The Role of the Prooftext:
The Lady and Her Attendants
And now, hear this, o delicate one, who sits securely, who says in her heart, ‘I am and there is none like me. I will not sit a widow, and I will not know the loss of children.... (Isaiah 47:8)
Beloved, harlot, wife, widow, mother, daughter – all are metaphors for the Jewish people and for Zion. These metaphors are scattered liberally throughout the Tanakh, but are highly prominent in the Song of Songs and in Lamentations. Hazal, too, adopt feminine metaphors to characterize the Jewish people, often using the image of a lady of high birth (matrona) to chart the course of our relationship with God.
The matrona image is particularly appropriate in commenting on Lamentations since the image with which the book opens describes Zion as a desolate widow sitting in the ruins. The first verse is a poetic expression of grief, a cry from the heart: “How (eikha) did she sit alone, the city that was full of people…” (Lamentations 1:1).1Please read Lamentations 1:1–9 to follow the midrashic discussion. I have opted for a translation that retains the feminine form of the verb from the Hebrew original since the metaphors used to describe Jerusalem in the first two chapters of Lamentations are largely feminine.
The Midrashic Commentary
Eikha Rabba 1:1 comments:
“How did she sit (eikha yashva)…”
(1) Three [prophets] prophesied using the language of “eikha”: Moshe, Yeshayahu, and Yirmiyahu.
(4) Yirmiyahu said, “How (eikha) did she sit alone…” (Lamentations 1:1).2According to Jewish tradition, Yirmiyahu is the author of Lamentations.
(5) R. Levi said,
(6) “This may be compared to a lady of high birth (matrona) who had three attendants (shoshvinin).3A shoshvin is a friend or agent/attendant of a bride or groom. Among the functions of a bridal attendant is to act as a chaperone.
(7) One saw her in her serenity.
(8) One saw her in her recklessness.4This refers to sexual indiscretion.
(9) And one saw her in her disgrace.
(10) Thus, Moshe saw Israel in their honor and serenity
(11) and said, “How can I carry alone....”
(12) Yeshayahu saw them in their recklessness
(13) and said, “How did the faithful city become a prostitute....”
(14) Yirmiyahu saw them in their disgrace
(15) and said, “How did she sit alone....”
(1) Structure of the Midrash
Structurally, the above midrash is extremely simple. It may be mapped as follows:
(1) an introductory statement (line 1)
(2) three citations of the word eikha (lines 2–4)
(3) a mashal (lines 5–9)
(4) the nimshal (lines 11–15)
The simplicity of structure we see here is particularly marked by the repetitiveness of the paragraph as a whole. The nimshal echoes both the citations in lines 2–4 and the mashal, virtually word for word. And if we examine the mashal as a story, it too appears to be more like a list of events than a narrative. Beyond informing us that three prophets used the word eikha, it is hard to see, at first glance, what point the midrash wishes to make.
The Interpretive Problem
Line 1 tells us that this midrash is reacting to the word eikha in Lamentations 1:1, a relatively rare form in the Tanakh. The singularity of the word stands out here because it is the first word of the book, and because there is no obvious reason why the more common form (eikh) could not have been used in this context. Since the word appears in only a few places, it makes sense for the midrash to cite other contexts in which the word is used (lines 2–4). But R. Levi appears to take this exercise further by constructing a mashal around these three citations, with the apparent intent of linking them in a meaningful way.
(2) Mashal as Story
The story of the mashal is very straightforward: A lady of high birth is accompanied by three different attendants through three stages in her life. The first attendant is with her during her tranquil years; the second attendant watches her as she succumbs to sexual temptations, and the third sees her reap the consequences of her actions. We are not told anything beyond this, such as why the woman has acted as she has, or what role the attendants play in her life during these periods. Nonetheless, the sequence of events described in the story is coherent and logical, and the outcome is predictable. We are perhaps frustrated by the story’s lack of detail, but have no difficulty understanding it.
(3) Isolating the Elements
Because the mashal is both short and simple, we are able to list the elements very easily, as follows:
a lady of high birth
the first attendant
her state of serenity
the second attendant
her state of recklessness
the third attendant
her state of disgrace
(4) Matching the Elements
Finding correspondences for the elements is similarly uncomplicated, since all the elements of the mashal are covered by the nimshal, as follows:
a lady of high birth / Jerusalem
the first attendant / Moshe
her state of serenity / the forty years in the desert
the second attendant / Yeshayahu
her state of recklessness / the sins of the First Temple period
the third attendant / Yirmiyahu
her state of disgrace / the destruction of the Temple
Looking for Discrepancies
In our discussion of the mashal genre, we noted that the interpretive and rhetorical power of a mashal resides in its ability to make us see the familiar in a new light by framing it differently. This mashal, however, does not appear to add anything new to our understanding of the word eikha and/or its use in Lamentations 1:1. If the point of this midrash were to list the appearances of a rare word in the Tanakh for concordance purposes, that task would have been accomplished in the first four lines of the midrash, with no need for the support of a mashal. Moshe, Yeshayahu, and Yirmiyahu all use the word, they are all prophets, and each prophesied at a different period in Jewish history. Beyond pointing out that prophets are like shoshvinin – hardly a major revelation – it does not seem that the mashal has told us anything new, or placed any of the facts we know in an illuminating relationship with each other.
Checking Biblical Citations
That is the impression, at least, until we examine the verses quoted by R. Levi. As we have suggested, it is always worthwhile to check biblical quotations in midrashim to ascertain whether they have been cited in full, and to see the plain-sense meaning of each in its original context.5See the discussion of biblical verses in Chapter 3 and Chapter 5. The crucial importance of this exercise comes to the fore in R. Levi’s mashal.
The context of the first citation, Deuteronomy 1:12, is the opening of Moshe’s farewell sermon to the Jewish people.6Please read Deuteronomy 1 for context. In the first chapter of Deuteronomy, Moshe explains how the people ended up wandering in the desert for forty years when they were originally intended to enter the Land of Israel immediately after receiving the Torah. Moshe begins by recalling the events that follow the giving of the Torah. In explaining why he appointed judges after this event, he says, “How (eikha) can I carry alone, your toil, and your burden, and your quarreling?”
When we consider this quotation in the framework of R. Levi’s mashal, we are struck by the discrepancy between the actual verse and the state of being it is meant to illustrate. This description of the Jewish people as too difficult and quarrelsome for Moshe to handle alone hardly fits the depiction of the children of Israel in the desert as a matrona at a tranquil time in her life.
This discrepancy is particularly significant because the other biblical verses cited by R. Levi perfectly match the circumstances they are intended to illustrate. Thus, in Isaiah 1:21, the city of Jerusalem is compared to a prostitute, corresponding with the image of the unfaithful matrona in the mashal. The full quotation of Lamentations 1:1 is similarly appropriate in the context of the mashal. It seems reasonable to conclude, then, that R. Levi’s use of the verse from Deuteronomy is not an oversight but a deliberate undermining of the mashal’s structure in order to convey a message.7Rabbi Shalom Carmy has pointed out to me that the identical verse from Deuteronomy is used with a different effect in the last few lines of petihta 11 in Eikha Rabba (Buber edition). There the verse is used to indicate a positive state of affairs, and contrasted with Lamentations 1:1 to underscore the punishment of the Jewish people. The radically different uses to which the verse is put in these two midrashic settings dramatically illustrate the role of context in interpretation.
(5) Allusion
When we focus on the discrepancy between the verse from Deuteronomy and the image of a serene matrona, we can pick up on the irony with which R. Levi has constructed the mashal. The mashal describes the matrona’s first attendant as one who “saw her in her serenity” (line 7); the nimshal assigns that role to Moshe, as the prophet who “saw Israel in their honor and serenity” (line 10). After seeing the verse in context, the reader realizes that the words serenity (in the mashal) and honor and serenity in the nimshal should actually be written with quotation marks and read with a sarcastic intonation. In R. Levi’s reading, the “honor and serenity” of the Jewish people in the desert is anything but that. This ostensibly idyllic era is, in fact, the setting for the sin of the Golden Calf, the sending of the spies, and the demagoguery of Korah (to list just a few of the many transgressions committed during the forty years in the desert).
By constructing the mashal so that the verse from Deuteronomy appears to undermine it, R. Levi makes an important point about the use of the word eikha in these three places by these three prophets. He suggests that these uses of the word by Yeshayahu and Yirmiyahu are not coincidental; instead, they are allusions to its previous appearances.
In none of these cases is the word eikha used in the ordinary manner – eikh (“how”) – because none of them preface real questions. Each of its three contexts uses eikha as a rhetorical device for expressing emotion. When Yeshayahu asks in dismay how a faithful city has become a prostitute, he is echoing Moshe’s cry of helplessness in the face of the quarrelsome and stubborn Jewish people. In much the same way, when Yirmiyahu calls out in pain and horror at the destruction of Jerusalem, he is alluding to the cry and dismay of his predecessor Yeshayahu. The midrashic statement that these three prophets “used the language of eikha” in their prophecies (line 1), draws our attention to the link Yeshayahu and Yirmiyahu made between events they witnessed in Jewish history and stages preceding them.
(6) Explanatory Power
This connection here, though, is more than a case of literary allusion. It has explanatory power. The answer to Yirmiyahu’s rhetorical question about how Jerusalem could be destroyed lies in Yeshayahu’s description of Jerusalem as a promiscuous woman. Jerusalem was destroyed because a once faithful city prostituted itself. By alluding to this even in his initial expression of grief, Yirmiyahu, in effect, answers himself. Similarly, when Yeshayahu asks how Jerusalem could have deteriorated as it did, he finds his answer in Moshe’s eikha. The negative character traits of the Jewish people which led to the corruption of Yeshayahu’s Jerusalem were already present in Moshe’s time, and the seeds of destruction reaped by Yirmiyahu had been planted in earlier generations.
Prophets as Shoshvinin
Interestingly, when we return to the mashal with this insight, the comparison of the prophets to shoshvinin takes on a new coloration. Above, we noted that the simplicity of the mashal-story is due in part to the absence of an explanation for the matrona’s behavior, and to the lack of interaction between the matrona and her shoshvinin. This part of the mashal, however, has no parallel in the nimshal. Unlike the matrona’s downfall which remains unexplained, the downfall of the Jewish people is all too easy to trace. And, unlike the shoshvinin of the mashal – who appear completely passive in the face of the matrona’s slide into disaster – the prophets try diligently to correct the sins of the Jewish people and prevent their doom. That is, after all, one of the important duties of both a shoshvin and a prophet.
One possible reason the shoshvinin of the matrona in the mashal-story are unwilling or unable to help her is that each of the three acts as her agent only at a specific, delimited time of her life. The shoshvin who knows the matrona during her sexually promiscuous stage was not with her during her stable, healthy period, and will not accompany her after this stage has passed.
In contrast to this, the prophets do have a frame of reference within which to maintain continuity in their individual relationships with the Jewish people. That frame of reference is the Tanakh and the continuity is maintained by language. Yirmiyahu, looking back at Yeshayahu’s struggles with the Jewish people, knows that they share a mission and a problem; Yeshayahu, recalling Moshe, knows the same. It is not really surprising then, that Yeshayahu and Yirmiyahu also look back into the past to find the words for expressing their strongest emotions of frustration, grief, horror, or pain.