On Eicha - 8/18/2024

They keep asking their mothers,

“Where is bread and wine?”

As they languish like battle-wounded

In the squares of the town,

As their life runs out

In their mothers’ bosoms.

The tongue of the suckling cleaves

To its palate for thirst.

Little children beg for bread;

None gives them a morsel.

Now their faces are smeared with soot,

They are not recognized in the streets;

Their skin has shriveled on their bones,

It has become dry as wood.

Today marks the 316th day of the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Everyday, the news from Gaza and the West Bank gets worse. As an epidemiologist, the piece of news I cannot stop thinking about is the rise of polio. After destroying Gaza’s infrastructure, and depriving Palestinians of clean water, Israel also rejected a two-week pause for a vaccination campaign. This level of cruelty is not new, and remains something that I cannot understand. It also feels almost ironic given what this week marks in the Jewish calendar. 

On Monday, Jews around the world commemorated Tisha B’av - or literally the 9th of the Hebrew month of Av. This is the saddest day on the Jewish calendar.  It is the day that Jews mourn the destruction of the temple and expulsion of the Jews from Israel in 500 BCE. This is not the only calamity that happened to the Jews on the 9th of Av. On this day in 1096, the first crusade started and 10,000 Jews were killed in France and Rhineland. On this day in 1290, the Jews were expelled from England, 1306 from France, and in 1492 from Spain. Heirich Himmler received approval for the “Final Solution” on tisha b’av in 1941, and Jews from Warsaw were sent to slaughter at Treblinka on Tisha B’av 1942. 

For the three weeks leading up to tisha b’av, Jews will read specific liturgy to prepare for morning. On the 9th itself, people refrain from eating or drinking and wearing leather. When you go to a synagogue on tisha b’av you are not greeted and you are not allowed to study torah because these are seen as comforting and not befit of mourners.  At synagogue, you gather to read from the book of Lamentations or in Hebrew - Eicha. Eicha comprises 5 chapters, each containing 22 verses and recounts the destruction of Jerusalem. It was written 2,500 years ago and is attributed to the prophet Jeremiah. According to the author, Jerusalem was destroyed and the people were exiled because the high priests turned their backs on the most vulnerable in society. The verses I began with come from Eicha. 

Eicha contains some of the most horrifying language in the Jewish liturgical canon. I have read this text before, and with every year of occupation, apartheid and genocide, this text feels less like a recounting of the past, and more like the Israeli government’s blueprint for Palestine. As I read Eicha this year, and saw depictions of rape, violence, distruction, famine and disease, all I could think of are all of the videos and accounts coming out of Palestine.

In my reading of the text this year, I was also seized with a sense of deepl irony that a nation mourning historic destruction is also hell bent on recreating this in the modern day. I could not imagine inflicting this kind of violence on anyone and also struggle with the idea that Judaism wants us to be vengeful.

In weeks past, I spoke about the great rabbi Maimonades and how he cautioned leaders against acting in anger and revenge. As a quick refresher, in the Mishneh Torah, which is regarded as the guidebook to actually living out Jewish law, Maimonides wrote:  A person who takes revenge against a colleague violates the Torah because [Leviticus 19:18] states: "Do not take revenge." Even though revenge is not punished by lashes, it is a very bad trait. Instead, a person should rise above his feelings about all worldly things, for men of understanding consider all these things as vanity and emptiness which are not worth seeking revenge for.”

That being said, there are aspects of revenge that are baked right into Eicha. At the end of the first chapter the narrator is quarreling with God. He says: 

Let all their wrongdoing come before You,

And deal with them

As You have dealt with me

For all my transgressions.

For my sighs are many,

And my heart is sick.

And again, we read of vengeance at the end of the third chapter:

God, give them what they deserve for their deeds

Give them anguish of heart, Your curse be upon them

Pursue tem in wrath and destroy them from under the heavens

In these verses, Jeremiah, or whomever wrote Eicha, is asking God  to enact this horror on other people. A small part of me understands how someone can harbor this kind of revenge fantasy, afterall, there does need to be some kind of accountability for such devastation. And at the same time, if your children are starving, and your streets are paved with blood would you really wish that on someone else?

Connecting to Tisha B’av has always been a challenge for me. I have never seen myself in diaspora from Israel. I do not have a connection or a desire to return to a sacrificial practice run by a hierarchical priesthood. But as I have read and re-read this text, and tried to ground my religious practice in my politics as opposed to the politics of mainstream Judaism, I realize that Eicha serves as an important warning for all of the poisonous ways that Empire seeps into the fiber of society. As Empires have grown, and entrenched their machinations into how we live, the cruel leadership condemns even the innocent to lives of hardship and death. 

The text is inherently anti-elite and anti-war. My hope is that Zionists, particularly Jewish Zionists, take some time to look inside themselves, and look at their texts critically. I want them to be able to see what they and their ideology have done. For as Eicha states:

Jerusalem has greatly sinned,

Therefore she is become a mockery.

All who admired her despise her,

For they have seen her in her nakedness, for what she is

And she can only sigh and recoil. 

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