The Shameful Celebration

Meat and wine are forbidden during the Nine Days leading up to Tishah B'Av, so only an important celebration can override the rule. The festive meal after a bris, or one marking the completion of a masechta, can qualify. Every year on the fifth of Av, the yahrzeit of the Arizal, Rav Yissocher Ber of Radoshitz finished a masechta of Gemara and held a seudas mitzvah with meat and wine. Each year he told the assembled chassidim and talmidim the same story.

In a distant town lived a man so fond of sleep that people called him the Sleeper. Elul came, and every Jew trembled and woke himself to teshuvah, but the Sleeper slept on. On Rosh Hashanah his wife went to shul early. During the morning davening she hurried home to nurse her baby and tried to rouse him, but he did not stir. She came back several times, with no result. Finally, as the Torah reading began and the shofar drew near, she ran home weeping and cried out, "They are about to blow the shofar."

He sprang from bed, threw on some torn clothes still covered in feathers, ran to shul and burst in gasping, still half asleep. The worshippers stared at the comic sight, and some, not only the children, laughed. The poor man was so mortified that his burning shame rose before the Heavenly Court, which ruled that his shame had cleansed him and all his sins were forgiven.

"So it is with us," the Sabba Kadisha would conclude. "We sit down to a festive meal in the depths of mourning for the Beis HaMikdosh. This is so shameful that, because of it, the Merciful One should forgive the sins of all Yisroel." With that heartfelt plea he wept so hard that his tears fell into the cup of wine over which he was about to say Al Naharos Bovel, the psalm of the exile, before Birkas HaMazon.