Insights into Megillat Eicha

Dr. Esther Shkop Torah lecture series

Leaving the lecture on Sunday night Miriam and I felt as if we started Tisha B’Av early this year.  To say that it was chilling would be an understatement.  Being raised by a couple of child WWII survivors who in 1980’s were mentally living in 1942, do I need this chilling reminder every year of what our people went through?  Do the wounds of my soul need to be reopened again and again, does it have to relive all these horrendous moments, days and years of torture and insane deprivation?  I remember being a day dreamer as a child, focusing on the beauty of nature, losing myself in a beauty of a flower or a cloud, or a blade of grass glistening in the rain.  Later I learned to be engrossed in beauty of the written word, harmony of mathematical theories, awesome and infinite beauty of G-d.  Yirmiyahu had his moments of sublime allegory talking about glistening spills of blood on cobblestones, shining like jewels in the sun on the road of exiles, when the earth was paved with blood.  He went to look closer and in the blood there were footprints of little children’s feet as they were led to captivity.  He fell on the ground and kissed the footsteps in the glittering blood, and he followed the trail to the camp, where he hugged and tried to comfort the survivors. 

He found thumbs and big toes on the road – the captives will be used for hard labor, without the thumbs they won’t be able to do any fine work, and without big toes they won’t be able to run away.  He collected and buried them. 

Yirmiyahu was the lone man of Eicha Chapter 3.  He was born a Kohen, part of the family that was banished from Temple service by King Shlomo for siding with Avshalom during the latter’s rebellion against King David.  The family lived in Anatoth, east of Beit Lechem, where Rachel Imeinu was buried.  (We were there jeep-tour!) Yirmiyahu would go to Jerusalem to collect taxes due Kohanim even if the family was not engaged in the Temple service, but they were also shepherds who lived on the edge of the desert. 

Yirmiyahu never married, because Hashem told him that his children would be slaughtered.  He was all by himself, absolutely lonely.  He was chosen to be a prophet against his will.  His prophesies were highly unpopular, his message that Yehudah had no chance against the Babylonians, they could only submit.  He was treated as a traitor, he was tortured, imprisoned, hung upside down on a rack. He was put in a bowl, a pit wide only as a human being, where he could only stand in his own filth. They tortured but did not kill him, because he still had a stature of a holy man.

He hoped that his visions were false, that he would be like Yonah, that his scary words will bring teshuvah, repentance, but it did not happen.  The king of Yehudah had torn and burned the scroll of the prophecy, from which only part was rewritten as megillat Eichah.

Yirmiyahu was on his way to Yerushalayim when he raised his eyes and saw smoke coming from Beit Mikdash – this gave him hope that people did teshuvah and brought sacrifices on the altar.  And then he saw that the city was closed off, barb-wired, and he screamed to G-d – why did you seduce me with hope? Where are they taking them, let me join, I want to be with them!

Babylonians treated him as a hero, because he urged Jews to give up fight, his prophecy was discouraging, hopeless, no one listened to the message about repentance as no one believed it was possible.

The Babylonian king was willing to accommodate Yirmiyahu and let me live among exiles.  Yirmiyahu saw this as his mission to go with them and comfort the survivors.  But Hashem told him that if he goes to galut, then His presence will stay in Yerushalayim, one of them has to remain among the ruins.  So Yirmiyahu said – I’ll stay, and left the exiles, turned around and went back, to their great dismay.  He returned to Yerushalayim so that G-d’s presence, Shehinah, went with the exiles, and has accompanied Jews ever since. 

Eicha means how, why, how come, how did this happen, to what end – the eternal question of the Jews, forever relevant until Mashiach comes.  Three prophets used this expression in Tanach – Moshe, Yeshayahu, and Yirmiyahu. 

In chapter 1 Yirmiyahu describes Yerushalayim as a woman, a widow but not quite, a mother bereaved of children, all alone.  The word for widow, almanah, comes from the word ilem- mute, the extra letter nun turns this muteness into a craft, a profession.  Being a widow (or a widower) is to learn silence – no one to talk to about your day, telling of everyday life, sharing small details that bond.  Jerusalem is like a widow, whose husband has gone away.  Chapter 2 speaks of G-d who has married the Jewish nation and gave us all love and kindness, and now became an enemy. 

In chapter 3 it is the lonely man speaking, with G-d against him.  This man speaks for the entire people of his suffering, as a chance to cleanse him, call for teshuvah, for change in character. 

The narrator of chapter 4 is a witness of history, author of the scroll written to foretell, then burned and rewritten.  He describes the events and demands vengeance - we were punished for our sins, but we received more than we deserved, no sin can possibly justify that kind of suffering.  He demands justice against the enemies of Zion.

Chapter 5 is a survivor’s tale, the description of horrors, the cannibalism, and the story of remnant’s suffering and humiliation.  It ends with a plea to take us back.

From megillat Eicha we learn that a woman should not be without a ketubah.  Shir haShirim is a ketubah between G-d and Israel.  Yalkut Shimoni speaks of a widow who takes out her ketubah to remember how much her husband had loved her - when she reads it, it gives her hope, and with renewed strength she is waiting for him to come back.  In the Midrash when He returns He’d accuse her of betrayal and she would ask ‘who else would want You?’  That’s right, what other nation would put up with that much suffering and still retain the love, longing and hope. 

The image of kruvim that don’t look at each other, as if angry at one another, but they are stuck, cannot get away from one another in eternal struggle – like it or not, a Jew is always a Jew, whom neither beauty nor riches can exempt from the status of an outsider.

The megillat Eicha has a remarkable format of an acrostic.  Each of the 22 verses of chapters 1, 2, and 4 starts with the next letter of aleph-bet, while chapter 3 that has 66 verses goes in a series of 3 verses in a row starting with the same letter – א, א, א, then ב, ב, ב, all the way to ת

In each verse the sound of the first letter reverberates throughout the verse.  The last chapter 5 does not go in the alphabetical order anymore.  This is the chapter written by the survivor, in whose eyes the world is seen as a chaos.  The aleph-bet presents the building blocks of the universe, until it returns to the void, with letters placed seemingly without order, but even that last chapter still has 22 verses, the same number as the letters in aleph-bet, as if hinting at the potential of harmonious order.

The flow of the letters is something remarkable, with the words chasing each other.  It is the ancient code that the popular book The DaVinci Code refers to, where the letters switched to create the code, one of the oldest codes, atbash.  Some verses in Gemara that seemingly don’t make much sense are written in that secret code.

Yirmiyahu stayed in Jerusalem with the small remnant of peasants left to work the land.  He managed to gain some measure of autonomy for religious purposes, with sacrifices brought on the altar, and Gedaliah as the governor and religious leader, only to see this all destroyed again and Gedaliah murdered on Rosh Hashanah.  Yirimiyahu went to Egypt, and the Zohar says that he was the gilgul, reincarnation, of Moshe Rabbeinu, who had nowhere else to go but to the land where he came from.

Suffering comes as a result of our sins, our desire to get away, our drive to estrangement.  Hashem may punish us with the full force or turn away, like a parent turning blind eye to a child harming himself in a process of autonomous growth.  He turns away and removes His Providence, lets us to the vagaries of history, lets us be on our own as we wish, while the forces of nature and history are unleashed against us. 

We are a historic anomaly; we had no reason to survive.  If you call yourself a Jew, it means that generations before you withstood suffering, discrimination and unbearable persecution.  We are the daughters of incredible heroes. Great many left, jumped the ship.  We have a claim on G-d, because we and our ancestors did not leave, we remained Jews despite all odds.  The book of Eicha has interwoven faith that G-d’s love for us is greater and will overcome the attribute of justice.  G-d is the source of all events that occur in our lives, and also the source of our hope. 

We grew up in a Christian culture with a notion of nobility of turning the other cheek – there is nothing noble about this.  Eicha expresses the desire for vengeance.  Our children and grandchildren, walking with pride, are our vengeance.  We are children of heroes, walking without shame.  Walk with pride, so that our enemies will cry and our friends will rejoice.  It is time to stop being ashamed to be a Jew, and that will be our vengeance, nikomen.

The sources used by Dr. Shkop included Midrash Eichah Psichta D’Rabati, Midrash Tedashe, and Yalkut Shimoni.