I had recently returned home from a trip to Israel three weeks before the barbaric assault by Hamas against innocent people in Southern Israel on October 7, 2023, when I had a dream about writing scripture.

In my dream, reams of paper and holy words were spread before me as I assiduously read them aloud. I woke up thinking it was an odd and possibly ungodly supposition to think I would even dream such a thing.

Only when my husband left an article on my desk about Lamentations, the 25th Book of the Old Testament, did I remember the dream from months earlier.

The article was about two October 7 female survivors who each wrote a lamentation about their harrowing experience.

I immediately Googled the word “lamentation.”

Lamentation: a passionate expression of grief, sorrow, mourning, or regret—a weeping.

My Googling got me thinking that maybe I misinterpreted my dream—that perhaps I hadn’t been writing scripture at all but instead was obsessed with some other lament. But what?

The Biblical Book of Lamentations is a collection of sorrowful poems—five chapters or elegies that focus on the extreme pain and misery of the people of Judah following the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. In Lamentations, the city of Jerusalem is depicted as a grieving widow, and the imagery is incredibly and heartbreakingly powerful.

Now, I don’t propose that I know anything about anything when it comes to the Bible. I’m just trying to make sense of my dream and how it might relate to writing my own lamentation, so please feel free to contact me with any corrections regarding what I have written here today.

Theological studies of Lamentations have long been fascinated by its literary acrostic device, how and why the poems are built around the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and whether or not the author was the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah. I will leave the tenor of the structure and the presumed author(s) to the experts.

My fascination with Lamentations is in the beauty, the sorrowful ache, and the level of sophistication in every line of verse. And how it hauntingly relates to my current life situation.

While nothing can compare to the Biblical text of Lamentations, over the generations, more lamentations were later written in response to the horrors and suffering Jews experienced over time and place: The destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the massacres of the medieval Crusades, the public burning of the Talmud in the 13th century, the unspeakable Spanish massacres of 1391, the Spanish expulsion of 1492, and on and on and on.

As I grabbed my Bible and read through Lamentations, it was 2:15-16 that gave me October 7 déjà vu and chill bumps. The words took on more significant and profound meaning because since October 7, I have been horrified by the antisemitism on college campuses and elsewhere, and I would dare say seemingly everywhere these days.

The recent hissing, gnashing, and Jew-baiting by the hateful has caused me to rethink how I feel about others I once had sympathy for. Those suffering people I aligned with and protested alongside for years, have me looking at them in another light. I am now suspicious in a way I was never before. I no longer wear my Jewish Star for fear of getting punched in the face or worse. And all this hatefulness has reminded me of the hate against me from those I once loved and, in many ways, still do.

Lamentations
2:15
All who pass your way
Clap their hands at you;
They hiss and wag their head
At Fair Jerusalem:
“Is this the city that was called
Perfect in Beauty,
Joy of All the Earth?”

2:16
All your enemies
Jeer at you;
They hiss and gnash their teeth,
And cry: “We’ve ruined her!
Ah, this is the day we hoped for;
We have lived to see it!”

So here it is:

What was my dream about? Was I supposed to write a lamentation?

After much soul-searching, I have decided that—YES—a lamentation is in my near future, so stay tuned.