August 23, 2020: This Feels Impossible – Michael Hidalgo

Jerusalem is destroyed, flattened. It’s in habitants hauled away into exile. The city is “shamed by her destruction.” How do you even begin to speak about this? An impossible situation in which it seems no one cares and there is no one to listen - not even the Divine? In this elegy, the poet uses the picture of a woman - a widow who is alone. Saying things like, “there is no one to comfort her” and the widow saying, “No one is near to comfort me, no one to restore my spirit.” And the isolation only seems to grow. Because Jerusalem is destroyed no pilgrims come to celebrate the feasts, “The roads to Zion mourn, for no one comes to her appointed festivals.”

 

This is perhaps the hardest, most intense of the five poems. It finishes without hope, only a request; without light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, only a hope for some sort of revenge. What do we do in these kind of moments? We cry out. We lament. We lay it all out there, even if we are not wholly sure God is listening.