To what may this be compared? To the practice of the hevra kadisha that prepares a body for a Jewish burial. Washing the body over in water and covering it in shrouds, the purifiers must handle the naked corpse. No disrespect is intended, and so the hevra kadisha asks the soul of the deceased for forgiveness, for mehila, for having exposed and treated the body in order to accomplish their sacred task. The positive act of purification takes place at the expense of ostensible mortification.
Megillat Eikha comprises five different poems— four of them lamentations and the fifth a petitionary prayer for restoration. They may have been composed individually, although they have been combined into a structure that forms a coherent yet emotionally wrenching work. Studies of the work’ s language reveals that it was written in its present form not in the decades immediately following the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 586 BCE, but rather in the decades close to the rededication of the rebuilt altar and temple between around 530 and 515 BCE. In other words, I suggest that Megillat Eikha expresses the people’ s mourning over the destroyed temple of Jerusalem at the time of its rebuilding, after some of the Judeans exiled to Babylonia had returned.
The book of Ezra, composed in the middle of the next century, recalls that when the new temple was being rebuilt, people cried( 3:12-13). The author of Ezra interprets the recollected weeping to have been caused by the sadness of those who had seen the original temple in its glory, reduced to ruins. But the tears may well have been ceremonial, the people mourning the old temple as the new one was being rebuilt.
In recent years we have experienced disaster and have lived under threat. We have had much over which to grieve and mourn. But in what I believe is the historical purpose of Megillat Eikha, we should channel the sorrow over what has been into an effort to restore and rebuild.
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