On Friday nights, the full 11 verses of Lecha Dodi include the words:
קֽוּמִי צְאִי מִתּוֹךְ הַהֲפֵכָה.
Arise and get out from the turmoil….
In keeping with the themes of Shabbat, it is meant as a call to awakening, setting a hopeful tone for the day. It gives us the vision – and the possibility – of rising out of the turmoil, of shaking off our sackcloth and ashes, of rejoicing as we do with bride and groom. It is a text for “the day after.”
Dr. Melila Hellner-Eshed taught Words from the Midst of Turmoil: Responding to the Devastation. And one of her framing questions, having cited these words that we sing each week, was: “What do we need to speak about hope truthfully?” She answered by saying what any of us who have suffered loss knows. She said: “You first have to speak in and from the turmoil; before the dreaming, and before the vision, we have to sit in the darkness and realize what we are seeing.”
One of my other teachers for an elective, Orit Avnery, is a Bible Studies professor and the author of Standing on the Threshold: Belonging and Foreignness in the Scrolls of Ruth and Esther. The class I took with her was on the Book of Lamentations. She spoke about how, usually, the 3 Weeks – this time in which we find ourselves – is an invitation to sit in the darkness, it is a time of preparation for Tisha B’Av and the recitation of the verses of that mournful book. She also spoke about how this year, no one in Israel needs that preparation – no one needs the invitation.
The texts that Dr. Hellner-Eshed brought were incredible; I invite you to join me on Tisha B’Av to learn some of them together. In one of them, Liora Ayalon, whose son was killed at Kfar Aza on October 7, reimagines a verse from Lamentations. In 1:2, the text describes the daughter of Zion – the central figure of the Book of Lamentations – as bitterly weeping in the night, all alone, because there is no one to comfort her. Ayalon, writing her post-October 7 interpretation, reads the verse not as a description, but as a command: Cry, she will cry at night.
But, she also does not allow the woman to cry alone. Ayalon writes further:
One must cry at the sorrow of one’s neighbor, whose son or daughter has died. For thus he takes away a little of their sorrow and puts himself a little in their place.
At night – for in the daytime their neighbors see their grief and may cry with them. At nighttime, people are left alone with their grief, and this is why it is written Cry, she will cry¸ that their neighbor cry with them at night, and as the weeping and sorrow are shared, they are diminished a little in the world.
This midrash, or interpretation, that she writes speaks to an enduring feature of our Jewish texts and history. When we reflect on collective devastation – be it of Tisha B’Av or October 7 – we do so through and of and from personal experience. We are heirs to this tradition that has known much devastation – but from it have found the ways to sit in it, and then to together do as that verse from Lecha Dodi suggests. Together, we rise and leave the darkness.
— Rabbi Sari Laufer