Rav Avi: Welcome to Responsa Radio, where you ask and we answer questions of Jewish law in modern times. I'm Rabbi Avi Killip, speaking with Rabbi Ethan Tucker, Rosh Yeshiva at Mechon Hadar, a center for higher Jewish learning based in New York City. Hey, how you doing?
Rav Eitan: I'm good Avi, how are you?
Rav Avi: I am great! Many of us find ourselves praying in different communities on different occasions, and it can be confusing sometimes to figure out how our personal practice or the practice of the congregation that we're used to being a part of is the same or different from a congregation that we're visiting. And it's my sense that this question we're gonna answer today is hitting on that experience, of when you're in somebody else's community, and for some people it's even within your own community, about figuring out how to practice and what we should we be doing. So I'm really curious to hear the answer to this one. The question reads: "When I am in a congregation during a kaddish, should I stand or sit while the kaddish is being said? Should I just do what everyone else is doing?"
Rav Eitan: Yeah, I sympathize with this. I feel like I jump around also, to lots of different places with different practices on this. I want to actually separate out two things here. The first is kind of the answer to the standing and sitting piece, which I really want to do briefly, and then really the more interesting piece to me here is how do you either stand out or fit in when you're in a community? And I think kaddish is one of these very intense examples, but kind of can serve as a symbol for grappling with that issue more broadly.
There's a great summary, very thorough and scholarly, by Rabbi David Golinkin, on the question of standing or sitting during kaddish, and I'll just say very briefly, the older practice seems very clearly to have been to sit during kaddish, with the exception of one reference in Masekhet Sofrim, which seems like it might indicate that people were standing, and that's a hard-to-date kind of tractate that's not in the Talmud and it's not in the Mishnah, but was a very important early medieval source for particularly Ashkenazi practice in Europe later on. And that one source in Masekhet Sofrim and a few other midrashim that are quoted to support it end up creating an Ashkenazi practice that more and more aggressively moves towards standing during kaddish.
There's a great little Biblical hook for it, that in the Book of Judges when the judge Ehud performs his sort of sneak attack on the king of Moav, Eglon, and he tricks him by saying I have something private to tell you, and he says I have a word of G-d to share with you, Eglon the king of Moav then rises up on his feet, and this is used as a precedent for saying, well, whenever we're doing something sacred, something communicating with G-d in that way, if it was good enough for the king of Moav, it's surely good enough for us to stand.
Rav Avi: Well, that also seems to fit with modern cultural sense of when your teacher comes in the room, you should rise, or when the President of the United States comes into the room you should rise. That feels very congruous.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. So, I think it's, we can totally understand it, and it became very common in many Ashkenazi communities, but also important to remember that the earlier practice, and still the practice in most non-Ashkenazi communities and in a number of Hasidic communities is not to stand for kaddish. And in some ways a lot of us do this kind of halfway in that it's not really clear that for instance, the barchu that we say before Torah reading when different people go up for aliyot is really any different of a status than kaddish; it's, you know, calling on people to praise G-d's name in a very public way. And while there are some people who jump up for that every time someone starts their aliyah, it's very common for people to sit during that piece.
So there's a kind of unevenness, and you'll find some bridging customs -- already starting in the Middle Ages, we hear about people who would stand for a kaddish if they were already standing, but would sit if they were already sitting. So they'd just sort of, you know, gave the kaddish enough its due that they wouldn't deliberately sit for it after, let's say, if you were standing for aleinu they wouldn't then sit down for the kaddish that followed it, but they wouldn't bother to specifically get up for, let's say, a kaddish after an ashrei where they had been sitting already.
Rav Avi: So, the answer to the question, should I stand or sit, is this is actually a matter of custom, there isn't such a clear answer that is wrong or right?
Rav Eitan: That's right. And in that sense, the normal answer in contexts like that is you should do what your community practices. And this is where I think the way the questioner asks this is important, because then what becomes key is, well, what do I do when I'm in a community that's not my own, or if I live a kind of cosmopolitan jetsetting Jewish life where I'm betwixt and between communities or I find myself, you know, combining influences of different places, then how do I judge it? To the extent one is really in a community where there's, like, total chaos and everyone does their own thing, then I think it's fair to say, sure, you can do what, you know, feels like it's most comfortable to you, or what is what your home community did. The question becomes, though, what if you are a person who always stood for kaddish growing up, and then you end up in an environment where people sit, or vice versa. How should you behave?
Rav Avi: And what's interesting, particularly, about this question of custom -- because really, this question of do I follow my own custom or the custom of the community I'm in could come up in many places, but this one is so visible, it's so obvious if everyone in the room is sitting and you're standing. And in some senses, it's obvious when people are standing and you're sitting as well. There's just something very visible and noticeable about this one.
Rav Eitan: So what you just said is actually beautifully captured by the first text I want to share here, which comes from another kind of marginal extra-canonical tractate called Masekhet Derekh Eretz. Basically, you know, the tractate of behaving like a decent human being. And here's what the text says, it's really kind of an amazing text. A person should never be awake among those who are sleeping, nor sleeping among those who are awake, crying among those who are laughing, laughing among those who are crying. One should not sit among those who are standing, nor stand among those who are sitting. One shouldn't study scripture, you know, Torah, Tanakh, in the midst of people who are studying Mishnah, nor vice versa. And then it says here's the general principle: a person should not make themselves very different from the disposition, I would translate it as, of the people around them. Alright?
Now, this is an amazing text, before we get too nervous about the conformity that this is potentially imposing -- this is an amazing text, kind of framed in very halakhic language, that is saying you need to be very sensitive to your surroundings. And part of the way you should comport yourself is to look around and don't stick out like a sore thumb. When the mood is jovial, don't you go around and start crying and throwing everyone off in an emotional way, and vice versa. And, you know, what's great about this text for our question is, that extends not just to kind of the overt emotions of things like laughing and crying, but to the sort of implicit emotions involved in things like standing and sitting, sleeping and being awake -- these are all very meaningful postures and states of being that have to take into account our context.
Rav Avi: The thing that makes me nervous about this text is that it makes me wonder, should I just stay home if I'm different? Am I supposed to change to match the community, or does it mean don't be a part of community when you're in a different mode?
Rav Eitan: Yeah. So let's go to the second text, because I think you're not the only one who was nervous about it. The Talmud in Ta'anit tells us a story about the Babylonian sage Rav. And here's what happens. Rav goes to what seems to be a synagogue in a certain town on a public fast day, okay? The public fast day piece here seems to indicate a lot of people are there, and it's a kind of, you know, intensely emotional time, and one of the things that happens during the service he's at is everyone is falling down flat on the floor. They're doing nefilat apayim, what many people do today during tachanun, the kind of supplications after the amidah every morning, where you kind of do this little leaning over, maybe on your arm -- that used to be a much more dramatic posture of really going significantly down to the floor, much like, let's say, people still do on Yom Kippur, other times like that. And Rav is in a community where everyone is doing that.
But, the story says, he does not. Okay? So the image you should have is, in exact contradiction to the text that we just read, right, everyone is down flat, and Rav is standing up. The Talmud wants to know, first of all, just technically, well, why didn't he? Like why didn't -- you know, when in Rome, why did he not do as the Romans did? And they offer three different possibilities. One possibility is that, well, there's a law where it's forbidden to fall down flat on a stone floor. This goes back to an interpretation of a verse in Vayikra, in Leviticus, and it turned out that Rav had a section of stone floor right in front of him where he was standing in that synagogue.
Rav Avi: This sounds a little bit like an excuse to me.
Rav Eitan: Well… apparently no one else had it, he did. And he therefore felt it was forbidden for him to do what everyone else was doing. Why didn't he just move away from that place? The Talmud says he didn't want to bother people. Either it was very packed -- you know it was a public fast day, and he would have had to sort of elbow people out of the way -- or it might be that by the time he got there, he'd be starting later, he would delay things. Whatever it was, he felt uncomfortable, and therefore because there was no kind of permitted way for him to bow down there, he didn't do it. That's option one.
Rav Avi: So one way to read that option is, if you have some extenuating circumstance that makes it reasonable that you would be behaving differently than other people, that's reasonable. So his maybe the floor, but mine may be, you know, I have trouble standing or, you know, whatever the reason is. That's one reason why I might be doing something different.
Rav Eitan: Yeah.
Rav Avi: One legitimate reason.
Rav Eitan: That's right. Reading it even -- if we were to read it most conservatively, it minimally says well, when there's, like, a reason that would forbid you from actually behaving like everyone else, then we don't expect conformity. And I think your question implicitly is, how far could you push that? Let's come back to that in a second, because I think that comes out with some of the other dimensions here. So that's suggestion one of why he didn't go down. Suggestion two is interesting. More in the direction you're suggesting, not really a prohibition, but something else.
The Talmud suggests that maybe everyone else's practice was when they would do this sort of bowing down ritual, they would kind of go down on their hands and knees, but not fully extend and prostrate. Rav, however, had the practice that whenever he went down flat, he would fully extend his arms and legs, and prostrate. And that he couldn't do this on, in this version, the stone floor that covered the entire synagogue, because elsewhere there's sources that say, well, going down kind of on your hands and knees on a stone floor is okay, but to actually fully extend yourself on a stone floor is not allowed. And Rav said to himself, well, I could avoid the problem of going fully extended by just doing what everyone else is doing, which is this mini bow, but that's not my practice, and I don't want to depart from my usual practice, and if that's the choice, I'd rather just not bow at all. That's option two.
Rav Avi: So it's the classic, if I can't fully prostrate, I won't prostrate at all.
Rav Eitan: Yes, apparently pretty inflexible on that front. But I think we all know many people who are pretty stubborn around the way that they are used to doing things. So that's option two. And there, I think, following up on what you're saying, to the extent we reconcile this with the other text at all, it seems like having a kind of an established practice of the way you do things might itself in some way justify departing from the norm, even though it does seem like it's gonna be pretty disruptive. So we'll have to come back and sort of piece that together.
The third option is, no no no, Rav didn't bow down because Rav was a very important person, and important people, the Talmud says, are not supposed to bow down flat to the floor. Basically only if you're guaranteed, like, Yehoshua bin Nun, who the Talmud says bows down flat in front of an angel that comes to him -- here, very confident that G-d will answer you if you bow down flat to the ground, then you're allowed to, but otherwise important people should not be essentially, I think the idea is almost demeaning themselves in that way, by being flat on the ground with everyone else.
Rav Avi: That is a tricky one.
Rav Eitan: Yeah -- why, because it's self-policing?
Rav Avi: It's… you know, what's so interesting to me about that one is that I think sometimes when you're in a congregation, for example, where everybody is sitting and one person is standing, there is a sense of, what, does he think he's more important than the rest of us? Like, what does she think, she's holier, she's frummer than we are, she's more pious than we are, that's why she's insisting on standing even when we're all sitting? And this seems to be saying yes, exactly that, that is exactly what he's thinking in that moment.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. So I think your question there is exactly on the money, because this goes to now -- let's sort of take the question head-on. This is raised later by Rav Chaim Yosef David Azulai. He explicitly brings this story about Rav and the Talmudic discussion of it into dialogue with our Derekh Eretz text that we started with. So, how could Rav have stood among those who are sitting? And one possibility that was offered by an earlier sage was, well, Rav was important! Important people don't have to abide by the rules of context; they're allowed to stand out.
And it's interesting, Rav Azulai says I don't really buy that. He doesn't spell it out, but I actually think he's probably getting at something like what you're saying, which is if the point of saying that people, you know, shouldn't stick out is they should somehow let the people around them feel that they're taking note of them and kind of being conscious of them and what they're doing, it makes very little sense to say that important people have some kind of exemption from that, because that potentially triggers a whole set of reactions exactly like what you're saying, of when you deviate from that, then people will say oh, this guy thinks he's so important. Right? It only sort of reinforces in a dramatic way how different you are from everyone else. So, Rav Azulai basically looks, is gonna look for something else as a justification for why someone can stand out, because importance, I think he probably thinks, risks becoming self-importance.
Rav Avi: Yeah. I think modern American values pull in both directions on this. In one direction of saying no, everybody is important, and therefore everybody should do their own thing, and also in the reverse, of, you know, everybody's equal and nobody is more important than anybody else, and therefore everyone should conform. I could see it going in either direction, actually.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, no, it's a great point in how it sort of plays in the current reality. So Rav Azulai suggests two other ways of thinking about why Rav's case was different, and I find them actually very helpful for thinking these through. One, he says, maybe Rav was allowed to stand while everyone else was going down because people wouldn't really have noticed it. If you think about the average other person in the community, they're going down flat on the ground, they're not paying attention at that moment to whether anyone else is up, and if they get up and see that Rav is standing, they'll just think he finished earlier.
That is to say, the only reason that Rav allowed himself the leeway to behave differently from everyone else was because it basically would be undetectable. And that, I think, is one very useful way of thinking about how does a person potentially kind of maintain their own distinctive practice while nonetheless blending into a community. To the extent there is a way to do what you need to do without in a dramatic way disrupting the context, this reading would say, that's the way you should pursue it, in a sort of non-demonstrative way.
Rav Avi: We had an episode a while back where we talked about eating or people who actually need to eat on fast days, and I think we came to a similar idea, of if you need to eat on a fast day, then eat, but don't eat in the middle of shul around everybody, you know -- do it discreetly, in a way that people don't necessarily need to see or know.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, that's a great example. I think that's another perfect example of that kind of dynamic. So that's one. Second thing he says, which is really interesting, and goes back to what you were saying earlier: he says maybe a person is allowed to stick out from the context when it's for a principle, and you have a substantive reason for your behavior. And in this case, he says, Rav has such reasons. Now, that makes a lot of sense in the version that we read where his reason is, oh my G-d, it would be totally forbidden for me to bow down on this section of stone floor, which no one else has, but he equally asserts that Rav being able to say, well, it's my custom to always prostrate fully, and since I can't do that on a stone floor, I didn't want to deviate from my normal custom and I just didn't bow at all -- that is a good enough reason, Rav Azulai says, for him to be able to kind of defend his behavior as not demonstrative and non-judgemental, but just sort of maintaining his own personal tradition.
Now, part of what I think is implicitly being said here is if you're going to be different than everyone else around you in a way that's potentially disruptive to them, you ought to be able to have a reason that you can articulate for why you did that, that might persuade or might be able to contextualize your behavior for others. If you're just, I don't know, it's not how I, you know, saw it done so I don't feel like doing it that way, and you don't sort of have a sense of, no no no, this is my practice, it's how I was raised, then the context actually should weigh more on you, I think Rav Azulai is saying here. And that's an interesting way of kind of calling on people, to the extent they are going to manifest difference, to do it from a place of, well here's where I am, and here's why. At least in a context where the fear is that by being different you're jeopardizing some sort of communal moment.
Rav Avi: It's interesting -- I think that sometimes people have a feeling of cop-out, that they don't know enough, I'm not really, I don't know my practice, I'm just copying the person sitting next to me, and that makes it less legitimate. And what you're describing is really the opposite: it's to say no, doing what you're doing because the person next to you is doing it is actually a value, and unless you have some competing value, that's what you should be doing. And that's not a cop-out; that's actually totally reasonable and even laudable.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. It's, you know, if you were invited to do some group singing with people, you wouldn't break out into the song you wish they had chosen right in the middle of the song that everyone else was singing, right? You would sort of acknowledge, I'm actually here to do something as part of the group. And I think there's a sense in which the choreography of various things actually contributes in a meaningful way to that.
And on this specific kaddish question, just to sort of bring it back, what I would recommend as the concrete piece here is, I would say as a default, given the kind of very complex history of whether people stand or sit, I would say as a default, you should do as the Romans do. If you're in a synagogue where only the mourners stand for kaddish, then you should sit if you're not in mourning, and if you're in a synagogue where everyone stands, you should stand and not demonstrably stick out. That said, if you really feel yourself to have been either raised with a standing practice or to really in a deep way feel that that's really the right way to instill, you know, seriousness for this, and you're prepared when someone comes up to you at kiddush and asks you, hey, why were you standing, to explain that in a gentle and sincere way, then I think there's room for saying okay, we don't have to quash your different practice on this. But you should think through whether you really need to manifest it in this moment.
Rav Avi: Great. In some senses, I think this seems like it was a very long answer to a very short question, but I think perhaps the amount of attention we gave to the answer mirrors the amount of personal angst that people have in the moment where they're trying to decide, should I stand, what am I supposed to be doing here? So it's a perfectly reasonable way to answer this question.
Rav Eitan: Well, I hope it'll relieve some of that anxiety.
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