Loss and Longing in the Zoharic Reading of Eichah

Abstract

This essay proposes a close analysis of the introduction to the Kabbalist text known as Midrash ha-Ne’lam al Eichah, an interpretation of the biblical book of Lamentations that integrates the medieval text of the Sefer ha-Zohar. While the biblical version centers on the destruction of the First Temple in 587–586 BCE, the medieval narrative of the Midrash ha-Ne’lam opens with an anachronistic argument between the two Jewish communities historically formed with the fall of the First Temple: one in Babylon, the symbol of the Jewish diaspora, and the other in Jerusalem, the geographical-spiritual backbone of the Jewish people. Collapsing the destruction of the First Temple with the subsequent destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the Midrash ha-Ne’lam intersperses literal and figurative meaning to craft a cosmic narrative of loss and longing which runs parallel to the original biblical account. By focusing on the argument between the Babylonian and Jewish communities, the present article probes into a tension that structures the Jewish condition in the diaspora: the state of spiritual homelessness induced by the combination of material distance from, and spiritual attachment to, one’s sacred homeland. The Midrash ha-Ne’lam paints the “competition” for the right to mourn the loss of the Temple as a sort of family argument between those who stayed in the destroyed homeland and those who have strayed from it many generations before, a tension that reverberates to this day in the inner divide between Israeli and diaspora Jews.