This week’s Torah commentary, written by Hebrew Seminary Rosh Yeshivah Rabbi Jonah Rank, has been sponsored anonymously.
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Landing a summer smash with their single “Wonderful,” the Portland-based rock band Everclear released Songs From an American Movie Vol. One in July of 2000. The album art, displaying the trio holding upright acoustic string instruments in front of a pink house, imperfectly imitates Grant Wood’s iconic oil painting American Gothic, prominently featuring a pitchfork-holding farmer and his wife in front of a house. The suggestion of hope or a happier future deviated from other previous hits from Everclear, such as their passive aggressive “Father of Mine” or their actively aggressive “Everything to Everyone.” None of those old songs seemed to share much in common with the sounds of the new album, with its lighthearted humor of “The Honeymoon Song” or the lead singer’s tribute to his daughter in “Annabella’s Song.”
Whether or not any of these brighter sounds or orchestral arrangements that Everclear embraced that summer would stick around for long became clear when, four months later, the band released the rest of this particular song cycle in Songs From an American Movie Vol. Two. Fans who had been loyal to this band who had debuted as a grunge outfit could easily latch onto the pessimism and loud distorted electric guitars that overwhelm most of this musical sequel, subtitled Good Time For A Bad Attitude. Still, this second album ends with a heavily acoustic song that mostly replicates the cheerful opener of the first volume and concludes with an anguished singer ambiguously stating, “Sometimes I am happy just to be alive.” The listener might wonder: Through all the rage that hides in the first album and blasts its way through the second, had Everclear truly ventured into a soundscape of optimism and joy?
As humans, we rarely get to articulate the fullness of our feelings. It is only natural for us to develop opinions about any of life’s happenings. Those of us who have been told we talk too much probably haven’t finished saying what we set out to say. Those of who talk too little probably have a hard time covering the points we keep thinking over. Perhaps the most difficult emotional state for us to convey though is ambivalence—when we do not feel just one emotion, but we find ourselves of two minds (or more).
At the onset of Tish’ah Be’Av, Jews around the world gravitate towards the enigmatic Book of Lamentations, recited usually at nighttime, and sometimes in the morning, of this fast day. The English title Lamentations feels mostly appropriate—but with some caveats. It is not clear that the laments that permeate this book are actually connected with one another. This is not the Book of a single Lamentation, but a Book of Multiple Lamentations. The hands who put together this sacred scroll had far more than one complaint to issue—and the totality of them do not always add up to a single cohesive lament.
When we chant Lamentations, we sometimes express our pain amidst utter desolation (for example, 1:1 and 1:13), but sometimes Lamentations tells us that there are passersby to witness us (namely, 2:15 and 5:6). Similarly, Lamentations sometimes places the blame for the destruction of our Temple in Jerusalem (circa 587 B.C.E.) on unnamed non-Israelite nations (for example, 2:16 or 3:46), but even more often the accused is God (such as 2:1–9 or 4:11), and often our text identifies the ones who wronged us as our very own people (like in 4:3 and 4:10). Sometimes we see ourselves as deserving this unhappy fate (for example, 4:6 or 4:13), but we also ask God to punish other nations for their evildoings against us (3:64–66). Although the majority of Lamentations comprises, appropriately, actual words of lament—by my own counting, 36 of the Book’s 154 verses have no such lament whatsoever.
Why does this level of discord color Lamentations? We do not know for certain if all the verses of Lamentations were written by a single poet in a single burst of brilliance that resulted in the occasionally disjointed poetic work we have today. Rather, is it possible that Lamentations is the product of several poets whose short words of lament existed long before an editor decided on the best order to glue them together into a collage?
The idea that Lamentations anthologizes the laments of ancient poets of lament feels compelling to me. Inasmuch as not every subsequent verse seems to flow neatly from one into the other, I am intrigued by the idea of multiple ancient Jewish poets gathering at an oral call for submissions to a new poetic collection of responses to the tragedy of Jerusalem’s destruction. Chapters 1–4 of Lamentations read as alphabetical acrostics—each verse beginning with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Because 3 short verses for each of Hebrew’s 22 letters make up Chapter 3 of Lamentations, these folk poets would have been offered, in total, 3 chances to compose a long verse beginning with any letter, or 3 chances to compose a short verse beginning with any letter. (Chapter 5, with no alphabetical scheme, allowed the verses that were too good to exclude but could not fit naturally into the first 4 chapters.)
Most impressive, however, were the submissions that were not just individual verses but strings of verses, each integrating a subsequent letter of the alphabet. The majority of Chapter 2 appears to have honed in on a single message of highlighting pain and attributing the worst of it to God’s actions. Likewise, Lamentations 3:27–42 appears to be its own unit; its author must have grown uncomfortable with the majority of Lamentations’ ire towards a God who abandoned, broke, and appointed others to join God in destroying Jerusalem. These 16 verses preach that the mourner not reprimand God, for it is possible that this catastrophe was caused by human hands and that God may later demonstrate God’s mercy towards us. Similarly, whoever wrote all of Chapter 3’s letter Shin verses (61–63) kept the focus clear on how terrible the enemies were to the Israelites, and the author of Chapter 3’s letter Tav verses (64–66) also maintained a distinct voice in demanding retribution (64–66); maybe they were composed by one and the same poet.
We may be able to glimpse layers of different poetic urges that peek through the cover of our now redacted Book of Lamentations. The witnesses to Jerusalem’s destruction may have disagreed with each other over who was to blame and what it felt like, but the clearly dominant response was to lament. But certain verses appear to be a reprieve from the depressive state of Lamentations. Is it possible that a moralistic allegory that appears in Lamentations 3:27–42 was written by the same author as the rest of Lamentations? The dissonance between this passage and various verses that accuse God of mercilessness (namely, 2:2, 2:17, 2:21, and 3:43) should force the reader to question whether the entirety of Lamentations should be read as a unified message or as a conglomerate of responses to national tragedy.
To pay close attention to each of Lamentations’ diverse trends in thinking, I opt to read every phrase in Lamentations as its own micro-poem in isolation. Most readers might prefer to read whole streams of verses that should flow one into the other, overlaying old ideas with new ideas—like new waves that leap upon old tides rolling back into a roaring ocean. Maximalist readers will likely prefer to read the verses of Lamentations not as isolated units but as heaps of images gathered together by the reader listening for the echoes of all the previous verses.*
Regardless of how many hands ultimately penned Lamentations, we know of a few devices that authors in ancient Israelite society employed to emphasize their most urgent ideas. Just as it is near the center of the Book of Leviticus that such crucial ethical laws as being fair in a court of law (Leviticus 19:15) or loving to our neighbors (19:18) appear—it was a common ancient practice to place near the center of a work the most important takeaways. Therefore, when reading Lamentations, we should take special care to note that even the authors of this book depicting the collapse of a sacred society asserted near the middle of Lamentations “כִּ֣י לֹ֥א יִזְנַ֛ח לְעוֹלָ֖ם אֲדֹנָֽי׃” (“that God does not reject eternally”) (3:31). There may be a future even when we cannot imagine one.
A related trick of any creative individual nowadays or at any moment in history is to state one’s point upon concluding. The Book of Lamentations muddies this strategy by having two different endings. The second-to-last verse—with a hopeful undertone—asks God to “return us” and to “renew our days as [the days of] old” (5:21), but the actual last verse declares that God has utterly spurned us (5:22). The common Jewish practice to conclude the Book of Lamentations by reciting again the second-to-last verse after reading the actual last verse suggests that our spiritual forebears rejected the idea that Lamentations was all about the lamentations themselves. Could Lamentations be this despicable sacrilege work that addresses God in the nastiest of ways? The whole purpose of Lamentations becoming holy to our people must be the reminder that—despite most verses teaching otherwise—God still needs us. We believe that God, who “does not reject eternally” (3:31), will come back to us and not throw us away with the ruins of a discarded social order.
In the end, is the Book of Lamentations a scroll recounting destruction or an inspiration for better days ahead? Lamentations is an anthology of poetic ambivalence. Lamentations does not have an ever-so-clear distinction between an acoustic Vol. One and an electric Vol. Two. Lamentations expresses its ambivalence much more subtly. Chanting Lamentations places us in the seat of its redactor who tried to muster up a prophetic vision in an overcast age of clouded foresight. Tragedies like the decline or the destruction of a society should lead us to emote deeply—even if we might never find the exact words that prove our point. But we must be able to rise from the ashes of mourning and be prepared to believe that there is a God who will welcome us back again, to support us as we seek meaning and rebuild after tragedy.
*How to break down—or whether it is appropriate to break apart—the Book of Lamentations into smaller units will inevitably lead to disagreements. I nonetheless have provided below a chart for readers who wish to understand better Lamentations’ littlest thoughts (and thoughts interrupted and resumed), at least as I understand them. For reasons mentioned above, some may legitimately argue that more verses should be read together as larger intentional literary units. Others would correctly argue that I neglected to break down verses into units even smaller than verses. Despite that traditional and critical scholars of the Hebrew Bible have done so, I opted here not to split verses into halves, thirds, quarters, or other fractions.
| RHETORICAL PURPOSE | LAMENTATIONS VERSES |
| Pain of Suffering | 1:1, 1:5, 1:11–12, 1:16, 2:10–14, 3:17, 3:19–20, 3:47–48, 3:51, 3:54, 4:1–2, 4:4–5, 4:8–9, 4:14, 4:18, 5:3–4, 5:9–10, 5:13–15, 5:17–18 |
| Pain of Suffering with Strangers as Witnesses | 2:15, 5:6 |
| Pain of Suffering with God as Witness | 2:18–19, 3:55–56, 4:17, 5:1 |
| Terror of Human Non-Israelite Enemies | 2:16, 3:46, 3:52–53, 4:21 |
| Terror of God | 4:11 |
| Terror of God and Human Israelite Enemies | 4:16, 5:5 |
| Terror of Human Non-Israelite Enemies and God | 2:17, 4:19 |
| Terror of Human Enemies, Non-Israelite and Israelite | 4:15, 5:8 |
| Pain of Suffering with Terror of Human Non-Israelite Enemies | 1:2–4, 1:6–7, 1:10, 1:13–15, 1:19, 4:20, 5:5, 5:11–12 |
| Pain of Suffering with Terror of God | 1:18, 1:20, 2:1–9, 2:20–21, 3:1–13, 3:15–16, 3:18, 3:43–3:44, 3:49–50, 4:22, 5:2, 5:20, 5:22 |
| Pain of Suffering with Terror of Both God and Non-Israelite Enemies | 1:9, 1:17, 1:21–22, 2:22, 3:14, 3:45, 3:60–63 |
| Pain of Suffering and Terror of Possibly (i.e., Ambiguous) Israelite Human Enemies | 1:8 |
| Pain of Suffering with Terror of Definitely Israelite Human Enemies | 4:3, 4:10 |
| Guilt of the Israelites | 4:6, 4:13, 5:7 |
| Nostalgic Praise for the Israelites | 4:7, 4:11 |
| Praise for God | 3:37–38, 3:57–58, 5:19 |
| Moralistic Advising or Allegorizing; Reframing the Fear of God | 3:27–36, 3:39–42, 3:59, 5:16 |
| Asking God to Punish Enemies | 3:64–66 |
| Concentrated Hope or Ask for Peaceful Future | 3:21–26, 5:21 |
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