[Avodah] Report: Orthodox Weddings to Resume with "Approved Model" in New Jersey: Rabbi Aaron Kotler

[Chana Sassoon]

RMB writes:

>You remind me of how I felts during the Second Intifadeh on Shabbos
Mevorkhim. Everyone was crying over the people murdered by terrorists in the
latest that week. But we can not ruin Shabbos Mevorkhim by saying Av
haRachamim?!

No, this is the opposite of what was saying when I said ", it feels
intrinsically wrong, at least to me, to be  carefully avoiding weddings
during sefira due to a plague that  occurred nearly two thousand years ago,
and yet not be prepared to 
 defer such weddings due to our very own plague, right here and now."

The feeling you had during the Second Intifadeh on Shabbas Mevorkhim is the
feeling that many, many avelim have, particularly when their shiva is broken
due to the requirements of v'samchta b'chagecha.  The halacha is pulling in
one direction, while one's heart is pulling in the other.  It feels like
one's heart wants to go against the grain of the halacha.  It does not want
to be samachta, despite that being the mitzvah.

I am describing something very different.  The halacha (in the form of
minhag k'din) tells us that sorrow, most commonly attributed as being due to
a plague, is a reason to postpone weddings during certain days of sefira,
even though that sorrow happened nearly two thousand years ago.  Nowhere
does the halacha say that you MUST have a wedding on Lag B'Omer, or any
other day that is not considered to be part of the sefira prohibition.
Surely it would therefore be working *with* the grain of the halacha to say
that weddings are assur now due to our very own plague, from which so many
are suffering!  To technically avoid having weddings on the days of sefira
prohibited by minhag, but to have them on other days would seem to be saying
that the technical halacha is solely what is important, but that no messages
can be learnt out from it, even though the message is about as
straightforward and blatant as it would seem possible to be.  

>The broader question is how often hilkhos tefillah can get in the way of
the spiritual expression that should be tefillah itself. Why? And/Or what
should be do about it?

That is a very different question. It is a question, but a very different
question.  How can one say modim, when at the time, that is the last feeling
one has?  The halacha does acknowledge that, by banning an onen from saying
it, but it then demands that from the onset of aveilut normal davening
resumes, despite many, many aveilim not necessarily feeling they are ready.
And the same is true about your Shabbos Mevorchim. The message of the
halacha is that life goes on, even if one is not really sure one wants it
to, or in fact one is absolutely sure at that time that one does not.  It is
not wrong to feel contrary to the halacha in these circumstances.  Indeed
the tension may be exactly the type of dialectic that the halacha intends to
set up.  But I can't see any such dialectic being set up in our wedding
case. Can you not see the difference?

>Micha

Regards

Chana