Q and A with Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb

Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb is the executive vice president emeritus of the Orthodox Union. He recently translated the Kinot for the Koren Kinot Mesorat Harav, a new translation and commentary on the Tisha B'Av services based on the work of Harav Joseph B. Soloveitchik. On Tisha B'Av (Tuesday, July 20) he will host his annual Kinot webcast on the Orthodox Union website (www.ou.org) live from the Young Israel of Woodmere.

Michael Orbach: What was the hardest part of translating the Kinot?

Rabbi Hersh Weinreb: In general, all translations are a difficult process: It's difficult to capture any author's meaning, the various levels of his meaning, the culture he's writing for and the audiences he's addressing. The Kinot are meant to have both intellectual meaning and an emotional impact. They're designed to make a person feel grief, mourning, horror and calamity. To convey that in another language is certainly the big challenge.

MO: What was the impetus for the new translation of the Kinot?

HW: We wanted a brand new translation that would convey the emotional impact. From the time I agreed to do [the translation], I did not consult any of the English translations available, I only used traditional Hebrew sources. I used the Mossad HaRav Kook, the Daniel Goldschmidt edition, which is the most authoritative version until ours. I also consulted some other Hebrew editions and I used a Yiddish translation, called the Evra Teich edition that I found it an old bookstore in Jerusalem.

MO: Did you try to capture the rhythm of the Kinot?

HW:  A few of the people that reviewed it have noticed that I tried very hard to keep the rhythm. I read every line or every phrase aloud to catch the rhythm, tempo and the meter. Sometimes I succeeded and sometimes I failed. The rhythm is an exceedingly important part of Kinot. The [Kinot] have a certain rhythm which makes them very different from liturgy like Selichot. The rhythm of Kinot is one that tries to subconsciously shock the person - an image or phrase that will make them feel the impact of the Churban [the destruction of the Temple].

MO: Which Kina was the hardest to translate?

HW: Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi's "Tziyon Halo Tishali." Rabbi Levi, unlike the other authors, is primarily a poet. He wrote volumes of poetry and he's considered to be the greatest post-biblical Jewish poet. He lived in the golden age of Spain; the poetry is so beautiful that to capture it is especially difficult. He writes in the Sephard style and that presents a special challenge [as well], since all the other Kinot are in the Ashkenaz style. Poets are influenced by their culture, including their secular culture. Ashkenaz [poets] are influenced by German poetry and Sephard [poets] are influenced by Spanish and Arabic poetry.

MO: Which Kina is the most meaningful for you?

HW: The most meaningful Kina to me is number 20 in our edition. It's the Kina where we ask G-d: How could you do this to us? Where were you? It begins "Hatae Elohi," "Incline your Ear My G-d." Kina means a lament; this also has that theme, but it's a prayer and it's a strong prayer, almost a demanding prayer. It's, "Okay G-d, we've had enough, now it's time for You to listen to us." It's very simplified, but it has a special meaning.

MO: Can you give us a brief history of the Kinot?

HW: There are different traditions in the Kinot. What we're referring to is the Ashkenaz version, Sephardim have a completely different version of Kinot. The Kinot were written over many centuries, and over time more and more Kinot were included, until the 18th century when it started to take the form it has now. Any one of the authors, and there are probably a dozen different authors of the Kinot we use, wrote numerous poems expressing their feelings of the Churban or other major catastrophes in Jewish history.

We include more of Eliezer Hakalir's poems than many others and it's a mystery just when he lived. According to some opinions he actually lived in the times of the Tannaim and was Eliezer, the son of Shimon Bar Yochai. That takes you back a hundred years after the destruction of the Second Temple. The more scholarly opinion is that he probably lived in the time of the 8th century. It seems pretty clear from the content analysis of his poems that he lived in Eretz Yisroel. Little is known about his life but he produced a massive amount of poems on a variety of topics. About 15 of his poems were incorporated into our Kinot. He focuses entirely on the theme of the destruction of the First and Second Temple. There are other Kinot on that theme [but] with a different spin, like comparing the destruction of Jerusalem to the Exodus from Mitzrayim. [Other Kinot] focus on a subsequent tragedy, like the First Crusade in 1096 and the Second Crusade that occurred in the 12th century.

There is a very famous Kina that deals with a still later historical event: the burning of the Talmud in the late 13th century. There are a number of poems that begin with Tzion and deal with the whole aspect of the loss of Zion and the return - they are all laments with some anticipation and hope. What is missing is any reference to the expulsions of the Jews from Spain, which is included in the Sephardic Kinot. There's no mention of the pogroms, the most famous, The Khmelnytsky Massacre, took place in 1648-1649 in Poland and the Ukraine. The Kinot take you up to the fourteenth century, but they do not deal with the Spanish experience and anything subsequent to that [time period]. The Kinot were written long before the Holocaust and we incorporated four Kinot on the Holocaust into the Koren edition.

In my presentation on the web, I include other Kinot that deal with the Spanish Expulsion, the Dreyfus Affair, the blood libels and the more recent things like terrorism in Israel today that are not in the historical Kinot but are a very important part of Jewish history. There are Kinot written on World War One and there are Kinot on the expulsion of the Jews from the Old City in 1948 and there is a Kina on the expulsion of Jews from Gush Katif.

MO: What exactly defines a Kina? Would Chaim Bialik's "In the City of Slaughter" be considered a Kinat?

HW:  It's a good point. Some of the authors of the Kinot are gedolai yisroel - Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi, the Maharam of Rutenberg - who are in the top 20 gedolei yisroel of the medieval times, but some of the authors we know nothing about. They may not have been great sages or rabbis and may just been poets. Any number of people who are not great rabbis or very observant wrote poems, Chaim Nachman Bialik is one, Uri Tzvi Greenberg is another. They all qualify as Kinot and they're important to read because they put us in touch with the historical memory. On Tisha B'av we're reading the Kinot in a shul so we try as much as possible to select Kinot written from a religious perspective. The poem by Bialik is controversial since it is a lament, but it is provocative since it questions G-d and it criticizes, or can be read to criticize, the passivity of the victims of the pogrom.

In our edition we include four kinot on the Holocaust. One was written by the Bobover Rebbe; another by Rabbi Schwab. The third Kina was written by Rabbi Abraham Rosenfeld. The fourth Kina is written by a poet, Yehuda Leib Bialer, a traditional Jew and a survivor of the Holocaust. He wrote several poems of the Holocaust that can be seen as Kinot. His Kina [in the edition] is modeled after the very last Kina, "Alei Tzion;" whereas, that Kina mourns the destruction of the Temple, Bialer mourns the destruction of European Jewry. There are a lot of Kinot but we try to focus on those that write from a rabbinic-religious perspective or at least from a traditional perspective.

MO: The new edition of the Kinot features commentary by Rav Joseph Soleveitchik, how would you describe his commentary? Would you say there is a unifying theme?

HW: As it's commonly known, the Rav would teach Kinot all day, every day, on Tisha B'av for 30 years and we have transcriptions of all of them. [Rabbi] Simon Posner did an unbelievable job of distilling them and now they're published as commentary on almost every verse of the Kinot. Did he have a unifying theme? His unifying theme was the experience, you might say, of what galut [exile] means to a contemporary Jew. He was able to express that because he was in touch with the traditional interpretations of galut, and in touch with contemporary Jewish traditions and many aspects of Jewish history, including the Holocaust and the State of Israel. That is what makes his commentary come especially alive. The Rav gives you a sense of the historical perspective and he relates it, time and time again, to the experience of his audiences and today's audiences.

MO: What is your favorite of the Rav's interpretations?

HW: In one of the Kinot about the Crusades, the Rav points out that one of the tragedies of the Crusades, beside the murder and eradication of whole communities of Jews, was the amount of Torah lost. The Crusades took place in the times of the Baalei Tosefos and the great Rishonim - hundreds of whom were killed in the Crusades. Rabbenu Tam was not killed, but he was severely wounded by the Crusades. I wonder if that affected his capacity to learn and teach. The tragedy of the Crusades was [also] the various Torah projects in draft form that were lost to us and the hundreds of victims who were outstanding rishonim.