Eicha: How / Oy / Where are You?

In the last weeks of his life, with the Jordan in sight and the people he has carried for forty years arrayed in front of him, Moshe begins the long farewell that becomes the book of Devarim, and almost at once he cries out a word that will not be heard again until the city is ash hundreds of years later. אֵיכָה אֶשָּׂא לְבַדִּי טׇרְחֲכֶם וּמַשַּׂאֲכֶם וְרִיבְכֶם, “how can I carry your trouble, your burden, and your quarrels, by myself?” The word is אֵיכָה, how, and it is already a lament, anticipating the book of Lamentations we’ll read next week. The heaviest of its three nouns is the last, וְרִיבְכֶם, your lawsuits, your litigation. The covenant sealed at Sinai has become, by the fortieth year, a docket. The bond has turned into case law.

The classical midrash on Lamentations hears that cry as the first of three. שְׁלֹשָׁה נִתְנַבְּאוּ בִּלְשׁוֹן אֵיכָה, three prophesied in the language of how/lament: Moshe, Isaiah, Jeremiah. Moshe said אֵיכָה אֶשָּׂא לְבַדִּי, how can I carry you alone. Yeshayahu said אֵיכָה הָיְתָה לְזוֹנָה קִרְיָה נֶאֱמָנָה, how has the faithful city become a harlot. Yirmiyahu said אֵיכָה יָשְׁבָה בָדָד, how she sits alone. Read them in order and they are the stages of a single marriage coming apart: a household grown too heavy to carry, then a wife turned faithless, then a woman left sitting alone. Burden becomes betrayal becomes abandonment. And the calendar stacks all three into one week, for Parashat Devarim is always read on the Shabbat before the Ninth of Av, whose haftarah is Yeshayahu’s harlot-city, days before the night when Yirmiyahu’s אֵיכָה is chanted in the dark over the ruins themselves.

Rabbi Nechemiah, the second-century sage, heard something further inside the word Eicha. אֵין אֵיכָה אֶלָּא לְשׁוֹן קִינָה, the word is nothing but a lament, and it is spelled, letter for letter, like another word God once spoke: אַיֶּכָּה, “where are you,” the question the Lord called into the garden to the man hiding among the trees. The lament that opens Lamentations is the question that opened human history. How, אֵיכָה, is where are you, אַיֶּכָּה, asked by someone still looking.

It is no accident that the Talmud files its great cycle of destruction stories inside the tractate of divorce, Gittin. The narratives of the Temple’s fall, Kamtza and Bar Kamtza, the ruin of the King’s Mountain, the fall of Beitar, sit together. The loss of the Temple is told as the loss of a home. To read the destruction of Jerusalem is to read a get.

According to the Mishnah, a scribe writes that document in twelve lines. He rules each line across the page before he sets down a word, and then he forms every letter with one man and one woman held in mind, this man, this woman, no other; a document drafted for people in general is void. He is writing a get, a bill of divorce, and its legal heart is a single clause he sets near the middle of the page: הֲרֵי אַתְּ מֻתֶּרֶת לְכָל אָדָם, “you are hereby permitted to any man.” The very passage of the Mishnah that fixes those words fixes, in the next breath, the words that free a slave: גּוּפוֹ שֶׁל גֵּט שִׁחְרוּר הֲרֵי אַתְּ בַּת חוֹרִין הֲרֵי אַתְּ לְעַצְמֵךְ, “you are a free woman, you belong to yourself.” A wife is released by the instrument that releases a bondwoman. Where betrothal had narrowed the whole world down to one man, הֲרֵי אַתְּ מְקֻדֶּשֶׁת לִי, you are consecrated to me, the get widens it back out to all men at once, and the same stroke that opens the world empties the house behind her.

The Talmud in tractate Gittin insists the release be total. A get is a סֵפֶר כְּרִיתוּת, a scroll of cutting, from the root כרת, to sever, and the sages define it as דָּבָר הַכּוֹרֵת בֵּינוֹ לְבֵינָהּ, a thing that cuts between him and her, leaving no thread. Hand her the document on condition that she never drink wine, or never visit her father’s house, and it is no get at all, because a single string still runs between them and severance means no string remains. The scribe is engineering an absence, a document built to leave nothing and to outlast the arm that writes it, because the Torah has already ruled that once she goes and marries another man, the one person on earth she may never again return to is the husband whose hand is shaping these letters now.

Some centuries after the scribes worked out these rules, a priest from the village of Anatot, just north of Jerusalem, picked up that exact document and read it back to God.

Yirmiyahu prophesied through Judah’s last decades, while the Babylonian armies gathered and the kingdom came apart around him. Early in his book he stages a courtroom, and the first word of the scene stands grammatically stranded: לֵאמֹר, “saying,” with no verb of speech in front of it, a participle left hanging. David Kimchi, the Radak, the twelfth-century grammarian of Provence whose eye for exactly this kind of seam is why students still open him, notices the word floating loose. It hangs because it introduces a citation. Jeremiah is about to quote something, and what he quotes is the divorce law of Deuteronomy.

הֵן יְשַׁלַּח אִישׁ אֶת אִשְׁתּוֹ וְהָלְכָה מֵאִתּוֹ וְהָיְתָה לְאִישׁ אַחֵר הֲיָשׁוּב אֵלֶיהָ עוֹד הֲלוֹא חָנוֹף תֶּחֱנַף הָאָרֶץ הַהִיא (ירמיהו ג׳:א׳)

“If a man sends away his wife, and she goes from him and becomes another man’s, does he return to her again? Would that land not be utterly defiled?”

Set it against the statute and the stitching shows. The Torah’s case runs: כִּי יִקַּח אִישׁ אִשָּׁה, “when a man takes a woman,” he writes her a סֵפֶר כְּרִיתֻת, sends her from his house, she goes and becomes another man’s, וְהָיְתָה לְאִישׁ אַחֵר, and then, if the second man dies or divorces her, לֹא יוּכַל בַּעְלָהּ הָרִאשׁוֹן אֲשֶׁר שִׁלְּחָהּ לָשׁוּב לְקַחְתָּהּ, “her first husband who sent her away may not return to take her again,” כִּי תוֹעֵבָה הִוא, for it is an abomination, and the land must not be brought to sin. Jeremiah has the whole sequence: the sending, the going, the becoming another’s, the defiled land. He is reading Deuteronomy aloud in the courtroom of history, and building it into an airtight indictment of Israel. Then he closes the case past the point the statute itself reached: וְאַתְּ זָנִית רֵעִים רַבִּים, “and you have whored with many lovers.” The woman in the Torah married one other man and was already barred forever. Israel has taken many. The verdict should write itself.

And then the verb turns.

וְשׁוֹב אֵלַי, נְאֻם ה׳. “And return to Me, says the Lord.”

Everything the reading has built now turns on where the verb of return has been standing all along. In Deuteronomy the one forbidden to return is the husband: לֹא יוּכַל בַּעְלָהּ הָרִאשׁוֹן לָשׁוּב, the first husband cannot come back, and his returning is chained to the verb לָקַחַת, to take, to acquire, the very word that opened the law when the man first took a wife. The statute governs acquisition, and what it bars is the reacquiring. Jeremiah keeps the verb of return and moves it onto the other body in the room. וְאַתְּ, “and you,” feminine, Israel the wife, וְשׁוֹב אֵלַי, you return to Me. He never has God come back to take her, which is the one motion the statute forbids. He commands the wife to walk home, and the verb of acquisition has simply dropped out of the sentence. What is asked for is a homecoming, with no repurchase attached to it.

The form of the word carries the doubleness on its surface. וְשׁוֹב is a bare infinitive, and the Masoretic reading lets it hover between a question, can you even return?, and a command, return. The tradition hears the command. Shlomo Yitzchaki, Rashi, the eleventh-century vintner of Troyes whose gloss is the first commentary every child meets, compresses the whole reversal into a breath. He has God say: יֵשׁ לִי לוֹמַר שֶׁאֵין עוֹד אַתְּ רְאוּיָה לִי, “I could say you are no longer fit for Me,” exactly as the law of the sender says of his wife; and then, וְאַף עַל פִּי כֵן שׁוּבִי אֵלַי, “and even so, return to Me.” I could invoke the statute. I am declining to.

The sages saw the collision long before Rashi glossed it, and they sharpened it into law. In the Babylonian Talmud, Rabbi Yochanan, the third-century master who presided over the academy at Tiberias and who told the story of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza, lays down a principle and proves it from precisely this pair of verses:

גְּדוֹלָה תְּשׁוּבָה שֶׁדּוֹחָה אֶת לֹא תַעֲשֶׂה שֶׁבַּתּוֹרָה (יומא פ״ו:)

“Great is repentance, for it overrides a negative commandment of the Torah.”

His proof is the divorce law read against Jeremiah. The Torah forbids the return; the prophet commands it; therefore teshuvah, repentance, is a force that pushes a standing Torah prohibition aside. תְּשׁוּבָה is built from the same three letters, שוב, return. Rabbi Yochanan set Deuteronomy and Jeremiah on the table side by side, saw that both could not stand as ordinary law, and concluded that return outranks the prohibition it violates. The problem the philologist finds in the grammar the Talmud had already found in the halakhah.

Radak refuses to let the return come cheap. Yes, he says, she may come back, but only after she has been driven from her land and has sat in exile many days, until the old betrayal is worn out of her. The rupture is real; the get was real; the cut held. Exile is the long waiting that return is made to pass through. Jeremiah keeps every gram of the law’s severity on the page, the pollution, the sending, the adultery, the shame, and adds to it one impossible imperative that the statute, read to its own conclusion, should have made unsayable.

The midrash names the audacity outright. The Pesikta Rabbati, a homiletic collection assembled for the festivals and the seasons of return, takes the same two verses and says the quiet part in the open:

תְּשׁוּבָה חֲבִיבָה לִפְנֵי הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא שֶׁהוּא מְבַטֵּל דְּבָרָיו בִּשְׁבִיל הַתְּשׁוּבָה (פסיקתא רבתי מ״ד)

“Repentance is so beloved before the Holy One that He cancels His own words for its sake.”

A mortal husband is bound by the ruling and cannot cross it. אֲבָל הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא אֵינוֹ כֵן, the Holy One is otherwise. Though you left Him and served another, He says to Israel, עֲשׂוּ תְּשׁוּבָה וּבוֹאוּ אֶצְלִי וַאֲנִי מְקַבֵּל אֶתְכֶם, “repent and come to Me and I will receive you.” The one who wrote the statute is the one who suspends it. God pays the law the compliment of enacting it against Himself, and then steps over it.

So the question is what kind of return can survive a door the law has genuinely shut.

Hoshea, the northern prophet whom God commanded to marry a faithless woman so that his own household would preach, had already dramatized the answer a century before Jeremiah, from the wife’s side. He watches her chase her lovers, lose them, and turn around: אֵלְכָה וְאָשׁוּבָה אֶל אִישִׁי הָרִאשׁוֹן, “I will go and return to my first husband, for it was better for me then than now.” There is the verb again, שוב, and there is the forbidden phrase, אִישִׁי הָרִאשׁוֹן, my first husband, the exact figure the law of Deuteronomy freezes out. And God, answering through Hoshea, offers her a fresh marriage where the law had sealed the old: וְאֵרַשְׂתִּיךְ לִי לְעוֹלָם, “I will betroth you to Me forever, in righteousness and justice, in kindness and mercy.” וְאֵרַשְׂתִּיךְ is the language of kiddushin, of betrothal begun from nothing, a first marriage. The old bond stays finished; the cut still holds; and what is offered in its place is a bond the statute never touched, because the statute forbids only the retaking of the same marriage and says not a word against a new one begun clean.

The Talmud remembers how hard that lesson came to Hoshea himself. In tractate Pesachim it tells that when God said to him, “your children have sinned,” the prophet should have begged mercy, and instead proposed a swap: the whole world is Yours, exchange them for another nation. So God sent him to marry Gomer and father children by her, and then said, send her away. Hoshea could not. אִם הוּא יָכוֹל לִשְׁלוֹחַ אַף אֲנִי אֲשַׁלַּח אֶת יִשְׂרָאֵל, “if he is able to send her away, then I too will send Israel away.” The prophet who had imagined Israel as replaceable was taught, through the one marriage he could not dissolve, that covenant is the thing that cannot be swapped out. He learned it holding his own bill of divorce and finding he could not write it.

The prophets seem to have argued among themselves about whether the first cut was ever final. In Jeremiah, God states outright that He handed over the document: שִׁלַּחְתִּיהָ וָאֶתֵּן אֶת סֵפֶר כְּרִיתֻתֶיהָ אֵלֶיהָ, “I sent her away and gave her bill of divorce into her hand,” delivered exactly as the scribe delivers it, into the hand. But a generation of prophecy later, the voice in Yeshayahu turns and asks the opposite: אֵי זֶה סֵפֶר כְּרִיתוּת אִמְּכֶם אֲשֶׁר שִׁלַּחְתִּיהָ, “where is your mother’s bill of divorce, with which I sent her away?” Produce the papers. Show Me the final document. Radak hears God distinguish His treatment of Judah from a true divorce: אֶלָּא כְּבַעַל שֶׁמּוֹצִיא אִשְׁתּוֹ מִבֵּיתוֹ שֶׁקָּצַף עָלֶיהָ אֲבָל לֹא נָתַן לָהּ סֵפֶר כְּרִיתוּת, like a husband who in anger puts his wife out of the house but writes her no bill of divorce, אֵין בֵּינִי וּבֵינֵיכֶם סֵפֶר כְּרִיתוּת, there is no bill of divorce between Me and you, לְפִי שֶׁעָתִיד לְהַחֲזִירָהּ אֵלָיו, because He is destined to bring her back. Exile is being sent from the house with the papers never drawn. And Malachi, last of the prophets, closes the file on the divine side with a line that has unsettled every reader: כִּי שָׂנֵא שַׁלַּח אָמַר ה׳, “for He hates sending away, says the Lord.” The God who wrote the law of the get is on record hating the act the law regulates.

Put these voices together and a pattern stands on its own weight. The law manufactures an irreversibility, and the prophets keep circling it, quoting it, invoking its full force, and then speaking one word past it.

Read as bookkeeping, Jeremiah’s point is trivial: a wife strayed a little, a husband overlooks it, the accounts balance. Read against the statute he himself has just recited, it is the harder thing. He has proven that this return cannot happen, and then he calls for it by name.

Reish Lakish, Shimon ben Lakish, the bandit who became a sage, draws the finer line: repentance from fear turns intentional sins into unwitting ones, and repentance from love, מֵאַהֲבָה, turns them into merits outright,

The tradition then locates the source of that impossible power, and places it outside the world entirely. Among the seven things the Talmud says were created before the world was made, before the mountains, before time began to run in its single direction, teshuvah stands second on the list, after Torah and before the Garden and the Throne. And the verse the sages bring to prove that repentance predates creation is from the ninetieth Psalm: בְּטֶרֶם הָרִים יֻלָּדוּ, “before the mountains were born, from everlasting to everlasting You are God,” and in the very next breath, תָּשֵׁב אֱנוֹשׁ עַד דַּכָּא וַתֹּאמֶר שׁוּבוּ בְנֵי אָדָם, “You return man to contrition, and You say, return, O children of man.” The proof-text for the return that precedes the world is itself built on the verb שוב, spoken twice.

This is why the same three letters can seal the door in Deuteronomy and open it in Jeremiah. The law of the get belongs to time, to the created order where what is cut stays cut and what is done cannot be undone, the street Arendt described as running one way only. Return is older than that order. It was made before the mountains, before the world in which return is impossible existed to make it impossible. When Jeremiah reads the statute to its airtight end and then says שוב, he is reaching behind the law, to a word that was there before the law had a world to govern.

The Hasidic masters heard that reaching-behind as an event in the upper worlds. Tzvi Elimelech of Dinov, reads Hoshea’s own summons, שׁוּבָה יִשְׂרָאֵל עַד ה׳ אֱלֹהֶיךָ, “return, O Israel, unto the Lord your God,” and hears in the word תְּשׁוּבָה the phrase תָּשׁוּב ה׳, the returning of the letter heh. Sin drives a wedge between the divine lovers, פֵּרוּד בֵּין הַדְּבֵקִים, and repentance is their reunion, the drawing back together of what betrayal tore apart. The exile mourned on the Ninth of Av is that wedge made history, the Presence sent out of the house with the papers never drawn; and the return the prophets demand is the wife walking home to a bond remade above.

The lament that names the ruin is אֵיכָה, and Rabbi Nechemiah heard inside it אַיֶּכָּה, the question God called into the garden to the man hiding among the trees: where are you.

The tradition remembers a first husband who signed the papers, laid them in the wife’s hand exactly as the law prescribes, and then spends the length of the prophetic books asking where the document had gone, swearing that he hated writing it, and calling down the corridor of the years, over the plains of Moav and the harlot city and the town that sits alone, against His own statute, in a verb that was old before the world was young: שׁוּבָה יִשְׂרָאֵל. Come home.

Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar

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