What's the Purpose of our Poetry of Horror?

Why bother reading poetry about the rubble of an ancient destruction of a city that has been rebuilt at least twice since?

Hello from the Harvard law school library where I am spending a few days at a conference and this seems an appropriate site for this conversation.

What’s the purpose of the lamentations of horror where there are horrors and there is rubble and terror happening right now -- burnt homes and grieving families in post October 7 Israel, hostages still captive, untold devastation in Gaza and the West Bank, ongoing war in Ukraine, cruelty and injustice in so many homes here at home in the United States?

On our Below the Bible Belt to read through the entire Hebrew Bible in 3/12 years we are now listening to the lamentations written 2,500 years ago in response to the biggest rupture that the Jewish world knew until that time - the siege, destruction and exile of Jerusalem and Judah by Babylon in 586 BCE. These five chapters of alphabetical anguish resonate these days in ways few of us could have imagined in the past.

But what’s the purpose?

Dr. Avivah Zornberg, a biblical scholar living in Jerusalem, wrote that

“The Book of Lamentations functions as an open wound in Jewish consciousness—an unhealed scar that insists on being felt, that draws us back into history so that we do not grow numb to its consequences.”

What are the consequences? That hate is real - and still here?

That internal strife is what got Jerusalem to collapse before and if we don’t watch out it may happen again?? That grief matters for reprocessing of our past, present and future?

My former professor at JTS, David G. Roskies, edited a powerful book called The Literature of Destruction - Jewish Responses to Catastrophe

It’s been cited a lot this past painful year+.

Roskies asks the same question, reflecting on the ritual use of Lamentations. Each year we fast on the Ninth of Av and chant this poem as mourners.

“Each year, we return to Eicha as if to a theater of suffering. But at what point does ritualized mourning become self-perpetuating trauma? Do we allow lament to be an engine of renewal, or do we become trapped in its echoes?”

These are important questions for ponder as we read through these lamentations for a few more days next week. As we also prepare to enter the holiday pour, which is both about the traumas of the past and the invitations to transcend them by turning upside down and imagining a world where we are each others Keepers. And i’ll end with one more quote -- from another important contemporary Jewish scholar -- the historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, In his seminal work, Zachor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, he wrote:

"The antonym of 'forgetting' is not 'remembering', but justice."

This is Shabbat Zachor -- the shabbat on which we remember the horrors that our ancestors lived through, how we survived.

Traditionally, this is to remind us to always be cautious of those who hate us and to remember the hurt. I want to offer a slight reframe, not without acknowledging, but there are many out there with hate in their hearts.

We are also taught to remember why we remember -- not just to honor the horror that our ancestors endured with resilience -- but what it may look like for us to keep fighting for justice, not to give up on each other’s hope, to transform as best as we can trauma - into healing, with and for as many of us as possible, beyond the old wounds, some still open, towards stronger scars?

Towards less laments and more laughs?

Perhaps this too is the purpose of these lamentations right now

May peace and poetry, healing and hope, grow. For all of us.

Thank you for joining me below the bible belt.

Shabbat Shalom.

Ramadan Kareem.

May peace prevail.