Return to Us and We Will Return
On Deuteronomy and Lamentations
אֵיכָ֥ה אֶשָּׂ֖א לְבַדִּ֑י טׇרְחֲכֶ֥ם וּמַֽשַּׂאֲכֶ֖ם וְרִֽיבְכֶֽם׃
How [Eicha] can I bear unaided the trouble of you, and the burden, and the bickering! (Deuteronomy 1:12)
אֵיכָ֣ה ׀ יָשְׁבָ֣ה בָדָ֗ד הָעִיר֙ רַבָּ֣תִי עָ֔ם הָיְתָ֖ה כְּאַלְמָנָ֑ה
Alas [Eicha] the lonely city that was once filled with people sits like a widow. (Lamentations 1:1)
There are three prophets who prophecied with the language of Eicha: Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. Rabbi Levi said one saw [Israel] in her glory and tranquility, one saw her in her recklessness, one saw her in her degenerateness. (Lamentations Rabba 1:1)
This week we begin the book of Deuteronomy (Devarim), the final book of the Torah. Then, when Shabbat ends, we begin Tisha B’Av, a day of collective Jewish mourning commemorating the historical and trans-historical exiles and losses, real and spiritual, that continue to this day.
One can draw many connections between the parasha and the fast day, but the most striking is that the same word—Eicha (the Hebrew word for lamentation)—appears both in the opening of Deuteronomy and in the book of Lamentations (which we read on Tisha B’av.) Eicha is both the Hebrew title of the book of Lamentations and its first word, but as the Midrash notes, Eicha appears in a handful of places throughout Scripture, including in this week’s parasha, Devarim.
Eicha is onomatopoetic. It sounds like a wail, and thus gets translated as “alas.” But Eicha also means how, an ambiguous question simultaneously demanding an answer and insisting that we not even try to give one. It is a word that has a plain, rational meaning and a purely sensory dimension. It trembles on the boundary between sound and sense, as if, when all is lost and meaning breaks down, the word sheds its meaning and returns to its primal origin, the cry.
When the same letters—aleph, yuh, khaf, hay—appear in a differently punctuated form, they spell ayyeka, the question “where are you”? (Genesis 1:9) This is the question God asks Adam and Eve when they hide in the garden. In drawing an intertxual connection between Eicha (alas) and Ayekka (where are you), Eicha Rabba creatively imagines the destruction of Jerusalem and the loss of Eden as one and the same. At the least, history rhymes. But more than this, it gives depth to both texts. In a shocking role reversal, God can now be heard in the garden lamenting all the destruction to come as a result of Adam and Eve’s transgression. Meanwhile, the prophet Jeremiah’s seemingly powerless and exasperated cry conceals a sharper critique aimed at God— “Where are you?”
Eicha Rabba’s inversion of God and the people finds expression in the poetry of Paul Celan, who writes, “Pray, Lord, pray to us, we are near.” According to George Steiner, that line is one of the few things one can say about the Shoah that are not completely meaningless.
Following the insight of Eicha Rabba, which sees every word of the Torah as a kind of satellite of lament, I note that Moses’s Eicha is about himself and his own incapacity to handle the people’s burdens. Moses is himself like the lonely city, Jerusalem. But he rectifies it. In Exodus 18, with the help of Jethro, Moses establishes a court system and a legal bureaucracy so as to free himself from having to adjudicate at all times. Moses is existentially a lonely figure, but practically, he solves his solitude problem by sharing some leadership with others. To his question, “How can I bear unaided…?” there comes a response—you cannot bear it alone, but, you do not have to bear it alone.
Why open Deuteronomy with a retelling of the founding of the court system? Granted that the whole book of Deuteronomy is “revisionist history,” is Moses’s attempt to tell the story of the Israelites in an effort to induce a sense of memory and continuity in the people. Why begin with an admission that he couldn’t bear the people’s troubles all by himself?
It seems Moses found in the establishing of courts an early way to ensure that the people would be able to function without him. Since the message of Deuteronomy is that you can and must go on without me, it makes sense that the establishing of the courts is the headline of the whole retelling. The courts down the line will become the place where a legal culture dedicated to observing divine law will negotiate the balance between an inherited past and a living present. But it’s also sad to compare Moses’s Eicha to the Eicha that is coming later in Jeremiah and that we are about to read on Saturday night and Sunday.
Can the courts really save Israel? Can any system be of help if culture is broken? What good are leaders when there is no buy-in from the people? What good is protocol when character is vicious? While Moses found a mechanism for dealing with “your trouble, your burden, and your bickering,” he did not address the core issue—the trouble, the burden, and the bickering. It is these core elements of the human and Jewish condition—the elements of complaint, ingratitude, and ego-driven divisiveness—that tradition says are responsible for the destruction of Jerusalem and the subsequent destructions. All Moses did was streamline the litigation process; he didn't correct the litigious nature of the people. Here is Rashi quoting the Midrash:
“Moses' use of the word your trouble regarding them teaches us that the Israelites were troublesome: if one of them perceived that his opponent in a law suit was about to be victor in the case he would say: I have witnesses to bring, further proof to adduce, I will add judges to you who are sitting.” (Sifrei Devarim 12:1)
Rashi presents an all-too modern picture of people manipulating the legal system to self-deal. It’s easy to miss this, but it’s not clear that the system Moses sets up can really handle these sorts of problems. Sure, it’s a welcome reform. But from the text’s perspective it seems like the trouble and burden continued throughout Moses’s life. What Moses does is find a way to bear it, to find aid.
In this anti-messianic, sober perspective, we can’t expect law or social engineering to make our problems go away. Only a change in character, a change in the tenor of relationships, can ensure the health of a society. Good laws and good judges with bad citizens will be less effective than bad laws or non-existent laws with good citizens. There is something profoundly self-critical in a legal culture admitting that the legal system alone cannot safeguard against hypocrisy and moral corruption.
But the Midrash seems to go in the opposite direction. Instead of emphasizing that the troubles we find in Lamentations can already be found in Devarim, it suggests that the time in the desert was a time of glory and tranquility. How can it be that as Moses is describing trouble and bickering it is a time of glory and tranquility? Of course, the Midrash might just be ironic, or else, trying to show that whatever the difficulties in the desert they were still nothing compared to the difficulties once the people actually settled the land. After all, the first generation were not allowed into the Land, and Moses, Aaron, and Miriam all die before entering it. Their prevention is the mirror image of our expulsion. So where is the glory?
Moses was troubled, but not alone. He had a kind of companionship in the people, and in its leaders, the text is saying. Yes, there were strains on the relationship between Moses and the people and between the people and God, but this differs from the image of Jerusalem as a widow. Relationship, however difficult, is hopeful. Even quarreling can be a sign of love. The notion of tranquil quarreling is paradoxical and funny, but also true—at least there is someone to quarrel with. There is familiarity in that. When Rabbi Yochanan loses his chevruta, Reish Lakish, he cries out, o chevruta o m’tuta “[Give me] a partner/adversary or [give me] death” (Bava Metzia 84a). Even Lamentations is not conclusively a lament—and this is why the book turns hopeful in its last words: “Return us to you, Lord, and we will return. Renew our days as of old” (5:21). Why? Because in offering the lament to God we demonstrate that we are still in relationship with God. To say to God, “I wish you existed” is still to be devout. For God to say to us, “How could you?” is still to be devout. Lamentations touches the boundary where relationships fall apart, but Tisha B’Av frames it in such a way as to renew us. To borrow a Freudian distinction, Tisha B’Av is a time of mourning, but not melancholy.
Will all of us enter the land, stay in the land? Will we be protected from calamity, doubt, alienation? No. But we will be in relationship. To be a Jew may be, at the ceiling level, to be holy, to aspire to fulfill the law, to walk in God’s ways. But at the floor, it is to be part of a family, a community that insists on the primacy of relationship. Knowledge, virtue, insight, creativity, impact, and any other handful of “values” are derivative of relationship itself. That Moses hands off his leadership to Joshua, that he establishes courts led by other judges, shows that the fundamental project of the Torah is relationship; neither followership nor leadership, but mutuality, give and take.
Just as Moses couldn’t adjudicate everything in his own lifetime, he can’t adjudicate everything for us now. The law needs, but cannot be confined to, charismatic authority. Only when each of us finds our own way into it can God’s original call to Abraham ramify outward. Only when each of us answers the call of conscience, hears God’s cry, asking, “Where are you?” can the shards of Jerusalem become whole. Only when we cultivate good relationships can Torah emerge. Jerusalem needs her chevruta in us and we need our chevrutot in one another. To rebuild and repair, let us begin by affirming our need and desire for relationship itself.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
P.S.—You may enjoy my recent mega threads on Kierkegaard and Maimonides.
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