By Cantor Sidney Ezer:
On Tisha B’Av we read the book of Lamentations (Eichah) mourning the destruction of the Temple and subsequent exile into Babylonia. The Hebrew word אֵיכָה (Eichah) can mean “Alas” or “How.” Opening the sorrowful book with the word Eichah, the prophet Jeremiah decries Israel’s calamities and asks “How,” as if to say: “HOW could this have happened to you? HOW could you have let this happen to yourselves? HOW could you have been so blind that you wantonly transgressed and pushed God to abandon you, when all God wanted was closeness with you?” There is a connection to this week’s Torah portion Devarim, which also contains the word Eichah. In Devarim 1:12, Moses asks: “HOW can I myself bear the trouble of you, and the burden, and the bickering.” Here, Moses rebukes the Israelites for their past transgressions. He reminds them of their past rebellions and the consequences they faced. He particularly highlights the sin of the spies delivering a false report in scouting the land of Canaan. He rebukes future generations to avoid making the same mistakes.
The word Eichah also appears one other time in the Torah, at what must have been the most catastrophic and tragic error in the history of humankind. In Genesis 3:9, after Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, God calls out to Adam, אַיֶּֽכָּה (Ayekah!) “WHERE are you?” According to Kabbalah, before the fateful transgression, Adam’s level of consciousness was so spiritually elevated that his perception enabled him to have a Divine understanding of all of creation. Surely God was not merely asking Adam’s location in the Garden. God asked Adam, “WHERE are you?” so that Adam might ask himself, “Where am I in relation to God?” The question was whether Adam had changed, whether he regretted what he had done. Yet Adam’s response evades the truth: “I heard the sound of You (i.e. I obeyed You) in the Garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.” (Genesis 3:10) Adam refuses to take responsibility for his actions. What if an elevated being like Adam had chosen to hear God’s real question and simply admit and confront what he had done?
One permanent fixture in the Jewish calendar is that Parashat Devarim is always read on the Shabbat before Tisha B’Av. The linguistic and thematical connections between Devarim 1:12 and Eichah in Lamentations clearly illustrate that this is not merely a calendrical coincidence. Furthermore, Jeremiah’s exclamation of Eichah (Alas!) in the book of Lamentations gives voice to God’s cry and connects us with God’s first question of Ayekah in Genesis 3:9. “WHERE are you now? HOW did you stray so far? HOW did you miss the point of life, and your purpose within creation?” It is during these first nine days of the month of Av and on Tisha B’Av itself that we confront the issue head-on.
The formative and formidable challenge of Tisha B’Av is the word Eichah, the first word of the book of Lamentations: “Alas, how she (Jerusalem) sits in solitude” (Lamentations 1:1). This is our challenging question to God after the destruction of the Temple and in other times of calamity: “HOW could this happen? HOW could God let this happen?” But the Hebrew letters also spell Ayekah, which is God’s challenging question to us: “WHERE are you in these fateful times fraught with possibility for redemption?”
So how do we hear the Eichah / Ayekah paradigm of Tisha B’Av? What are we doing with the potential God has given us? We should not be like Adam, so elevated that he could hear God’s voice yet not properly understand the hidden fundamental question. Rather, we can answer by acknowledging our mistakes, by knowing where we stand and who we are capable of being. Shabbat Shalom.