Jeremiah Lamenting the Devastation of Jerusalem (Rembrandt)
He is old; he has seen everything. Everything but this: the place he loved and cared for, the city alive with her markets and holy places, the mountains protecting her, God holding her in his arms – this place destroyed.
It’s not as if he hadn’t seen it coming. For years there had been signs of neglect, decay; a lack of foresight about how deep the threat was. Instead, the people had continued with their ordinary lives and petty disagreements while ignoring what lay just outside their borders. They didn’t want to see the hatred and the armies amassing. They prayed, but for all the wrong things: for wealth and fertility and worldly successes. They asked for protection for their loved ones, for healing. Sometimes it felt as if their prayers had been answered.
Jeremiah is old. His gaze is downwards, his head is in his one visible hand. His body is illuminated in the darkness.
Your ruin is spread as wide as the sea, he laments. Who can heal you? (Lamentations 2:13)
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Her ruin is spread as wide as the sea. In summertime, she glistens, her curvature welcoming the bathers who gather from the streets that surround her and the world surrounding that. She is famous as Jerusalem, the heart at the centre of the city’s light. I spent my childhood here on her steps; every rock and wave and building along the promenade takes me back to a magical world I had left behind. When I go there, I relive it all: the smell of hot salty chips with the inevitable grains of sand. The Pavilion, its gritty concrete floor unchanged. The Icebergs looming over her southern end where the waves are too strong and the rocks too close for swimming, where women were first allowed to go topless. The Surf Lifesavers, the North Bondi RSL, the triangle of grass with the children’s playground next to the Pavilion, the concrete bridge that leads from the street across the road from the primary school and weekend markets down to the promenade and the sand.
Devastated, now.
Littered with bullets and the blood of Jews celebrating a miracle in Jerusalem.
