Megilat Eikha (Lamentations) Part I
‘How?’ The Question that Shocks Us Into Consciousness
This essay is based on a transcript of an audio lecture I gave as part of a series on Megilat Eikha (The Book of Lamentations). It is largely AI generated based on the written transcript of the class with edits and additions by me.
We open the scroll with a cry. A single word stretched across time, burdened with sorrow and bewilderment: Eikha. How?
This word is not merely the opening of the Book of Lamentations. It is its heartbeat, its recurring motif. The Megillah offers no comfort at the outset. It issues a challenge. How did this happen? How did we arrive here? The question is existential. It summons us into the core of rupture.
The Hakhamim recognise that the letters of Eikha - איכה - in Hebrew are the same letters as another word used in the Torah that they see hints to a deeper understanding. Eikha and be read, Ayeka - Where are you? This is the question God asks Adam after he eats from the Tree of Knowledge. That first question in the Torah, directed at the newly self-aware human being, was not one of geographical location. It was ontological. Where are you now? Where do you stand in this altered reality that you have brought upon yourself?
With Ayeka, the human condition is born. Adam, once seamlessly embedded in the order of existence, discovers himself as separate. He sees himself—his vulnerability, his nakedness—and in doing so, loses his place in the whole. God does not ask him for information. God prompts reflection. The question pierces the veil of illusion and demands awareness. That same demand reverberates through the Eikha of Lamentations.
The structure of the Megillah underscores this tenor. Each chapter begins with Eikha or evokes its essence. The verses are arranged alphabetically, a gesture toward order within chaos. Chapter three shifts the lens from national lament to personal suffering: Ani haGever, it begins. ‘I am the man’. One feels the isolation and grief pressed into each verse, threefold for every letter, as though the soul itself is caught in a stammer of pain. And then the fourth chapter returns to Eikha, as if to remind us: this is not a passing question. It is an enduring reality.
What, then, is the nature of this cry? What is Eikha asking?
God's question to Adam was the first Eikha. It is a question of dislocation. Something essential has shifted. The world is not what it was. And yet, the human being may not yet know it. So God asks, Where are you?—not because He does not know, but because Adam does not.
Eikha, then, is the language of rupture. It arises only after assumptions collapse. It is the sudden awareness that the story I thought I was living is not the one I am in. The Midrash teaches that God spoke Ayeka not to accuse, but to orient—to bring Adam into awareness of what had broken.
What broke, in that primeval moment, was the seamlessness between self and world. Before eating from the tree, Adam knew only what was real. He could not imagine what was not. His consciousness was one with truth. Afterward, imagination entered the human experience. He could now contemplate falsehood. He could think “what if.” And with that capacity came the possibility for delusion, for self-deception, for psychosis. The tragic irony is that our capacity for creativity and abstraction is born in the same moment as our capacity for estrangement.
The Book of Lamentations gives voice to that estrangement. It asks not only what happened to the city, but what happened to us. How did we come to live so far from what is real? What allowed us to inhabit assumptions so deeply that we mistook them for truth?
That is the work of Eikha—to puncture the veneers of comfort, to dismantle the scaffolding of assumption, and to confront what lies beneath. And it is here that mourning begins.
The Hebrew word for mourning—aveilut—shares its root with aval (אבל), a term often used to mean “however” in modern Hebrew. In the Torah, aval does not imply hesitation. It conveys certainty, as in: Aval asheimim anahnu—‘Indeed, we are guilty’ (Gen. 42:21). When Yosef’s brothers finally admit their wrongdoing, they do so with clear realisation and affirmation of their wrongdoing. Their assumptions had veiled the truth. They had told themselves that their actions were justified. Twenty-two years later, reality shatters that narrative.
So it is with mourning. Mourning begins not with tears, but with the collapse of the world as we thought it was. Reality has fundamentally changed with the loss. Eikha is the moment that recognition dawns.
And yet, the pain of that recognition seems to contradict the rhythm of life. If breakdown is inevitable, why are we not better equipped to handle it? Why does the world so regularly violate our expectations, and yet we respond with surprise, dismay, and devastation?
Ramban raises this very question. If death and loss are constants in the human condition, why does grief not feel natural? Why have we not developed mechanisms to absorb it with ease?
Because deep down we know, he says, that it should not be this way. Our pain is not maladaptive. It is revelatory. It testifies to a memory embedded deep within the soul—a memory of a world that was whole. Mourning, then, is not weakness. It is protest. It is the soul’s refusal to normalize disintegration. And Eikha is the voice of that refusal.
The Megillah begins with an image: Jerusalem as a solitary widow, once full of people, now desolate. The focus is strikingly physical. Streets, gates, stones, why begin here?
Because when a city dies, it is not only its spirit that is lost. Its body decays. Mourning attends to the physical as well as the spiritual. To see a beloved place—once vibrant—reduced to rubble, is to feel the rupture in one’s bones. The city stands as a mirror to the soul.
And yet, the question remains: what allows a world to fall apart?
The answer, in part, is assumption. The stories we tell ourselves. The comforts we cling to. The refusal to consider that what we have may not endure.
The Gemara (Gittin 56a) tells of Rabbi Zekhariah ben Avkulis, whose scrupulous indecision precipitated the destruction of the Temple. Caught between halakhic principles and political realities, he refused to act. He assumed, fatally, that the Temple would endure. That it was unthinkable for such a place to fall. And in that assumption, disaster germinated.
We are all prone to such errors. We take heartbeats for granted. We assume the sun will rise. We imagine that what we cherish will last. And then comes Eikha. The unraveling. The demand to face what is.
But Eikha does not end in despair. Beneath its grief is a call to agency. We are not victims of randomness. We are partners in Ma’aseh Bereshit, the ongoing work of creation. If the world is broken, it is because it is still being made. And we have a role in that making.
This is the legacy of Avraham Avinu. Where others sought stability, he embraced motion. Where others built monuments to permanence, he circumcised flesh and walked before God—hit’halekh lefanai ve’heyeh tamim (Gen. 17:1). Keep moving. Do not settle for what is. Stay awake to what could be.
Eikha demands that same posture. It is not only a lament. It is an invitation to truth and to questioning. To relinquish what no longer lives or is viable. To mourn what has died. And to begin, once again, to build.
We will return, in time, to Neḥama, to comfort. But comfort, in our tradition, never comes cheaply. It arrives only after Eikha has been asked in full.\