History
The first source for a special status of the Three Weeks—which is also the oldest extant reference to these days as Bein ha-Metzarim—is found in Eikhah Rabbathi 1.29 (Lamentations Rabbah, fourth century CE?). This midrash glosses Lamentations 1.3, "All pursuers overtook her between the straits," interpreting "straits" as "days of distress"—namely the Seventeenth of Tammuz and the Ninth of Av.
Rabbi Isaac Tyrnau (who lived in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries) wrote in his book Minhagim, a record of Austrian customs, that haircuts are not taken and weddings are not celebrated during the Three Weeks. His opinion was cited as halacha by Moses Isserles in Rema on Shulchan Aruch, which is the foundation for most of current Ashkenazic practice.
Read more about this topic: The Three Weeks
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set in. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)
“The true theater of history is therefore the temperate zone.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)