Tishah b’Av 5781: An Approach to the Blasphemy in Eichah and Kinnos

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Artwork: Doom Blade, by Matthew G. Lewis

Tishah b'Av 5781: An Approach to the Blasphemy in Eichah and Kinnos

“[Hashem] has drawn back His right hand from before the enemy” (Eichah 2:3) “[Hashem] has bent His bow like an enemy, with His right hand set like a tormentor” (ibid. 2:4) “My Lord was like an enemy” (ibid. 2:5)

First Hashem is described as withdrawing His protective right hand, allowing the enemy to attack. Then He is depicted as taking up arms and joining our enemy in its assault. Finally, Hashem, Himself, is identified as our enemy. What insight do these pesukim offer? What is the significance of this progression?

The answer is that this is actually a regression. The first pasuk is the accurate perspective: when we turn away from Hashem, He withdraws His protection, leaving us vulnerable to our enemies. The second pasuk reflects a warped view of Hashem, in which He is characterized as committing treason against His own people. The third pasuk is the worst distortion of them all, in which Hashem is the enemy of the Jews.

Why would Eichah cater to distorted portrayals of Hashem? The same may be asked about the kinnos (liturgical lamentations), which are replete with harsh, inappropriate, even blasphemous statements of this nature. How are we to make sense of such statements? What are we to think when reciting them?

When we suffer a horrific catastrophe – whether the destruction of the Beis ha’Mikdash, or the Holocaust, or even a personal tragedy – there are parts of us which feel that Hashem is like a malicious enemy. This is false, “for He does not afflict maliciously, nor cause the hearts of men to suffer” (ibid. 3:33). It is tempting to think that knowledge alone is the solution – that we can simply supplant falsehood with truth. This approach will not succeed. If we neglect to address these misguided parts of ourselves on their own terms, we will succeed only in driving them underground, where they will continue to affect our minds and hearts in an even more insidious manner. Instead, we must acknowledge that we have these parts of ourselves. We must give expression to them, allowing them to say what they think and feel what they feel. Only when they feel seen and heard will they be receptive to truth. Only then can the healing begin.

Anthony de Mello’s analogy in Awareness: the Perils and Opportunities of Reality illustrates this point:

This reminds me of this fellow in London after the war. He’s sitting with a parcel wrapped in brown paper in his lap; it’s a big, heavy object. The bus conductor comes up to him and says, “What do you have on your lap there?” And the man says, “This is an unexploded bomb. We dug it out of the garden and I’m taking it to the police station.” The conductor says, “You don’t want to carry that on your lap. Put it under the seat.”

The distorted conceptions of Hashem carried by our inner parts are like bombs we carry on our laps. To uncritically embrace these false views as true would be to detonate the bombs. We must seek knowledge of Hashem, led by our tzelem Elokim (intellect) and guided by Torah. But that is not enough. If we dismiss, deny, or “exile” the parts of ourselves that harbor these false views of Hashem, all we’re doing is taking the unexploded bombs and putting them under our seats. This is worse than keeping them on our laps, insofar as we convince ourselves that we’ve eliminated the threat when all we’ve done is hidden it. All it takes is for the bus to be jostled in the wrong way, and these hidden bombs will explode.

There is a third option: to acknowledge the bombs we are carrying, to accept our precarious state, and from that place of awareness, apply our knowledge to diffuse them. This is the intent of Eichah and kinnos: to make us aware of and feel the distorted perspectives we harbor, to accept and feel the precarious metaphysical danger we are in, and from that place of visceral intellectual recognition, to help us “unburden” these misguided parts of ourselves through knowledge and teshuvah and the light of truth.

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