Eicha!

The agonizing cry of grief from the Book of Lamentations echoes as Tisha B’Av arrives, as hostages remain captive, as the war goes on, as Israel still reels from the savagery of October 7

The seventh of October, in Hebrew sheva, seven, a grim play on the word shiva, the traditional seven days of mourning

And so it is the wail Eicha resonates over the fallen,
mourning catastrophic loss then, the temple destroyed not once but twice, the people exiled, and now

The immensity of grief, the maimed, the tortured, the dead,
the kibbutzim laid waste, the fields of flowers gone to seed
where young people danced and are now remembered with piles of stones and heaps of yahrzeit candles, wicks blackened

Where Israeli flags flap in the wind as we recite Kaddish
And praise Gd with the ancient words, even as we confront unconscionable evil.

And so it is that we are in Israel to gather with others to grasp the horror of October 7 the communal grieving making it even a little more bearable providing solace, finding a glimmer of hope in being together.

In finding others to process the enormity of the loss in poetry, in prayer, in song, in art, expressing profound pain and the possibility of healing

Poetic words capture the brutality, a tiny headstone of a day old baby, a flower to bloom but never grow, a hug to reassure a little one of life.

The haunting Song of the Ascent, the melodic prayer assuring that there is a ladder to lead us from the depths of despair to a higher place where spirits ascend with a glimmer of hope, of promise where “those who sow in tears will reap in joy”
And we are moved to find that stairway to the light.

We join together in song, 200 of us or more, swaying to the words of Oseh Shalom, beseeching the divine, “May the one who creates peace on high bring peace to us and to all of Israel.”

And my eyes glisten with tears.

And then a show of nature’s beauty, captured in precise images, a fitting memorial to an Israeli soldier felled in battle, his hand stilled, his stunning artwork a reminder of the unfathomable cost of war and the tragic loss of far too many

Reciting the words of the Kaddish, recalling those gone, yet remembering the greatness of Gd and sanctifying His name

And I weep

So it is the agonizing Eicha we recite now captures the pain and sorrow of tragedies past and present and also bodes of the promise of healing, the possibility of renewal.

Fields to plow, seeds to sow, flowers to grow
Babies to be born, children to be comforted
And prayers to be said, songs to be sung
And life to go on.

May it be so.