TIKKUN readers may associate the biblical book of Lamentations with its liturgical context: the last fast day of the Jewish calendar, Tisha b’Av, which commemorates a series of catastrophes in Jewish history, including the destruction of the First and Second Temple, the failure of the Bar Kochba rebellion, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and, more recently, Kristallnacht. In Lamentations 1 and 2, God has led Zion to such deprivation that she has been forced to cannibalize her own children. Given the imagery of extreme cultural devastation for reasons that remain unfathomable to the victims, we can understand why readers of this short book have continued to find resonances with the experience of the inexplicable catastrophes most directly related to our historical moment.

Following the fourth anniversary of 9/11, two books published in the wake of the event demand revisitation, because they explain how Lamentations’s expression of acute, undeserved suffering by a mother who weeps and rages against an abusive male figure (God), can be applied to modern and contemporary tragedies.  The first, 2002's Surviving Lamentations: Catastrophe, Lament, And Protest In the Afterlife Of A Biblical Book (U of Chicago Press), a scholarly study by Georgetown professor Tod Linafelt, traces the history of the book’s “afterlife.” The second, Lamentations: From New York to Kabul and Beyond (Sheed and Ward, 2002) is an impassioned political midrash that attempts to come to terms with 9/11 by long-time peace activist Daniel Berrigan, illustrate how and why Lamentations continues to move us today.

Linafelt argues that exegetical commentary on Lamentations often reveals more about the historical context, and emotional needs, of the belated writer, than it does about what the poet (or poets) of Lamentations actually wrote 2,500 years ago.  Indebted to Walter Benjamin’s theory of translation as a form of literary survival in which something thought dead “lives on,” and to Jacques Derrida’s understanding of textuality as a linguistic mode that challenges the borders between distinct writings, Linafelt asserts that readers remain haunted by a book that is “assaulting” with “its unsparing focus on destruction, pain, and suffering” because Lamentations is an unfinished text .  It ends without providing God’s response to Zion’s demand that God explain why her children have been destroyed.  The lack of closure has provided an opening for authors working in a variety of literary and liturgical responses, ranging from the midrash of Eikhah Rabbab, to the early medieval poetry of Elezar ben Kallir, to the contemporary fiction of Cynthia Ozick.   In these belated texts, Lamentations reappears in surprising forms that often contradict the biblical book’s thematic emphasis on Zion’s Job-like rage against God’s infliction of the unexplained and unexplainable atrocity against the Israelites.  

In his chapter on midrash, Linafelt shows how Eikhah Rabbab imagined God weeping for his own losses, as well as for the human victims.  This midrash illustrates how commentators extend the “afterlife” of Lamentations by offering God’s response – in this case, a response of mourning -- that was lacking in Lamentations.  In the midrash by Eikhah Rabbah, Rachel affronts God with the suffering of children until God promises to restore Israel’s children to their home in a kind of eschatological version of a return to Jerusalem.  Community survival is thus linked with midrashic commentary.   In Benjaminian fashion, the dead children “live on” through a textual tradition.  The Jewish people survive, not in the cultic context of the temple, but in the diasporic context of Biblical interpretation. 

Like Kallir, the Palestinian poet (4th to 8th century CE), Linafelt considers Lamentations 1 & 2 to be the center of the text.  He is, however, interested in how often commentators, working in the wake of the Holocaust, have parted company with their forebears by focusing on Lamentations 3.  Unlike Lamentations 1 and 2, Lamentations 3 is spoken by the “Suffering Man,” a much more compliant figure than the enraged Zion.  Where the mother figure forces readers to witness pain, not to find meaning in it, Lamentations 3 tries to interpret suffering.   There is little correlation between Zion’s sins (such as idolatry) and the catastrophe that befalls her, but Lamentations 3 emphasizes the purposiveness of suffering as punishment deserved for acting against God’s will.   The “Suffering Man” believes that if Israel could admit its guilt and atone for its sins, God would provide the persistence of hope through the possibility that a change in Israel’s behavior could redirect their fortunes vis a vis God. 

Linafelt draws an intriguing parallel between contemporary responses to Lamentations and to the Holocaust.  He compares his own inclination to emphasize the parts of Lamentations that tolerate an expression of suffering that exists outside a framework of meaning with responses to the Holocaust by Primo Levi, Terrence Des Pres, and Lawrence Langer.  Instead of imagining a purpose for the Holocaust, these authors displayed its horrors, so that the concerns of the survivor become the concerns of the reader.   Linafelt links commentaries on Lamentations that interpret catastrophe as a punishment with perspectives on Shoah by authors such as Victor Frankl.  In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl argued that victims survived in part because they could find meaning in their affliction.  

Linafelt’s study is flawed by a major irony.  He claims that Lamentations survives because it “is more about the expression of suffering than the meaning behind it, more about the vicissitudes of survival that the abstractions of sin and guilt, and more about protest as a religious posture than capitulation or confessions.”   And yet it is precisely in our time that many commentators have searched for the reason (the “why bad things happen to good people question”) God has bestowed such terrors upon the Jews.  In spite of Linafelt’s claim that his emphasis on Lamentations 1 and 2 represents an accurate reading of the biblical book, most contemporary readers have not understood lament as a sufficient response to the biblical book, or to the Shoah.   Is not the desire for meaning a legitimate response to the traumatic experience of utter helplessness and moral chaos described in Lamentations, and experienced by survivors of the Shoah?  Linafelt too easily dismisses the all-too-human urge to pose the “why me” question, even if such a desire for meaning leads the survivor to self-critique, and to finding one’s own culpability in a situation in which one’s guilt cannot and should not be assigned?  Since, as Harold Bloom has noted, all reading is in fact misreading, and since even Lamentations cannot be viewed as an “original” work with a recoverable “intention”  (it is, after all, a pastiche of prior texts), it seems unfair of Linafelt to consider Lamentations 3 an illegitimate portion of the text for some critics to focus upon, and for him to establish Lamentations 1 and 2 to be the thematic “heart” or “center” of what is a centerless text.  However counterfactual, it is a book such as Frankl’s, rather than the testimony of Primo Levi, that has become a cultural touchstone for non-survivors as they grapple with the aftermath of the Shoah, as well as their own quest for personal significance.

Unlike Linafelt’s scholarly tone, Berrigan’s book is composed in a sprawling, impassioned, diary-entry fashion that includes passages from newspaper stories, political speeches, and articles from The Catholic Worker that are critical of the war movement.  Drafted just after 9-/11, he is unaware of the full extent the martial direction American foreign policy would take in Iraq.  Berrigan’s thesis is that the root cause of 9/11 is America’s sins, not that of Bin Laden and Al Quaida.   The Bible’s admonishment to the Israelites, “You stand guilty of idolatry, of breach of covenant.  You have bowed before gods of power, riches, pride of place, violence,” could as easily be spoken in condemnation of the United States.  Working in the prophetic tradition of Jeremiah, Berrigan reads the Pentagon and the World Trade Towers as “quite literally places of worship” in American society.   Calling for the victims of 9/11, that is, the American citizenry, to ask forgiveness for participating in (and benefiting from) the communal sins of greed, empire, and global violence, he links healing with the act of grieving for what we as an imperial nation have done to other, poorer nations, not for what has been done to us.  Although writing in the immediate wake of 9/l1, and thus not especially concerned with the Holocaust context, Berrigan falls into what Linafelt would consider to be the trap of emphasizing Lamentations 3’s “Suffering Man,” the Christian prototype of Jesus, who suffers to expiate humanity’s sins.  From Linafelt’s point of view, Berrigan’s text misreads the Zion figure as one who prefers to submit to God, rather than to rage against God’s destructive powers.

Berrigan’s midrash lays stress on Lamentations 3, but Lamentations 1 and 2, which imagine Jerusalem as a lone weeping woman, remain important to Berrigan.  These books speak to his call for our collective sensitivity to the feminine side of God, which has been repressed in the context of Bush’s swaggering persona and the “world of warriors” that he leads.  Is there another way to respond to tragedy besides vengeance?  Does “destruction of the enemy” make the victim feel better?  Can we break the cycle of violence by moving toward a mindset in which our foreign policy expresses accountability towards one another on a global scale, as well as an awareness of the interdependence of societies that are currently viewed in zero-sum game terms of victimizer and victimized? As Berrigan puts it:  “Will destruction of her enemies, in the name of God’s justice – will this mitigate her own sufferings?  Or is there another way than vengeance, a better?”.

Like other commentators who focus on Lamentations’s “Suffering Man,” Berrigan wants to supply a meaning for what happened on 9/11 by answering the “why” question: “Why, why, why this disaster?  The text poses the tormenting question and more – it ventures an answer.  Thus, sin, our sin, has shaken the pillars of empire.  What has befallen, we have brought upon ourselves.  The moral universe stands vindicated.  This is the word that comes through the text, dense, clogged with grief and loss.  Despite all, a word of truth.  And the bare bones of hope as well”.  Rabbi Harold S. Kushner has argued that asking the “why” question tends to paralyze sufferers from performing meaningful actions in the future by turning them into the direction of a loss of faith in God, or into a destructive self-loathing.  The better approach, according to Kushner, is to ask the “what” question, as in “What do we do now to make the world a safer, more humane place after this senseless tragedy has befallen us.” I think Berrigan gets too caught up in the “why” question.    For Berrigan, the main characters in this global drama are too easily identifiable; “we” are the rich, corrupt, materialistic empire, and “they” are the poor who have been exploited by us.  In fact, reports have stated that the perpetrators were not poor men, but well-educated figures who resented U.S. presence in the Holy Lands of Saudi Arabia.   In spite of Berrigan’s provocative thesis, I wonder if 9/11 will ever be fully explained.

Berrigan is most persuasive when looking forward, not backward.  By reinterpreting the meaning of 9/11 as a wake-up call to what has become a heartless global superpower, he converts the tragedy into an opportunity for reflection.  His focus in not on the “enemies” and how to stop them from hurting us again through acts of vengeance, but a turn inward toward self-scrutiny.  “Let us search and examine our ways/that we may return to God.” How different the world would be today if our media emphasized self-scrutiny, rather than parodying Howard Dean’s idea of apologizing to the Iraqis.  How different the world if a Manichean demonization of adversaries as evil had not become the official political and media response to the catastrophe.  Berrigan’s willingness to look inward is most welcome, but barely tolerated in a climate in which our political leaders perceive self-reflection as a sign of weakness and admission of mistakes as a sign of vulnerability.