NOTES for Lam 1:1-22

The Book of Lamentations was written during the Babylonian exile. Jeremiah can hardly have been its author: he never went to Babylon and ended his days in the Jewish colony in Egypt. It is possible, however, that the book was written by one of the prophet's followers, who understood the events before the exile and the beginning of the exilic period as Jeremiah himself had seen them. Jeremiah's chief concern was repentance, which meant remorse for the sin committed and a renewed turning to God.

He understood very well that repentance had to embrace the whole nation: not in the sense of some collective act, but in the sense of each person's awareness of the sins he had committed and each person's conversion. If enough such conversions took place, they could change the life of the nation as a whole. Yet Jeremiah already understood that no conversion would occur without a national catastrophe.

Not because catastrophes are spiritually useful or beneficial in themselves, but because sometimes only a national catastrophe can make, if not the greater part of society, then at least a significant part of it, think seriously about the spiritual meaning of what is happening. And the prophet, it seems, was right: the people began to reflect on what was happening only after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. Repentance began with nothing other than an awareness of the very fact of sin, without which no repentance is possible. In the first chapter of the book, this awareness is expressed quite clearly. The author understands that the catastrophe is no accident, that it is the consequence of collective sin and the corresponding spiritual condition of the people as a community. A sin that before the exile was not perceived as sin at all, but regarded as normal.

One might think that a people who had been given the Torah ought to be able to distinguish sin from righteousness. Yet what may have been at work here was the automatic way of thinking characteristic of mass consciousness and of those who fall under its influence. Such a person seems to split in two: what is obvious to him when it concerns his own life ceases to be obvious when he moves from private into public life.

In public life, a person easily succumbs to the hypnotic influence of the crowd or group to which he belongs, becoming, in a sense, two different people at home and in society. Then it often turns out that in public life he begins to regard as normal what would seem completely unacceptable to him in his private, domestic life. This split leads to the triumph in society of that collective sin which, unless noticed in time, will sooner or later inevitably lead the people and the country to catastrophe, in one form or another.