Articulating Grief: Life Setting and Lamentation

The laments and eulogies in the JPA corpus complement other attested performances of grief from late antiquity, including the erection of monuments (sarcophagi and tombstones, with their concomitant inscriptions and epitaphs); the creation of liturgies, including not only funerals but rituals such as the Roman parentalia (an annual ritual that commemorated the deceased members of an extended family, including small children) and Christian funerary meals (of which the ecclesial authorities disapproved); and the composition of literary works, including eulogies, elegies, and laments, such as the laudatio (prose associated with male articulations of grief) and nenia (poetry associated with female mourning).Footnote ² While these practices and products are attested (with variation over time, to be sure) throughout antiquity (including in Roman and Byzantine Palestine), the generic or universal elements were often customized to reflect the community of origin, religion, profession, gender, social class, and age of the individual mourned. At the same time, the force of conventions obscures individualizing elements. As Judith Evans-Grubbs notes, “It is often impossible to determine the religious affiliation of wealthy commemorands from their epitaphs.”Footnote ³ The same holds true of the deceased poor, whose memorials (if extant at all) typically employ minimalistic and formulaic language.

The practice of mourning extended beyond individuals to destroyed cities and communities, expressing grief for the suffering and death of a city's population. Indeed, in literary terms, the attestation of communal laments is particularly lengthy and rich. City laments can be traced back to the Sumerian laments for the city of Ur; in the biblical context, this custom appears most fully in the biblical book of Lamentations, which recalls the sack of Jerusalem by the Babylonians.Footnote ⁴ Similar texts can be found in Greek literature. Margaret Alexiou traces a tradition of city laments from Aeschylus and Euripides (who composed laments for Persia and Troy for their characters to perform), to the sack of Corinth in the second century BCE, to the destruction of Smyrna in the second century CE; new laments for the city of Constantinople were composed for centuries after its fall in 1453.Footnote ⁵ Within Judaism, the tradition of composing kinot (laments) for recitation on the Ninth of Av (the anniversary of the destruction of the Jerusalem temple) was well established by late antiquity. Poetic eulogies, by contrast, first appear in Jewish sources in Greco-Roman antiquity, attested not only in independent poetic corpora such as the works studied here but in the Talmud, as well, where funerals for important rabbis are described.Footnote ⁶

JPA poetry provides specific examples of mourning performance that illustrate broader issues within the subject of grief rituals. In these works, we find communal laments (kinot) recited on the Ninth of Av, commemorating the destruction of Jerusalem, and eulogies for individuals (hespedim) recited in the context of funerals. To be sure, laments and eulogies are distinctive genres; they served different functions and were performed in different contexts. Laments were composed for liturgical recitation on the Ninth of Av, in a communal context and as a form of expressing communal grief over events that transpired centuries earlier. These poems, for all their varied forms and voices, resonate with the various biblical models depicting Israelite grief over the destruction of the temple and the razing of Jerusalem. Eulogies, by contrast, reflect recent and immediate grief over the loss of an individual, and they lack any explicit biblical model. Furthermore, the precise settings in which they may have been performed are uncertain, and the effect of these poems would have varied depending on performative context. Performance is contingent, and the experience of these works would have been different depending on when during the funerary process they were heard. Nevertheless, the two kinds of literature share sufficient similarities to justify juxtaposing them: both laments and eulogies construct and create a process and form of mourning. Both activate and shape grief. Beyond this general functional commonality, these works share certain philosophical commonalities—ideas about correct and incorrect forms of grieving. Finally, the tradition of personifying Jerusalem as a woman (a mother) blurs the distinctions between the two genres because communal grief is personified, while hopes for the restoration of Jerusalem find an echo in hopes for resurrection of the individual.

The two narrative laments presented here serve as useful means for illuminating performative and functional elements of the eulogies and laments, because rather than creating and mediating a grieving experience they depict it from a narrative remove. These poems are particularly useful for highlighting the gendered aspects of lament. The poem depicting Moses's grief over his own impending doom presents a male model of mourning, while Zeresh's lament (despite or perhaps because of its carnivalesque elements) offers a female counterpart. These narrative poems provide exemplars of both correct and potentially deviant forms of mourning, and help as a result to give us a sense of the performance of the individual and communal laments to which they are, however obliquely, related.

Key to the constructive power of these poems—their ability to influence emotions, shape worldviews, and inculcate gender norms—is the fact that words “do” things, particularly when they are uttered in a ritual context.Footnote ⁷ On the one hand, the eulogies provide mourners at funerals with roles to direct the energy of grieving in directions that substantiate, teach, and reinforce elements of identity, particularly gender identity. On the other hand, communal lamentations employ techniques associated with grief (particularly “feminine” grief) in order to inculcate and generate an immediacy of bereavement among a diffuse group of ritual participants at a set time of year.

For all their diversity, all of the poems examined here were experienced within larger ritual frameworks: funerals, the Ninth of Av, the Torah reading, or Purim. A fundamental premise of this study, rooted in ritual and performance theory, is that the liturgical framework engenders a sense of receptivity among the community to ideas and ideals embedded in the texts, a power reinforced through elements of audience engagement that range from direct address, evocative repetition, and refrains; the physicality of prayer, from intonation to posture, likewise reinforces and realizes its meaning by drawing in the body as well as the mind.Footnote ⁸ As Aad de Jong writes, “The performative approach [to ritual] is usually accompanied by close attention to the active, creative role of participants and non-intellectual aspects of their participation, more particularly emotive, physical, and sensory aspects. A key concept of this approach is ‘ritual as an event,’ while the concept of framing sometimes plays an important role.”Footnote ⁹

This study takes the constructive potential of liturgical poems seriously and understands, to borrow Ronald Grimes's phrasing, that “rituals not only ‘are’, they ‘change’ and ‘do’. Rituals are dynamic.”Footnote ¹⁰ Each text examined here derives additional layers of significance from the contexts in which it was performed, settings that transformed the poem into speech acts, words with the power to effect existential change.

Mourning Individuals: Eulogies (Hespedim)

Jewish Palestinian Aramaic eulogies (hespedim) were composed for men, women, “maidens” (na‘arot—unmarried women), and children.Footnote ¹¹ While the forms vary, two basic rhetorical strategies predominate and at times intertwine: the historical, in which the history of humanity or Israel structures the poem; and the philosophical, which assumes a rhetorical stance of addressing the deceased directly.Footnote ¹² We do not know the precise setting in which these poems were recited (which may have varied over time) but they likely formed some part of a funerary rite, perhaps recited at the time of burial or after internment (e.g., as part of a postfunerary ritual meal).Footnote ¹³ It seems plausible that these texts, whether mourning male or female decedents, were recited by men and can be understood to reflect and inculcate a kind of mourning appropriate for men. Based on their simple, straightforward language and vocabulary, they were certainly comprehensible to the assembled listener-participants.Footnote ¹⁴ In general, whether tacking historical or philosophical, the language of the poems is restrained and impersonal, and they do not directly reflect the emotional intensity that other poems articulate. Instead, tones of resignation and acceptance of loss predominate. In their stoic restraint, these poems echo the advice of classical writers such as Seneca, Cicero, Lucretius, and Plutarch and model norms of (masculine) grieving.Footnote ¹⁵

The first type of eulogy, the historically (or genealogically) structured variety, exemplifies the theme-and-variations tendencies of poetic composition. Text 51, for example, eulogizes a male decedent. The opening stanza describes God in terms of creation and life, and incorporates death into that context, as part of a divine plan. The author then delineates the lives and deaths of famous men, stanza by stanza: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, Joshua, and David. Every stanza begins with praise for the individual and concludes with a reference to his death, a structure that reinforces the inevitability of death and the idea that no amount of virtue can spare someone this fate. For example, the stanza on Noah states:

Noah is praised as uniquely righteous, but the massive size of the ark and the impressive length of his life serve merely to underscore the fact that in the last stich, death finds him. The same is true of each of the other heroic ancestors in the catalogue.

Other eulogies follow similar patterns, adapted to reflect subsets within the community but without changes in tone. A eulogy “for women/wives” (li-neshayah) (poem 56, the header is in the manuscript) begins immediately with a description of Eve, identified as Adam's wife, and devotes two stanzas to this first woman. The poem then continues with stanzas devoted to Sarah, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel (who share a stanza even as they shared Jacob), Yocheved, Tamar, Serach, “Aaron's wife” (pilegesh de-Aharon), and Deborah. The poem concludes with a reference to “all the other righteous mothers / who have completed their days and years” (l. 42). A eulogy for a priest, in turn, emphasizes the priestly line of Judaism, devoting the first two stanzas to Aaron, then moving on to Nadav and Avihu, Eleazar, and Pinchas (where the extant text breaks off). In all cases, the deceased assumes a place in larger genealogy: the deceased man connects to the male line of the Bible; the women to the women; the priests to the priests. Each death, representing a generation, becomes a tessera in life's mosaic, and in that idea there may be a kind of solace: death is something every individual has in common with even the most exalted ancestors.

These lineage-based eulogies suggest a certain philosophical outlook through their insistent reminders that all mortals die, no matter how illustrious; the chronological litanies make the point through sheer force of repetition. The “philosophical” eulogies, however, make this point explicit and share a common philosophical orientation despite a variety of formal structures. Poems of this type do have one formal feature in common: they directly address the deceased, even as they speak, obliquely or directly, to the living audience. Thus, the “historical” eulogies narrate a lineage of mortality while “philosophical” works articulate a specific response to the inevitable. These works often overtly moralize: Poem 61 begins with the imperative, “Make repentance / while it is still in your power!” (l. 1). At times, the poets seem to conflate living and dead audiences: “Let your soul find rest in your righteousness” (l. 10) could be read as a prayer for the deceased but also as advice for the living. And phrases such as “Death takes everything / and makes it as if it were nothing” (l. 20) speak universally to all, present and otherwise. Similar texts, such as poem 62, explicitly address the deceased, but quickly it becomes apparent that all people are included in the address, which begins:

As with the historical texts, these works emphasize the futility of denying death its power, but they stress the more universal, timeless ideas of transience, morality, and mortality rather than genealogy.Footnote ¹⁶ Righteousness, fasting, and other virtuous behaviors possess intrinsic value but cannot undo one's mortality. The tone of these poems strongly recalls the biblical wisdom tradition, particularly Ecclesiastes and, as Yahalom and Sokoloff point out, Ben Sira.Footnote ¹⁷ Tonally, these poems are as a group stern in their advocacy of a graceful acceptance of mortality and they model great emotional restraint. And yet, with their abundant references to the experience of grief—particularly in the eulogies for children and unmarried youths—the devastation of death finds a voice, one perhaps more powerful for its restraint. As poem 59 acknowledges,

These poems reflect an awareness that the loss of a child is the loss of a world, of a future. In this particular poem, the formal technique of anadiplosis (daisy-chaining), in which the last word of one stanza becomes the first word of the next, creates a relentless rhythm, the lines rushing breathlessly past any pause that might take place between stanzas, as the poem moves rapidly from its first word, “mourners” ('avilayyah), to its last word, “love” (raḥamah). Grief is given concrete form.

Some poetic eulogies hybridize these two basic rhetorical-structural strategies, or innovate in other ways. Poem 52, for example, blends the historical structure—each stanza meditates on a different figure from biblical history in chronological order, from Adam to Solomon—with a philosophical refrain: “(So-and-so) has died; who does not die?”Footnote ¹⁸ In a very different and distinctive move, the author of 57 transforms the philosophical approach from the Stoic to the Neoplatonic, by creating a debate about death between body and soul over which should be judged guilty for a person's sins. This poem, which echoes an aggadic tradition found in Vayikra Rabbah 4:5,Footnote ¹⁹ transitions from philosophical musings on mortality to the debate motif with these lines:

The poem concludes:

The interplay of reported speech with play-by-play narration makes this an unusually lively and entertaining eulogy, despite the serious philosophical content and conclusion.

Mourning the Community: Laments (Kinot)

Formally and narratively, the kinot (laments over the destruction of Jerusalem), composed for recitation during the mourning rituals on the evening of the Ninth of Av, are more varied and explicitly emotional than the hespedim. Eulogies mourn an individual whose death is recent and express a loss that may be quite keenly felt; at the same time, the experience of intense grief is most likely limited to a small circle of kin and community. The mourning expressed in eulogies reflects primarily the responsibilities of family and close associates, with the larger community drawn in primarily through evocations of the universality of the experience. Laments, however, mourn a loss not directly experienced by any of the participants—the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple—but one understood and internalized, through the power of ritual, as an ongoing trauma that is re-experienced routinely.Footnote ²⁰ Precisely because of the historical remove, communal laments for the Ninth of Av must appeal more directly and explicitly to listeners' imaginations and emotions. Kinot transform history into memory, and they do so by creating in their listeners an experience of loss and feelings of raw grief, a kind of mournful anamnesis.Footnote ²¹ These works are less interested in modeling emotional restraint than the eulogies and instead make use of the ability of women—including personified Zion whose voice becomes the communal voice—to express more violent and emotional forms of mourning than were considered appropriate for men.

The grief in the kinot is complicated not only in terms of how the sensations are created through vivid images and emotional engagement but also at the theological and psychological levels. While eulogies philosophize regarding death's universality, laments regard destruction as self-inflicted by both people and deity: Zion was destroyed by our own God on account of our own sins. Eulogies accept the inevitability of death and do not blame the dead for dying; in the laments, the impulse to assign or accept guilt frequently finds voice.Footnote ²² The psychological and theological dimensions of these two kinds of mourning texts are thus significantly different, and as a result, the poems themselves are constructed, and were presumably performed, quite differently.

Several laments reflect a narrative sensibility, however loosely construed. Poem 17, for example (“A lion came up from the sea”) retells the destruction of Beitar as described in Y. Ta‘anit 4:6 (68d–69a).Footnote ²³ The poem piteously recounts the slaughter of infants and elders, sages and disciples, in gory detail, with the briskness of poetic rhetoric heightening the intensity of the grim imagery:

Like the Talmud, the imagery here is graphic, but where prose allows the talmudic narrator to describe the scene in elaborate detail and weave together varying accounts of the tragedy, poetry distills it to its essence: blood and bodies. In terms of performance, this poem is functionally a duet: the stanzas and one of the refrains (from Jeremiah 2:29) are in God's voice while the other refrain (from Lamentations 3:45) is in the communal, first-person plural. The imagery of the slaughter is graphic, and this visual richness leads directly to emotional impact. The perspective shifts from God's sweeping view of the catastrophe to the poet's own voice as he articulates the grief-stricken response to what he has “witnessed.” The poem concludes in a tone of mournful pleading, speaking directly to the deity, in the only full stanza from this perspective:

The sheer quantity of suffering dominates, and the violence of Rome overwhelms; it is Roman guilt, the disproportionate destruction of Jewish life, that the poet laments, not Jewish responsibility. The poet acknowledges his community's culpability—the tragedy is a “debt that came due” (l. 44)—but the pathos of the poem, its efficacy, derives from the scenes of the horrific past that God, in His narration of events through the poem, has made manifest (titgalle’). This may suggest divine culpability, the idea that God's inaction permitted the slaughter and let it come to pass, but it also displays an awareness of the potency of liturgical ritual: the past becomes real. The poet has seen the destruction through God's eyes, shared it with his congregation, and now leverages the horror into a prayer for redemption.

Most of the other JPA laments are less linear in narration than this particular lament and convey less sense of historical remove. These other kinot offer, instead, mosaic-like images of the destruction, recreating some sense of the chaos or experience of actually witnessing it. They create this sense of immediacy through the powerful deployment of the feminine voice: many of these poems, drawing on the personification of Zion as a mourning mother and widow from the book of Lamentations and Jeremiah, are written in the voice of a grieving woman.Footnote ²⁶ This loss is personal; it is being told, as if by a witness, to both the community and God. For example, in poem 18, the speaker refers to the enemy “overturning my temple / and trampling me like chaff” (l. 3); she says, “My heart grieved for Josiah” (l. 8), “the enemy's might overcame me” (l. 16), “he punished me on account of Joseph's blood” (l. 20), and “I protested in suffering and wailed” (l. 36). Only in the last lines does the poet shift and offer words in the voice of God, “the Rock, who said to them / ‘I shall not leave you // I will not forget you / but rather I am destined to rescue you’” (ll. 44–45). Given the historical sweep of the poem, which begins with an allusion to the scouts reconnoitering in the days of Moses and ends with the Babylonians sacking the temple, the speaker can only be Zion, but never does the poet specifically identify in what voice he speaks. Instead, the character he presents would be conjured through mannerisms and tones—as in any theatrical performance—implicitly deploying the conventions of and exploiting the tolerances allowed to female mourning. Because he inhabits a feminine persona, the performer can model bereavement with particular depth of emotion, with the effect of transforming the congregation simultaneously into consolers and, paradoxically, those whose loss the matriarchal figure mourns. Zion mourns for Israel and Israel mourns with her.

The fact is that while Zion appears to be the speaker in several additional kinot, the actual identity of the woman is never specified, and the use of the first-person singular obscures any actual assignment of gender. That said, certain allusions underscore the identification. In poem 19, the speaker's lines are rich with allusions to the first chapter of Lamentations (which would be heard in the context of the Ninth of Av liturgy, as well), which describes Zion as a bereft widow. In the piyyut, however, that narration becomes speech: “Then He sent fire from the heavens against me” (l. 2), echoing Lamentations 1:13; “How I sat, a widow, more desolate than all” (l. 12), resonating with Lamentations 1:1; and “Thus over these I weep” (l. 14), alluding to Lamentations 1:16. Other lines underscore the speaker's dire straits in emotionally charged terms: “How all the nations scorn me!” (l. 6), and “Dread for them fell upon me and I was weeping” (l. 19). The final stanza underscores the pathos of maternal bereavement imagery:

In this poem, the speaker persists explicitly in the voice of Zion to the very end, but once again concludes with a petition directed explicitly at the deity. Zion is a woman throwing herself upon her Lord's mercies, interposing herself—in the body of the poem's performer—between her vulnerable children (the congregation) and the deity with the power to undo her, and their, suffering.

Poems 20 and 24 also suggest that the speaker is a feminine mourner. Poem 20 is in the first person, with a preface that again makes it clear that the speaker is Zion (“my citadel” in l. 2; “my congregation” in l. 3) and a first-person refrain, “O woe is me!” ('alelay li). Similarly, poem 24 opens with:

The speaker is not explicitly gendered, but the term of endearment used by God—“pure dove,” from the Song of Songs—is feminine, as is Israel in the figurative reading of the Song. The rest of the poem, only half of which survives, offers stark images of lost beauty and graphic suffering, much like poem 17, but here underscored by the prominence of the singular, rather than plural, first-person communal voice.

The prominence of the first-person, feminine perspective in the kinot is striking, and some of the poems that do not strictly follow this convention serve to highlight its significance. Norms of gendered mourning are suggested in poem 25, of which only the initial lines survive. In this poem, the patriarch Abraham “lifts his voice like a dove (m.)” (l. 6) while Sarah “weeps tearfully / and wakes all who sleep” (l. 8).Footnote ²⁹ The association of women with weeping seems a particularly recurrent motif. Poem 23, which is more a prayer for restoration than a lament per se, opens with an imperative addressed to the deity: “Gaze upon Zion / In mercy may You rebuild Jerusalem” (ll. 1–2).Footnote ³⁰ Here the poet-performer is the only speaker in the poem, but he asserts that his intended audience is a masculine deity (the congregation eavesdrops) and the subject of their discourse is a feminine city. In this poem, Zion cannot speak for herself; she is too bereft. Finally, the identity of the speaker in poem 21 is entirely ambiguous. The refrain, “my eye, my eye runs with water,” quotes directly from Lamentations 1:16 (in Hebrew), a verse that in context is spoken by Lady Zion, and indeed the poem can be read as entirely in Zion's voice, narrating various graphic images of destruction and loss. But particularly because the line is a refrain, it also invites communal participation in this “feminine” act of grieving (copious, public weeping).Footnote ³¹ Furthermore, in various midrashic sources this phrase is ascribed to the deity, who Himself mourns the destruction of His city with what might be regarded as undignified—unmanly—intensity.Footnote ³² It is possible, we might conjecture, that in uttering lines that assert one is weeping, whether the intent is to induce actual grieving behaviors in the listener-participants. It seems noteworthy that the one kinah in the communal voice—poem 22, composed as a dialogue between two “masculine” groups, the exiled Israelites and their Babylonian captors—consists of an indignant refusal to perform, based on the language of Psalm 137:3–4.

Taken together, these kinot indicate that in the ritual context of the Ninth of Av, it was not enough to affirm that one's ancestors suffered and that the consequences of the destruction of Jerusalem were still felt centuries after the fact. These poems provide a graphic, multisensory impression of having experienced the catastrophe, and provide insight into the human and divine experiences of loss. As the cantor-poet-performer intoned these works, quite possibly enlivening them with the stock gestures associated with mourning women, he modeled a very bold form of grieving, in that it permitted male participants a chance to be closely proximate to or even actively involved in the powerful world of maternal mourning.

Aside from the common use of alphabetical acrostics—a formal device connoting universal scope (from A to Z) even as it functions to limit quantity—no common stylistic features unite these works. There are no formal conventions of lamentation. Instead, in their diversity, the individual works highlight specific, emotionally engaging perspectives as ways into a tragedy that, while it occurred centuries before these laments were composed, remained keenly felt. The specificity of images, in their vivid directness, functions to make the loss more immediate and personal, transforming remote history into immediate, internalized memory. The participatory, experiential nature of these poems creates a sense of investment in the audience. It collapses the historical remove between then and now and conjures up a sense of loss for something not personally known or experienced by the poet or listeners. The variety of materials in this corpus suggest that no single work can explain the destruction in its entirety; instead, reading these works together creates a mosaic of the catastrophe, and the varied perspectives, voices, and styles of the kinot underscore the scale of loss. The hespedim console by mirroring stoic acceptance of the inevitability of mortality in a voice of narrative neutrality; the kinot give voice to the anger and terror of death on a massive scale but use voices that speak with devastating immediacy.

Grief Narrated: Moses and Zeresh

Perhaps the most revealing way we can engage with the rhetoric of eulogizing and lamentation, however, is to illuminate the material obliquely. As much insight as we can draw forth from the hespedim and kinot directly, “secondary” texts that narratively engage mourning practices and concepts shed additional light on performative and constructive elements of these works. Poem 40, Moses's confrontation with Adam over the origins of mortality, implicitly challenges the philosophical stoicism of the eulogies even as it playfully subverts the “historical” structure of other eulogies; Poem 32, Zeresh's lament over the death of her sons, in turn, echoes and even exploits the helpless, angry, feminine grieving of the communal laments.

Poem 40 was composed to embellish the final portion of the Torah, which includes the death of Moses and his unknown burial at the borders of the Promised Land. The poem starts in medias res: God has apparently informed Moses of his imminent demise and Moses, presumably, has complained, for the opening lines state:

God here synthesizes the two major approaches to comforting the bereaved on display in the hespedim.Footnote ³³ The phrase, “Thence have gone all [your] ancestors” (l. 4), echoes the genealogical logic of the “historical” eulogies, while the assertion of death's inevitability (it is “the fate / of all living beings” in l. 3) recalls the stoic consolations of the “philosophical” eulogies. The deity, in short, offers the standard consolations of (masculine) eulogies. In a way, Moses constitutes the audience for his own eulogy in the opening line, and the rest of the poem flows from its rhetorical failure. Rather than accepting these assurances, Moses confronts the historical construction of mourning by seeking out Adam, the first man, who brought death into the world when he ate of the fruit of the Garden.Footnote ³⁴ In doing so, he collapses the historical distance separating him from all of his other ancestors, challenging the idea that death actually is a necessity. Adam counters by arguing that the Torah predated the creation of humanity by 2,000 years, and thus in fact he should not be blamed for bringing death into the world; it was foreordained. Indeed, it seems that perhaps the knowledge that Adam gained when he ate of the Tree of Knowledge was an awareness of his own fate, an image that fills his statement—“My name was listed for death” (l. 20)—with tremendous pathos.Footnote ³⁵

What intrigues about this poem is not only the way in which it blends elements of actual eulogies into a literary narrative; it also depicts the response to the words of consolation. The final stanza, which concludes the acrostic, states:

The penultimate line (l. 21) is clear: the news that death has been part of the divine plan from the beginning of creation does not relieve Moses's predicament, but it does activate his grief, transforming his anger and indignation into mourning. The imagery is stark: Moses, the man who has spoken (literally) volumes, who accused Adam with vehemence, stands in tearful silence. The final line is less clear: despite its simple language, we cannot be sure who speaks. Is it Moses, reluctantly accepting the nature of the world and permitting Adam to return to his eternal slumber in the cave of Makhpelah? Or is the speaker Adam, consoling the grieving Moses, sharing his sorrow, and gently urging him to accept his fate? Or is it God, re-entering the conversation, now attempting to comfort rather than philosophize? Any of these interpretations is plausible and creates a specific understanding of the poem's resolution, but in a performative context, the speaker of this poem would have had to decide how to inflect his voice—not only determining who speaks the line, but with what tone, what posture, and for what purpose.

This poem creates a kind of doubling of audience: Moses, Adam, and the deity interact with, and thus constitute audiences for each other, even as their actions are beheld by the congregation. The consolation of the poem addresses the listeners only obliquely even as Moses models a response to this most immediate loss imaginable: the loss of one's own life. The voices in this piyyut—God, Moses, and Adam—speak to each other, but as embodied by the performer, it takes place before another set of witnesses, the present community. The result is a further collapse of temporal distance: Moses interacts not only with Adam, the first person, but also with the living congregation, the most recent generation. This poem offers a kind of slant access to the reception of eulogies for individuals like those noted above: they are the necessary words, the words everyone will say, but what healing and catharsis such words offer comes slowly. These texts and the rituals around them facilitate and create—or, in the case of poem 40, model—a way of mourning together: they are not spoken alone, but to and with others.Footnote ³⁶ The philosophical, appropriately “masculine” response to grief proves a challenge for no less a figure than Moses to accept.Footnote ³⁷

While eulogies provide a means for mourning the death of an individual—equipping the survivors to accept sad but inevitable and universal truths with fortitude—communal laments permit and even seek to generate strong emotional responses in their audiences, both human and divine. Neither nation nor temple is necessarily mortal in the way an individual is. Anger is certainly one of the major tones of the lament of Haman's wife, Zeresh, for her ten crucified sons, and while a poem in a personal voice may seem significantly different from a lament for a city, the scale of Zeresh's loss (ten men and the promise of life through future generations) can be seen as a “community writ small.” Moses, having reached the end of his lifespan, needed to accept his fate; Zeresh's sons were doomed prematurely by their father's foolish choices.Footnote ³⁸ Furthermore, in Zeresh's lament we hear a particularly feminine voice—the voice of a bereaved mother—which stands in stark contrast to the restrained (“masculine”) hespedim for children. These differences both suggest different standards of mourning and may indicate that the eulogies we have were associated with male funerary performance.

Poem 32 elaborates on an episode from Esther 9:5–10. Our poet fashions from the biblical material a carnivalesque inversion of the Christian Passion story: Zeresh takes the place of Mary, and her ten sons are mourned in place of the executed Christian savior. Although the Purim setting colors our understanding of the poem, the poem's performance in the setting of a national Jewish holiday and its resonances with the central narrative of Christianity suggest that, like the Ninth of Av kinot, this work can be read as speaking to a communal crisis—however humorous or ironic—as much as to an individual mother's loss.Footnote ³⁹

The opening stanza of the poem sets the stage—Zeresh grieving at the site of the ten crucifixions—and quickly introduces the mourning mother's voice. Although she is the only character in the poem aside from a narrator, she speaks in the first-person plural, implicitly including her dead sons in her lament, much as traditional kinot adopt a communal voice or speak as a community personified. Indeed, even as she offers a parody of the Christian Mary, Zeresh can also be seen in the poem's final stanzas as a tragic inversion of Mother Zion.Footnote ⁴⁰ The poem could perhaps be seen as “Judaizing” Zeresh when it depicts her as (unwittingly) performing Jewish Purim rituals, in her doubled exclamations of “cursed be Haman”;Footnote ⁴¹ her language of lament includes a refrain that begins, like a conventional kinah, with an utterance of woe: “Woe upon her, for what befell her / for the fate of her son . . .” with the specific son specified in each iteration. Some Hebrew laments composed for the Ninth of Av display a similar cataloguing structure, integrating the tribes of Israel or the signs of the Zodiac as structuring devices, in precisely the same way Zeresh mourns her sons.Footnote ⁴² And while labeling Zeresh a “harlot” (l. 14) mitigates audience sympathy for her, we should recall that the same accusation is leveled against Israel throughout the prophetic literature.

The resonances between this piyyut and conventional styles of kinot suggest that the performance of this poem may have been modeled on the performance of a liturgical lament. That is, if we imagine that a Ninth of Av kinah employed the body language and gestures associated with laments in late antiquity more broadly, we can imagine that this parody or inversion of lament likewise parodied or inverted the same physical mannerisms and techniques. Such parodies of lament and the humorous deployment of language and forms from tragedy are attested in Greek and Roman comedy, and the extension of such a practice in the Jewish context is not implausible.Footnote ⁴³ In terms of structure and rhetoric, Zeresh's lament hews closely to the style and images of the kinot, and thus we can consider the possibility that, just as the poem about Moses's impending death played with the tropes of actual eulogies, this work deploys the conventions of liturgical laments where, as here, it is the maternal figure who gives fullest expression to grief. Just as Moses could be understood as the audience of his own eulogy, Zeresh can here be seen as the performer of a lament as pathos laden as it is ultimately unpersuasive.

Viewed as a parody of lament practices, Zeresh's recitation suggests certain realities of Jewish mourning practices, although the nature of the poem—a hybrid of eulogy and communal lament—means that it may reflect the practices of one or the other, but not necessarily shared rituals. The prominence of Zeresh's voice, for example, correlates with the public performances of grief by women in mourning rites throughout the Mediterranean world.Footnote ⁴⁴ Within the corpus of Aramaic poems, Zeresh's behavior recalls the statement in poem 60 (a eulogy) that “the father offers the eulogy / and the mother cries out” (l. 5), which resonates with poem 25 (a lament) in which Abraham “lifts his voice” (l. 6) while Sarah “weeps tearfully” (l. 8). The physical postures ascribed to Zeresh, particularly the references to “sitting” (ll.36, 42), along with her actions (notably “cutting her hair” in line 23) speak vividly to feminine mourning practices, as do more general references to her “wailing” (l. 2), “howling” (l. 12), and “weeping and lamenting [oh-woe-ing]” (l. 23). Zeresh enacts, in exaggerated or compressed form, the physical process of grieving, particularly as it was permitted to or expected of women. Her speech does not reflect the restrained, philosophical acceptance of the (masculine) hespedim, or even the righteous, indignant resistance of Moses to those norms in poem 40, but rather the epitome of overwrought, ultimately self-harming, feminine bereavement.

Certain structural-rhetorical elements of the poem suggest elements of its ritual performance. The short declamatory lines, most of which are in Zeresh's voice, create a rapid pace and suggest a particularly searing tone. The refrain, with its repetition of “Woe upon her . . .,” lends itself to choral or audience participation, with the collective voice gaining momentum with each iteration. The final lines of the poem do not, of course, reflect typical mourning practice, insofar as they depict Zeresh's suicide. And yet, from a performative standpoint, the idea of the speaker enacting the line is quite plausible. The performance of this piyyut could easily have drawn on the stage mannerisms attested in late ancient theatrical performance. The performer could easily have transitioned from Zeresh's sorrowful voice to the violent and unexpected concluding act; used the physical stances that would indicate suicide in a tragedy; and exaggerated the mannerisms of mourning to amplify them across a room. The parodic nature of this poem, furthermore, would invite the kind of parodic style of performance particularly associated with such late ancient theatrical forms as mime and pantomime—art forms where many elements of identity find expression through exaggeration. That said, while ritual performance may have drawn on the techniques of the stage, the two modes of performance served vastly different functions. As Grimes writes, “Ritually engaged people are supposed to be connected by a web, whereas playgoers are connected by a thread.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The shared experiences constructed by the various liturgical works examined here, which reinforce bonds among people and across time, constitute slender threads woven into the ritual web of community.

On and Off Stage: Audience(s) Engagement

The two narrative laments illuminate and cast into relief performative elements implicit in the eulogies (hespedim) and laments (kinot). Some elements of these poems, including their philosophical attitude, use of meter and rhyme, rhetorical technique of dialogue or mock-speech, vividness of imagery, and sense of voice suggest a kind of continuum between mourning poems and the texts of funerary epitaphs; if anything, epitaphs are more personal (or personalized) than the poems, which, by their nature, are relatively generic. Unlike epitaphs and monuments, however, eulogies and laments directly engage the participants (family, friends, and community) in a performance. In some cases, this audience engagement is explicit: refrains, antiphony, and other formal techniques require the presence of others for performance.Footnote ⁴⁶ Other elements, such as rhetorical questions, are attested in other media (such as the epitaphs) but take on a different experiential quality when declaimed in front of an actual audience; this performative quality of rhetorical questions is, to some extent, underscored by the fact that in poem 40 Moses seeks out concrete answers to such questions. As an “audience” to God's attempt at consolation, he is active rather than passive. Similarly, while praise is a standard element of funerary language, Zeresh's poem engages more specifically in epideixis, “praise-and-blame” rhetoric, familiar from the world of classical oratory. And her rich use of deictic particles (this, that, these, those) in the poem suggests a physical component of gesturing as part of the poem's performance. Even poems lacking significant deictic verbiage nonetheless suggest a certain vividness of body language, with their references to lifting eyes, weeping, and crying out. Such words do not demand a specific posture, but nonetheless suggest potential engagement with the vocabulary of related gestures known from Greco-Roman oratory.

The prominence of Zion's voice in so many of the laments is both commonplace and noteworthy. These poems embed clues about ancient grieving practices, both funerary and communal, and remind us that mourning was highly gendered. Laments such as these not only reflect the gendering of mourning but also served to inculcate it. These poems suggest that women were closely associated with highly emotional mourning, and that their mourning was expected to be particularly expressive—and, in a ritual context, perhaps possessed a particular efficacy, as well.Footnote ⁴⁷ Not only is Zeresh far more emotive in her lament, but poetic eulogy 60 specifically references the mother as “crying out” (n-h-m) whereas the father of the deceased “eulogizes” (s-p-d)—suggesting precisely that emotional mourning is the mother's prerogative while eulogizing is the father's responsibility. Even more significant is the female presence in the kinot.Footnote ⁴⁸ In most cases, the feminine voice of Zion provides the powerful articulation of grief, but in other cases (poem 23), the sight of desolate Zion/Jerusalem is expected to move God to compassion; the feminine is thus, if not always the voice of grief, a powerful catalyst. It is not that men never weep: Moses weeps in poem 40, and in kinah 21, the deity may well be the weeping mourner. Yet even these examples belie complexity. Moses weeps, but he doesn't howl the way Zeresh does; and it is his anger, not his lamentation, that wakes the dead. Moses resisting death reflects an emotional resistance to the demands of masculine grief, but in the end, Moses is socialized to male restraint. And with regard to poem 21, the spare text offers the performer a great deal of room for interpretation: the refrain could be understood as God or Zion; it could have been performed as an antiphonal duet, or the weeping could have been done by the congregation, moving the audience to weep (or at least assert tearfulness). Laments, it seems, find feminine images and ways of mourning useful in not only representing but actively generating a depth of grief that is not necessarily intrinsic in the worshippers, who are centuries removed from the events they recall. Eulogies, in contrast, offer a more restrained style of mourning that is wholly in keeping with Greco-Roman male gender norms.

The distinctly “masculine” and “feminine” modes of grieving indicated in these poems suggest that the eulogies themselves may have belonged to the male sphere of mourning (as in poem 60, noted above) while the laments echo less restrained, more expressive female grief. Much, of course, remains unknowable about performance of these texts, which themselves reflect various ritual settings: funerals, Shabbat, the Ninth of Av, and Purim are all strikingly different occasions not only in terms of ritual but tone. In the end, the poet-performer, whether addressing a personal loss or one that is historical and communal, must employ techniques that move himself in order to move others. As Erik Gunderson notes, in analyzing a declamation recounted by Seneca: “Haterius believes what he says. He speaks from his heart. His declamation offers him the opportunity to work through real, personal sorrows. On the other hand, this sorrow remains firmly embedded within a context of public performance. . . . Given the iterability of the elements of the declamatory genre, Haterius can even expect to ‘relive’ his own sorrow again and again throughout the years. Even if his tears are authentic, they become staged and stagey. . . .”Footnote ⁴⁹ To be effective, rhetorical grief must be performed; so, too, liturgical grief: performance embodies it and translates it from a philosophical possibility to an experienced event. Eulogies and laments teach proper mourning even as they channel the emotional experiences of bereavement.

The experience of poems such as those examined here results from a chemistry between words and performance, between text and context. “Context” in this case consists not only of the ritual framing, which grants the words a kind of efficacious potency beyond their surface meaning, but also of the performer's physical presence, his embodiment of the role, and his dynamic with the audience. It seems likely that the hespedim, which reflect masculine mourning, were performed by men during the funerary rites; the kinot, while performed in the context of the fast day of the Ninth of Av, deploy feminine modes of grieving not because they were performed by women but because feminine (and especially maternal) modes of grieving more effectively induced a grief-stricken emotional experience in an audience of men and women both, and were most efficacious in moving the deity, as well. Eulogies socialize the participants in restraint, while laments loosen societal restrictions.

The very real significance of such performative choices—how to stand, how to weep or resist weeping, how to hold one's arms and pitch one's voice—raises a number of issues, none of which are easily resolved but which open up these works to scholarly imagination. Issues of embodiment and gender are particularly intriguing, and significant for understanding how these works shaped identity as men and women, as family members, and as Jews. The prominence of feminine (maternal) voices in the kinot, as in Zeresh's lament, indicates one mode of mourning, while the resignation of the eulogies, and Moses's struggle against going gently into that good night, indicates a different, and equally gendered, norm. These elements of gender and voice highlight the essential (if impossible to recover) element of embodiment in performance, one which likely colored the performance of poetic eulogies, as well. While a written epitaph may have a “voice” (as in the Greek metrical epitaph of Arsinoë, written in the first person from the perspective of the departed who died in childbirth),Footnote ⁵⁰ only during a performance is the voice actually articulated. Thus the performers (including the congregational participants) who breathed life into these poems, whether in a synagogue or during a funeral, would likely have adopted the persona of the various speakers and thus conveyed, in terms of posture, voice, pitch, or other methods of embodiment, not only the gender but other, less tangible, elements of character: emotional tenor, pride or humility, resilience or defeat, philosophical resolve confirmed or philosophical resolve unraveling.

Poetic eulogies and laments speak, by their nature, of something lost. They resemble monuments and epitaphs in their textual permanence, but they are more than just words on a page. They resemble memorial and mourning practices in their performativity, but they are more enduring. These poems give voice and structure and body to grief, whether it is a person or a city that is mourned. Through the vividness of poetic rhetoric and the alchemy of living performance, these texts triumph over death and despair. By breathing into the lines, the performers of these works not only inhabit a role, they embody a persona. Much of the reality assumed by these texts is, of course, lost to us, and transforming these poems from textual relics into living works is, itself, an act of imagination, much like that which brought them to life in the first place.