Canter Bridge

Five times in the twenty-two grief-stricken verses of the book of Lamentations’ first chapter, the poet wails out a most forlorn cry: אין מנחם, there is no comforter.

In point of fact, one of the two reasons by which the book of Lamentations finds a place in the biblical anthology is precisely because this claim is factually wrong.

The other reason is that human experience shrieks from both good hearts and bad ones that the claim is right.

There is indeed one who comforts. Yet in Zion’s debris—or ours—he makes himself invisible. His footsteps become almost—though rarely completely—silent.

We cry with the poet of Lamentations that no one comforts. We are bereft, left with only poetry and tears.

And hope. It is this third ash-dusted treasure that we guard in an inner pocket of our shredded jacket, touching its tiny lump from time to time to assure ourselves it is still there.

One must not believe that hope alone bears witness to a Redeemer who might yet appear. Tears and poetry do that also. Yet hope endures more stubbornly than they. Tears flow down our cheeks, poetry pierces the air and penetrates the audition of those who share our shaken Zion. But hope, that one we keep on the inside pocket, whispering to our neighbor that we have a store of it for when the need should undo us. We touch our coats. It is still there. We do not pull it out, do not ask others to gawk at it, do not risk it falling from our trembling fingers to become lost beneath stones or the desperate mob.

This hope, it is ours. Yet more than that it is mine.

Even as we cry again that ‘eyn menachem, we know better.

A small lump in our overcoat interrupts the otherwise level, sweating, fearful line between our forsaken flesh and the betraying air. We touch it again.

It is still there.