INTRODUCTION
Dr. Ora Horn Prouser
The Book of Lamentations( Eikhah) is a central part of our liturgy for Tisha B’ av, commemorating the destruction of the first and second Temples. Throughout our history a number of other calamities that have befallen the Jewish People have occurred on or around this same date, making it a day when we remember and think about the historical struggles of the Jewish People. The book delivers a strong plea for understanding and help from both communal and personal standpoints. It speaks as a community or nation personified, struggling with loss and defeat, with devastation and horror. It also speaks as an individual, calling out for understanding of their pain, and, at the same time, struggling with the beginnings of hope, and how to move on to a brighter future, and to a newly understood relationship with God.
For much of our contemporary history, Tisha B’ av has felt to me like a historical obligation. There is absolutely the responsibility to remember our past, to feel the pain of decades, centuries, and millennia of loss, destruction, and fear. And yet, while we were sitting on the floor chanting Eikhah in darkened rooms, there was for me a performative aspect. We were mourning the loss of Israel, while Israel was newly reborn and thriving. I understood the importance and, actually, the necessity of this liturgical moment, and yet, knew that behind it we had a strong State of Israel, as our miraculously reborn homeland.
Tisha B’ av now carries a different resonance. We are living in a time where both in Israel and in the diaspora, we are feeling tremendous and intolerable levels of antisemitism and anti- Zionism. We are finding ourselves in new situations, ones that our ancestors navigated but that many of us were shielded from. And now, as we face this time of tremendous and
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