Dcn Leah Sandwell-Weiss

NOTE:  The content of this Daily Bread may be disturbing as it contains references to war, violence, and sexual assault.

Lamentation:  the passionate expression of grief or sorrow

Jerusalem, Constantinople, Rome, London, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, My Lai, and now …
Bucha, Ukraine

Most of these names will be familiar to you. These are all places destroyed by war – on the ground and from the air. Soldiers using swords and knives, flame throwers and machine guns; airplanes dropping regular bombs, firebombs, and a nuclear weapon. Residents shot in the street, sometimes after having their hands tied and being tortured. In the last few weeks as images and statements about Russian actions in the Ukraine have been published online and in print, we have become witnesses ourselves.

One reaction to these events is to lament the toll taken on the people who lived in or near these places. One of the most famous of these laments is Lamentations; this book in the Hebrew Bible has 5 chapters, each a separate poem, describing the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E. The NRSV annotation to Lamentations tells us that “[t]he common theme of all the poems is the agony of the people, the apparent desertion of Zion by God, and the hope that God will yet restore a humbled and repent Israel.”

This morning’s Daily Office reading includes the beginning of the first poem/chapter in Lamentations, verses 1 – 2, 6 – 12.

How lonely sits the city
that once was full of people!
How like a widow she has
become,
she that was great among the
nations!
She that was a princess among the
provinces
has become a vassal.

This poem identifies Jerusalem as a woman, one whose husband has been killed and whose children have disappeared. Are they dead, captured, or just lost in the destroyed city? Verses 8-9 even describe her as a victim of sexual assault. Verse 12 says,

Is it nothing to you, all you who
pass by?
Look and see
if there is any sorrow like my
sorrow,
which was brought upon me,
which the Lord inflicted
on the day of his fierce anger.

Some of us have experienced this destruction directly  – as victims, witnesses, or perpetrators. We’ve read about it; almost all have seen pictures of it. What have we done with our experiences, our feelings, our anger and pain?

One thing is clear – it is ok to take these feelings to God. The author or authors of these poems put their pain and anger and despair and expressed it in poetry. Those who heard them added them to the writings collected in the Hebrew Bible. Jews recite Lamentations annually on the fast day of Tisha B'Av, mourning the destruction of both the First Temple (by the Babylonians in 586 BCE) and the Second Temple (by the Romans in 70 CE). In our tradition, readings from Lamentations form part of the Tenebrae service on Holy Wednesday and may be read at other services in Holy Week.

In his translation of the Hebrew Bible, Robert Altman’s conclusion to his Introduction to Lamentations provides an explanation as to why this work reaches us so directly:

[The author] repeatedly affirms his faith in a just God Who has punished Israel for its transgressions but Who in the end will redeem it and exact retribution from its enemies for their cruel excesses. [It is] a strong response to the historical circumstances for which it was framed while at the same time speaking to analogous situations in other times and places. Its catalog of horrors is something that, alas, we continue to see reenacted in various guises across the globe. … One readily understands why … Jewish tradition fixed the recitation of these five laments as an annual ritual, not merely in commemoration of the destruction of the First Temple or the Second, but also as a way of fathoming the ghastly recurrent violence that has darkened two millennia of history.

—Dcn Leah Sandwell-Weiss