Deutschland
your golden hair Margarete
your ashen hair Shulamit

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 Todesfuge

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends

wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts
wir trinken und trinken
wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng
Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt
der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete
er schreibt es und tritt vor das Haus und es blitzen die Sterne er pfeift seine Rüden herbei
er pfeift seine Juden hervor läßt schaufeln ein Grab in der Erde

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts

wir trinken dich morgens und mittags wir trinken dich abends
wir trinken und trinken
Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt
der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete
Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng
Er ruft stecht tiefer ins Erdreich ihr einen ihr andern singet und spielt
er greift nach dem Eisen im Gurt er schwingts seine Augen sind blau
stecht tiefer die Spaten ihr einen ihr andern spielt weiter zum Tanz auf
Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich mittags und morgens wir trinken dich abends
wir trinken und trinken
ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith er spielt mit den Schlangen
Er ruft spielt süßer den Tod der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
er ruft streicht dunkler die Geigen dann steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft
dann habt ihr ein Grab in den Wolken da liegt man nicht eng
Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich mittags der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
wir trinken dich abends und morgens wir trinken und trinken
er Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland sein Auge ist blau
er trifft dich mit bleierner Kugel er trifft dich genau
ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete

er hetzt seine Rüden auf uns er schenkt uns ein Grab in der Luft
er spielt mit den Schlangen und träumet der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith

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 Mauthausen Concentration camp, 30 June 1942:
an orchestra of inmates

Although the work is titled a fugue, there is no literal manner of reproducing the musical form of
fugue in words; the title must therefore be taken as a metaphor, the phrases and rhythms of the
work paralleling the introduction and repetition of musical themes.

Rhythm is a strong element of the work, which in its Romanian and German typescript versions
was called Death Tango; the poem is structured to give a strong impression
of dactyl and trochee rhythms. These are brought out in the poet's own reading of the work, which
also varies speed, becoming faster at moments of tension and slowing dramatically for the final
lines.

While the events which emerge for the poem strongly evoke aspects of life (and death) in the
concentration camps, other references are more indirect. "Margarete" may evoke the heroine
of Goethe's Faust, whilst "Shulamith" (the female version of the Hebrew name Solomon), is a
figure who appears in the Song of Songs, where she describes herself as "black, yet comely" (Ch.
1 v. 5). The two figures may thus stand as metaphors for Germans and Jews.

There is extensive evidence of Nazi concentration camp orchestras being created from amongst
the prisoners and forced to provide entertainment for their SS gaolers. However, the victims in
"Todesfuge" being forced to make music and dance for "Him" also recall the exiled Jews in
Babylon being asked by their captors to sing (Psalm 137 v. 3; "For there they that carried us away
captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of
the songs of Zion"). Moreover, in the specific context of German poetry, they recall the slaves
in Heinrich Heine's poem "The Slave Ship" being forced to dance by the mercenary captain.

The recurrent themes, encoded content and dialogic constructions demonstrate Celan's tendencies
towards hermeticism.

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