Swapping Selichos: why should it make a difference?
As many of you have probably noticed, there’s a widespread custom to switch the selichos designated for the fourth day of עשרת ימי תשובה with those printed for the fifth day. Although that’ll only happen when the fourth-day selichos don’t happen to fall out on a Monday or Thursday. I recall this being the custom even in R’ Shlomo Miller’s kollel in Toronto.
Why would anyone care? After all, the purpose of selichos is to inspire and encourage our efforts to do proper teshuva in anticipation of Yom Kippur. Let’s leave aside for now previous discussions about how hurtling through many thousands of words of extremely difficult Hebrew(-ish) poems/riddles may not be optimally inspiring for everyone. But why should the inspiration only work on certain days?
Unless, of course, this isn’t about inspiration at all.
Among recent authorities, the best known source for the practice is שו"ת נטעי גבריאל. There, it’s suggested that the selicha of י"ג מדות - which is normally scheduled for the fifth day - should always be recited on a day on which we read from the Torah.
There is a footnote in שו"ת נטעי גבריאל attributed to שו"ת מלמד להועיל ס' קי"ח (which is unlikely to refer to the work of that name by R' Dovid Tzvi Hoffman) who cites many chassidic communities (along with the Telzer yeshiva) making the switch. But the reason given there is because an old custom to fast on the day when the selicha of י"ג מדות is said would be difficult to observe on a Friday. That wouldn't explain why this year we switched Monday’s reading for Tuesday’s. And it also wouldn’t explain the connection to קריאת התורה.
Given the general attachment to kabbala in the communities maintaining this minhag (very much including Telz), it seems likely that they’re assuming some supernatural leverage due to the confluence of this day’s selichos and קריאת התורה. Somehow, tuning into such a convergence will produce a stronger output.
It’s interesting that such a flagrantly kabbalistic practice - along with the mechanistic thinking that drives it - should have penetrated so deeply. I’m guessing that practitioners assume their teshuva will meet greater “success” when armed with such tools.
Which is especially strange when you consider that teshuva itself is a kind of “mechanical” process that the Torah (ישעיה נה:ז) actually explicitly advocates. Why would such a tried and tested tool need any extra help?