In the memory of Lori Kay Gilbert, Ellis Parlier, and Riley Howell and all victims of gun violence; in honor of my students and colleagues at UNC Charlotte.
Alas! Lonely she sits… her squares, once teeming, her buildings, alive with sound. She is a widow, now, mourning her dead, weeping for the injured, the fallen, whose voices once called out in greeting, in play, across her pathways, walkways, glens and gardens.
Bitterly she weeps in the night, her cheek wet with tears. There is none to comfort her. “Thoughts and prayers” mean nothing without rage, without anger so righteous, it rises up to cry out: Let their wrongdoing come before You. Let their wrongdoing be named. For making murder easy, slaughter simple. For placing pistols and assault rifles in every hand.
Our steps were checked, we could not walk in our squares. The breath of our life was captured in their traps.
See how the foe has laid hands on everything dear to us. Our young, shot at study. Your supplicants, shot at prayer.
Hear my plea. Do not shut your ear to my groan, to my cry.
For these things do I weep. My eyes flow with tears. My children are forlorn. For the foe has prevailed. See, how abject I have become?
This text includes sections from Lamentations, Chapters 1, 3, and 4.
Last week, Jews marked our annual commemoration of the day the Temple was destroyed, Jerusalem set afire, and Israel’s leaders exiled.The text of Lamentations is our assigned reading on Tisha B’Av.
It is a text of anguish.Each of its five poems shatter equanimity; they refuse to offer easy answers.In its opening chapters, Daughter Zion, who represents God’s abused people, accuses God of murderous abandonment.
Years ago, I wrote a lament in honor of women who have been cruelly and brutally mistreated.I dedicated it to a woman who had told me her story, who had crawled out from under the weight of eighteen years of domestic violence.
In the day just before Tisha B’Av, a woman told me of a friend who had been sexually abused by her father.The day of Tisha B’Av, in a small congregational study group, women spoke of suffering they had known.I knew the backstory in each case.
I have grown into my middle aged life hearing laments from too many women, laments that have their source in the emotional and physical and sexual mistreatment they have known from men.
There is much to lament in our world.There is too much to lament in our world.
Yet we must lament, to honor our sorrow and our pain.We must lament in order to have a prayer at healing.
Yet, I longed last week, as I do again and again and again, for a world in which no child is harmed, in which every woman is safe, in which each man is at peace.I want humanity to be simply good.I refuse to lose my childish confusion; I insist that kindness cannot be so very hard. Generosity should be as easy as smiling.
The rabbis say that one good deed so gladdens our souls and spirits that after the doing of a mitzvah, we will want to do another right away.
I pray for the doing of mitzvahs.
Lamentations 1: 1-5
Cheryl’s Lament, by Barbara Thiede
How lonely is she now,
the once crowded city!
Widowed is she
who was mistress over nations;
The princess among the provinces
has been made a toiling slave.
Bitterly she weeps at night,
tears upon her cheeks,
With not one to console her
of all her dear ones;
Her friends have all betrayed her
and become her enemies.
Judah has fled into exile
from oppression and cruel slavery;
Yet where she lives among the nations
she finds no place to rest:
All her persecutors come upon her
where she is narrowly confined
The roads to Zion mourn
for lack of pilgrims going to her feasts;
All her gateways are deserted,
her priests groan,
Her virgins sigh;
she is in bitter grief.
Her foes are uppermost,
her enemies are at ease;
God has punished her
for her rebellions.
Her little ones have gone away,
captive before the foe.
How alone I am!
Once I believed you my love.
You called me bitch
the night we married;
Just hours after I fairly danced
to meet you under the chuppah.
I weep when you sleep;
you will not have another reason to
deride me.
Who would believe me
if I said it aloud?
(I whisper to myself:
He wants to kill me.)
I was confined behind four walls,
shut down, shut in.
My mother told me,
I must lie in the bed I made.
I stayed for eighteen years;
they were death, not life.
You made it clear:
No family, friends, or guests allowed.
Our house was filled
with threats and fear instead.
The children and I crouched in corners;
we tried to be quiet.
I left when they were grown,
but you still control me.
Look: my son does not see
how he lives my life!
And my daughter, too, is caught
in the terror of your devising.
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