How words recreated what was lost in stone - The Jewish Chronicle

Fifteen hundred years ago, the ancient residents of the Bamiyan valley in central Afghanistan carved two giant Buddhas — each well over one hundred feet tall— into the side of a cliff, where they stood until one March day in 2001 when the Taliban set explosives at their base and toppled them. I remember the news that day clearly.

I recall thinking that this story was not just another footnote in the history of religious bigotry, but a harbinger of much worse to come. For who better than us Jews to note that the dehumanisation of others begins not with attacks on human beings, but with the destruction of cultural icons. Smash the windows of the synagogues, destroy their places of worship, forbid the use of their religious symbols, burn the Torah scrolls.

Leave us bereft of the symbols in which we place our hope and we will lose our faith, lose our distinctiveness, or leave the country.

Of course, it rarely works. And the violence almost never ends at the destruction of objects and architecture either.

All of which seems pertinent this weekend. As Shabbat goes out on Saturday night, another commemoration begins —the fast day of the ninth of Av. On Tishah b’Av we mourn, among other tragedies, the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem more than 2,500 years ago.

We know that the Temple was mere bricks and mortar, but it was the physical space that our forbears used to connect themselves and their community to the Divine. And in the wake of its destruction the Babylonian conquerors were not content only to leave our ancestors alone to mourn their loss, but rather they exiled the elite members of society to Babylon; raped, pillaged, and murdered or starved to death those residents of Jerusalem who were left. How did those ancient Jerusalemites respond to this tragedy? Did they allow the destruction of the Temple to crush them and to turn them away from their relationship with God?

Of course not, but they did respond to God in anger and frustration and, to a limited extent, in repentance as well. We know they did because in the void left by the Temple, our ancestors wrote the book of Lamentations, Eichah, where they laid down their witnessing to the destruction visited upon them. They called on God to remember and see them in their despair. “Remember, Eternal One, what has happened to us; behold and see our disgrace!” (Lamentations 5:1).

In place of being able to rebuild the Temple (or even in the immediate aftermath to be able to conceive of a world in which the Temple might be rebuilt), they wrote literature. In place of being able to offer sacrifices to God, they constructed, and perhaps even performed aloud in some sort of ritual context, Eichah. In the theological gap left by the destruction of the Temple and their direct connection with God via the priesthood and daily sacrifices, the ancient Israelites created a poetic response that demanded a divine reaction.

In Eichah we find a direct challenge to God. The ordeal of combat is laid bare with horrific images reminiscent not just of ancient warfare, but of modern battlefields and sieges, too. The trauma is described in painful detail: “See, O Eternal One, and look at whom you have done this/ For women eat their own young, their newborn infants” (Lamentations 2:20).

Here the voice of Zion, personified as a woman, tells of mothers so hungry that they are eating their own (already dead) infants. In the next verse God is described as “slaughtering without pity” and in the final verse of the chapter Zion makes clear that of those that she has born, Jerusalem’s inhabitants, “none survived or escaped”.

Eichah confronts the reader with a bleak picture indeed, but an image nonetheless. In the absence of the Temple, we find a literary description of the remains, both of people and buildings. “Because of Mount Zion, which lies desolate/ Jackals prowl over it” (Lamentations 5:18). Where the Temple once stood, now is only wasteland, where scavengers, wild animals, roam.

Last month a Chinese couple travelling the world offered a fascinating solution to the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. They set up 3D projectors at the site, casting holographic images of the Buddhas into their original settings. For two days a memory of the Bamiyan Buddhas was made incarnate. Modern technology created a way not of rebuilding, but of memorialising.

For our ancestors, ancient technology was the written word. In setting down the text of Eichah, they memorialised for generations long into the future to remember the Temple, its destruction, and its aftermath. Though none may have survived, like an ancient holograph wavering in our memories, the remembrance of what once was survives in our imagination through Eichah.