Reminder: Eikhah on neohasid for Tisha B'Av
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David Seidenberg
Aug 1, 2025, 9:11:53 AMAug 1
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Go to neohasid.org/resources/laments/ to download one of the best liturgical translations of Eikhah and print it out for yourself or your community.
This year the "wrapper" (the supplemental materials) includes three pieces about October 7 (same as last year), and three pieces about Gaza (two of them new), along with the piyut about climate disaster that you may already have used in years past. There are also reflections about ICE and about being Aveilei Tziyon.
I hope you'll make use of it. But that material, which is more overtly political, is also kept separate from the tachlis Eikhah plus theological commentary that can be used in any political context. So download both parts and then use the parts you want.
As you may have also heard, Awdah al-Hathaleen from Umm al-Kheir in Masafer Yatta (south of Hebron), one of the great souls and greatest peace and coexistence activists in the West Bank, was murdered by settlers this past week, may they be brought to justice. I am dedicating the Lamentations reading that I am running to his memory. May his blood not have been shed in vain.
As a people, we are at one of our lowest points in my lifetime, with Gaza undergoing famine and the murders of the innocent in the West Bank. If the covenant is real, it is clear that this is the kind of reality that leads to destruction of the state and a return to full-blown exile. And if the covenant is not real, then there was no privilege to re-establish a Jewish state in the first place. (Our need for a state, made manifest by the Shoah, does not confer in itself the privilege to create a state, at least not by Jewish/Torah standards.)
May we redeem ourselves and find the elevation in our lives and in our reasons for being alive to merit being in the land of the promise.
And may ICE be rapidly destroyed, and its forces scattered and unable to harm and torture more people, speedily, today.
David Seidenberg
This year the "wrapper" (the supplemental materials) includes three pieces about October 7 (same as last year), and three pieces about Gaza (two of them new), along with the piyut about climate disaster that you may already have used in years past. There are also reflections about ICE and about being Aveilei Tziyon.
I hope you'll make use of it. But that material, which is more overtly political, is also kept separate from the tachlis Eikhah plus theological commentary that can be used in any political context. So download both parts and then use the parts you want.
As you may have also heard, Awdah al-Hathaleen from Umm al-Kheir in Masafer Yatta (south of Hebron), one of the great souls and greatest peace and coexistence activists in the West Bank, was murdered by settlers this past week, may they be brought to justice. I am dedicating the Lamentations reading that I am running to his memory. May his blood not have been shed in vain.
As a people, we are at one of our lowest points in my lifetime, with Gaza undergoing famine and the murders of the innocent in the West Bank. If the covenant is real, it is clear that this is the kind of reality that leads to destruction of the state and a return to full-blown exile. And if the covenant is not real, then there was no privilege to re-establish a Jewish state in the first place. (Our need for a state, made manifest by the Shoah, does not confer in itself the privilege to create a state, at least not by Jewish/Torah standards.)
May we redeem ourselves and find the elevation in our lives and in our reasons for being alive to merit being in the land of the promise.
And may ICE be rapidly destroyed, and its forces scattered and unable to harm and torture more people, speedily, today.
David Seidenberg
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