Growing up in New York City public schools in the 70s and 80s, one would simply just not wear canvas sneakers. These verboten items of apparel were derisively called “skipsâ€. The unaware male student who breached this fashion taboo was subject to jeers and was most likely to suffer the gravest of schoolyard humiliations– being selected last when choosing sports teams.
Looking down at my canvas. sneakers during my father’s shiva awakened me to the fact of how much things had changed over the past twenty-odd years yet how much some things remained very much the same. Back then, wearing canvas sneakers was a clear marker, right or wrong, of a certain schoolyard stereotype. Now, wearing canvas shoes is also a clear marker but of one who is in mourning or in a state of solemnity. Now, as then, the “clothes make the manâ€. What we wear affects how we feel and how others feel about us. Funny how the world turns in such a way that the very item one would rail against his parent to avoid wearing is the same one he is now obligated to don to mourn that parent. These canvas shoes are heavy… with meaning.
According to Jewish law and custom, the shoe symbolizes our physical existence. Just as the shoe encases and protects the lowest part of the body and allows it to navigate the physical world, so too the physical body encases and protects the lowest level of the soul and allows it to live in and relate to the physical world. It used to be that each of the birchas hashachar (morning prayers),were recited in conjunction with a certain stage of awakening and preparation for the day. For example, after putting on clothing, the bracha of malbish arumim –blessing the One who clothes the naked– was said. The bracha specifically associated with donning shoes is sheasa li kol zarki—blessing the One who has provided me with all of my needs. We see from here that shoes, specifically leather shoes, are the ultimate paradigm of physicality. Our sages teach that one of the reasons that we don’t wear shoes on Yom Kippur is that on that Holy Day, we are considered as angels and angels, since they are purely spiritual beings without physical needs or desires, don’t wear shoes.
When G-d sees that a person needs to relate on a more spiritual and less physical plane, He commands him to remove his shoes. It happened to Moshe at the Burning Bush and Yehoshua when confronted by the angel of G-d. It happens to us on Yom Kippur, during Shiva and on Tisha B’Av. During these times, we need to realize that physicality must be ignored and that spirituality must be emphasized.
As we slowly and solemnly crawl toward another Tisha B’Av, it may make sense to focus on the physical/spiritual lesson that these canvas shoes teach us. We mourn for the loss of the two Holy Temples. But we are not mourning the loss of physical buildings. Remember, on Tisha B’Av we don’t wear shoes, we are ignoring the physical. As the Temples were the crossroads of the spiritual and physical worlds, we are mourning the spiritual loss of our actual proximity to G-d.
With the loss of the First Temple, we also suffered the loss of prophecy, the mechanism by which spiritual reality was voiced in our physical world. Such tragic losses have unfortunately catalyzed us to view the physical as true reality and the spiritual as a murky, irrelevant reverie.
G-d runs the world according to the principle of midda keneged midda. That means that we are punished or rewarded in accordance with the particular actions that we have taken for which we are being either punished or rewarded. If we truly wish to be rewarded with the return of G-d’s proximity, the return of the truly spiritual to our physical world, we must act in a way which begs for such reward. We must take the lesson of these canvas shoes beyond Tisha B’Av. We have to return our everyday focus toward the spiritual and away from the physical. It is not a once a year thing. It is an everyday, every opportunity thing.
May our continuing efforts to turn our focus from the physical to the spiritual lead to the exchange of Tisha B’Av’s shoes of mourning for Yom Kippur’s angelic footwear. Hey, I told you these shoes are heavy!
First published on August 2, 2006
Why doesn’t this Linn guy write here more often?
Re my earlier post:
Actually, I tap my feet while saying “asher heichin
mitz’adei gaver” (for whixh many have a nusach of “hameichin…”).
Re: my post in # 19
“e. Smaller families, where a man who dies without having fathered children doesn’t have a brother.” (This is a reason for fewer Chalitzah rituals today. In the past with larger families, the man who died without fathering children was more likely to have a brother.)
Judy wrote in # 16
1. A special shoe is used for the ritual of Chalitza, which is rarely performed nowadays. Chalitza is required to release a childless widow from her brothers-in-law so she can marry someone else (not a Kohen). My son once observed a Chalitza ceremony along with other Yeshiva bochurim and said it was something like a sandal with thin straps that laced up.
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At first I wondered about your statement about the rarity of this mitzvah “nowadays.” Then I came up with several reasons for its infrequency today.
Chalitza was most likely more common up to and including the 1950’s due to several reasons.
a. Most closely related to Tisha B’Av, childless women who survived the Holocaust while their husbands perished may have often required Chalitzah;
b. Deaths of young Jewish married men in wars prior to Vietnam (sadly still a frequent occurence in Israel);
c. Diseases and accidents claiming the lives of young married men;
d. Infertility, resulting in older childless widows;
e. Smaller families, where a man who dies without having fathered children doesn’t have a brother.
Unfortunately, there are cases where the family doesn’t know about this mitzvah or refuses to participate in it.
I have referred to childless widows, but the mitzvah is based more on the status of the man: he must not have ever fathered a Jewish child, and he must have a brother.
May it be Hashem’s will that the mitzvah of Chalitzah be one of ever decreasing necessity.
Those who share in the mourning for Zion are destined to share in its rejoicing.
And may it be the Divine Decree to convert our Taanis into a Moed, and that next Tisha B’Av 5771 with G-d’s Help we will feast together in Jerusalem rebuilt, resplendent, before the courtyard of the Bayis Shlishi.
Amen. Kayn yehi ratzon.
Thanks, David, for your worthwhile thoughts. One comment:
> It used to be that each of the birchas hashachar (morning prayers),were recited in conjunction with a certain stage of awakening and preparation for the day <
It still is the case ;-), although granted that, practically speaking, many may rely on saying the b'rachos at a Shacharis minyan. Personally,
I still say the b'rachos at home prior to Shacharis, although admittedly
I don't connect every single one with a particular act of getting dressed
(I do connect some, e.g. I tap my feet together when saying "she'asah li kal-tzarchi").
Shenir'eh b'nechamas Tziyon!
On Tisha B’Av 5770 I would like to add three narratives about shoes.
1. A special shoe is used for the ritual of Chalitza, which is rarely performed nowadays. Chalitza is required to release a childless widow from her brothers-in-law so she can marry someone else (not a Kohen). My son once observed a Chalitza ceremony along with other Yeshiva bochurim and said it was something like a sandal with thin straps that laced up.
2. Alexander the Great wanted to enter the Bais HaMikdash. The Jews knew he would grow angry on being told to remove his shoes. So they prepared costly slippers for him to wear, studded with valuable gems, while everyone else went completely barefoot. Instead of being angered, Alexander the Great felt honored.
3. After 65 years, the piles of shoes in Auschwitz are starting to deteriorate. Millions of dollars will be needed to preserve these shoes whose owners died in the gas chambers. What about priorities, though? Is this the most important use for Jewish dollars? Should we instead use the money to put new shoes on the feet of poor living Jewish children? Think of the Mesamche Lev shoe distribution each year in Yerushalayim, 60000 pairs of shoes to poor children.
4. One more narrative. Rabbi Akiva and his companions passed by the ruins of the Bais HaMikdash and saw a fox walking out of it. Rabbi Akiva laughed as the others cried. He saw that the fulfillment of the prophecies of destruction would also mean the eventual fulfillment of the prophecies of rebuilding.
Think of the shoes of the Muslims walking today, in the year 2010 of the Common Era, more than nineteen hundred years after the destruction of the Second Temple, going up the ramp next to the Wall and removing their shoes to pray in the Al-Aksa Mosque. Right now, Muslim construction workers on top of the Har HaBayit are busy building, working on a new addition to the Al-Aksa Mosque that will make it the largest mosque in the world, capable of holding over thirty thousand Muslim worshippers, who will call out in prayer five times a day facing eastward toward Mecca in the place where the Kohanim used to offer the Korban Tamid. Mounds of dirt and rubble uncovered during the building process are simply dumped in big garbage mounds outside the city. Think of the piles of Muslim shoes outside the Al-Aksa Mosque on the Har HaBayis today.
“According to Jewish law and custom, the shoe symbolizes our physical existence.”
When this essay is released again next year, I want to seen an exact source for this quote.
What a truly meaningful essay. Thank you so much. (I’m definately saving your pre-fasting recipe, especially since it includes my favorite foods!)
Thank YOU fo an amazing Tour De Force of shiurim, davening, etc. yesterday. The way you pulled that off while fasting proved that you shed the physical for the spiritual!
“So too the physical body encases and protects the lowest level of the soul”
The Nefesh HaChaim explains that @ the burning bush when Moshe was commanded to slip off his shoes/sandals he was not merely being told to assume the default shoeless-ness for consecrated ground (see comment 3) he was also being told that prophecy requires the casting off of his outer physical husk so that all components of his neshoma/core could commune with HaShem in a prophetic experience.
As for shoeless-ness on all consecrated ground: I remember hearing once (I believe in the name of the Ramchal) that shoes were only required to separate man from the post-sin cursed earth. Odom and Chava weren’t just naked in Gan Eden but barefoot as well! The idea that bare-footedness obtains in the Bais HaMikdosh is that the Bais HaMikdosh is the one place left on earth (before the Messianic era) that is still Eden-like i.e. exempt from the curse that afflicted the rest of the globe.
Yesterday at the JHC I elucidated some of the Kinnos. I was struck by a stitch in Rav Yehuda HaLevi’s kinnah (Tzion Haloh Tishalee- kinnah #36) that reads “It would be sweet to my soul to walk naked and barefoot upon the desolate ruins of what was once your inner sanctumâ€. The simple message of these lines is that the author would prefer poverty in the holy places to the relative comforts and wealth of his homeland. In light of your post it now occurs to me that a deeper level of meaning of the stitch might be that the Holy of Holies has never ceased to be Eden –like. There, as in Eden, being naked and barefoot does not connote poverty but the natural state of an ecstatic unfettered soul, primed for instant prophetic communions with HaShem, in a blessed, rather than cursed world.
Thanks for a thought provoking post and for all your efforts in organizing the coming Shabbaton.
Vis a vis canvas sneakers being cool – when I was a kid in summercamp, we diligently dirtied up our white keds ASAP. Now canvas sneakers are actually in style again – look how many variations there are of Converse on the market. Plus there are my daughter’s custom painted canvas sneakers – she’s an artist who does this for fun – for personalized sneakers, get in touch with me. Although she may not have time to do it before she leaves for seminary, I”H on 9/3.
Hope everyone had an easy fast – personally, I did much better yesterday then I did 3 weeks ago. We had a seudah of wild rice mixed with chinese veggies before the fast, I drank lots of water. And as is my custom, I broke it on Enterman’s cheesecake and coffee.
Until next time, oh handsome one……
You can ask Rabbi Schwartz if I am more handsome than thou:-)
If you want, paste thie following into it’s own topic window.
BTW, my feeding method before this fast worked excellent. It’s 7:14pm on Tisha B’Av and I’m only now just starting to get a little hungry.
Usually, I despise fasting and am ready to pass out from hunger pains and a headache by 2pm.
Here’s what I ate last evening:
8 pieces of sushi
2 avocados
2 bananas (10 minutes before the fast started)
1/2 cup of almonds and a bottle of water
All afternoon I noshed on almonds and drank about 2 bottles of water.
It is the miracle pre-fast technique. I highly recommend it for Yom Kippur.
Jeff
I had to leave after Kinos to pick up one of my daughters from babysitting.
I was the gabbai on the left side of the bima during the torah reading. (The handsome one)
David,
I was at the JHC all morning, until after mincha.
I asked Rabbi Schwartz if anyone from BeyondBT was there.
But you had already left.
I would have liked to meet you.
Next time,
Jeff
Thanks for a great post. Have an easy fast.
Jeff,
You are the Professor of Shoeology!
David, an awesome post.
However, I must take issue with your comments about canvas “skip” sneakers.
In the part of Brooklyn I grew up in, skips & decks were the choice of the most popular & coolest guys in the guido culture (which was the majority). Guidos were predominatly Italian, but there were plenty of Jewish & Irish ones as well. I can personally vouch for that.
If one didn’t wear skips or decks, then one would be abused & ostracized. If you wanted to be cool, you had to have Keds Decks! Only the “rockheads”, jocks & nerds didn’t wear them in neighborhoods like Canarsie, Bensonhurst, Sheepshead Bay, Howard Beach & Bayside:-)
And davka, we had to have new ones every 3 weeks so they’d be as white as snow.
Just thought I’d set the record straight:-)
May everyone reading this have a meaningful fast.
Thank you Ruby. I’ve been called many things before but never Wein-esque. I think I like it :)
“When G-d sees that a person needs to relate on a more spiritual and less physical plane, He commands him to remove his shoes.”
Yet another example is that the Cohanim were required to be barefoot when they performed service in the Beis Hamikdash, “the crossroads of the spiritual and physical worlds”.
David, your ability to derive deep meaning from mundane objects and events can best be described as Wein-esque.
Thanks, Amishav. Coming from you, that means a lot.
Have an easy fast.
David, as usual you have taken something rahter esoteric and brought it down to a level where I can understand it. Thanks for the thoughts as I get ready for Tisha B’Av.