Once the Walls Come Down Shabbat D’varim

The walls are crumbling before our very eyes. Walls of denial, walls of defensiveness, walls of deception. The walls are crumbling and we can see – we must see – what is behind them: starvation, suffering, death. The destruction of Gaza started nearly two years ago, but it is only now that the Jewish community is beginning to ask that essential question: Eichah? How? How did we get to this place? How did we let this happen?

Eichah. It is a question, but also a cry of lament. In fact, the Hebrew name for the Book of Lamentations is Eichah because it begins:

אֵיכָ֣ה  יָשְׁבָ֣ה בָדָ֗ד הָעִיר֙

 “Alas! Lonely sits the city once great with people.” The Book of Lamentations was written after the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE, and it vividly describes the devastation wrought by the Babylonians: the razing of Jerusalem, the starvation, slaughter, and exile of the Israelites. Throughout Lamentations, the question is raised again and again: How? How could God let this happen to God’s own people? 

Jews around the world will read these haunting words tomorrow night, on Erev Tisha B’Av, the evening of the Ninth of Av. According to Jewish tradition, both the first and second Temples were destroyed on the Ninth of Av, as well as numerous other tragedies that have befallen the Jewish People. In anticipation of this day of mourning, we always read Parashat D’varim, the beginning of Deuteronomy, right before the holiday. D’varim also contains an “eichah,” when Moses recalls exclaiming to the people, 

אֵיכָ֥ה אֶשָּׂ֖א לְבַדִּ֑י טׇרְחֲכֶ֥ם וּמַֽשַּׂאֲכֶ֖ם וְרִֽיבְכֶֽם׃ 

“How can I alone bear the trouble of you, the burden, and the strife?!” (Deut. 1:12). Moses, leader of the Israelites for forty long years, cries out in desperation and exhaustion: “How can I go on?” Moses, like the city of Jerusalem in Lamentations, feels abandoned and utterly alone.

This Shabbat’s haftarah provides one more eichah, from the first chapter of Isaiah. Isaiah, writing in the 8th-century BCE, sees the corruption and moral decay of Zion and cries out, 

אֵיכָה֙ הָיְתָ֣ה לְזוֹנָ֔ה-

“Alas, she has become a harlot, the faithful city, that was filled with justice, where righteousness dwelt—But now murderers” (Isa. 1:21). Lamentations asks, “How did it come to this?” Isaiah asks, “How could you – how could we – do this?” and Moses asks, “How can I go on?” 

As we face the catastrophe unfolding in Gaza, the Jewish community must ask all three questions. How did we get here? How are we responsible? And how do we move forward? But before we can ask these “how” questions, we must first voice the primary eichah, the eichah of lament, the eichah of pain and bewilderment and grief, the eichah that has no sufficient answer.

My teacher, Dr. Rachel Adler, writes about the necessity of lament: 

“How can the broken reenter the realm of language and speak the unspeakable? The doorway, I would maintain, is lament. In lament, the boundary between the made and unmade universe is thinnest, for it is the cultural form closest to the preverbal howl of pain. Lament can be incoherent and chaotic, picking its way through a broken rubble of unbearably vivid happenings and intolerable sensations. Its content is dangerously dark and disordered, and its meaning may be nonexistent, rejected, or found wanting. And yet I want to argue that the doorway through which lament enters the world is a petach tikvah, a doorway of hope.”  

Lament is a petach tikvah, a doorway of hope, because it is only when we acknowledge the tragedy that we can move towards resolution and healing. For too long, members of the Jewish community have been afraid to recognize the truth of what is happening in Gaza. As Yuli Novak, the executive director of the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, explains, 

“We told ourselves other stories to survive the horror, stories that kept guilt and grief at bay. We convinced ourselves that every child in Gaza was Hamas, every apartment a terrorist cell. We became, without noticing, those ‘ordinary people’ who keep living their lives while ‘it’ is happening…. Recognizing this truth is not easy. Even for us, people who have spent years documenting state violence against Palestinians, the mind resists it. It rejects the facts like poison, tries to spit them out. But the poison is here. It floods the bodies of those who live between the river and the sea – Palestinians and Israelis alike – with fear and unfathomable loss.” 

Recognizing Israel’s culpability for the catastrophe in Gaza, whether you call it genocide or not, is enormously difficult, incredibly painful, and absolutely essential. 

So on this Tisha B’Av, we cry out: eichah. We begin with the eichah of lament, the question with no answer. As Rabbi Zachary Truboff puts it, “Tisha B’Av…is not a time for explanations or justifications. It is a day for letting the enormity of suffering and destruction break through our defenses. If we do not allow ourselves to feel their weight, we will have learned little from the churban, the destruction of the Temple.” But once the day of weeping is done, we must ask those other eichahs, and, more importantly, urgently seek the answers: How did we get here? How are we responsible? And how do we stop the suffering and move forward? 

The time between Tisha B’Av and Rosh Hashanah is seven weeks. On Tisha B’Av, the walls come tumbling down. But even in the rubble, there is still life and still hope. For the next seven weeks, we move from destruction to creation, from devastation to hope. And on Rosh Hashanah, God willing, we look around and see that we have built the world anew. 

Ken y’hi ratzon – may it be God’s will, and our own.