The Therapeutic Use of Lamentations after Collective Trauma

Why do communities and nations desire to commemorate suffering? Why must we remember and understand? Why must we tell? In his 2006 preface to Night, Elie Wiesel writes, “In retrospect I must confess that I do not know, or no longer know, what I wanted to achieve with my words.”¹Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), viii. By telling of his Holocaust experiences, Wiesel participates in the human mystery of remembering horrors. His inability to capture his purposes is just a part of the mystery.

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We might ask the same probing questions of the biblical book of Lamentations. The book is an eyewitness testimony written in the aftermath of the horrors of the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 586 BCE. It consists of five poetic descriptions the suffering of Zion and its people, with scattered explanatory or theological comments. It closes with an appeal to God. Interpreting the book involves answering asking why it was written.What was the author trying to “achieve” with these poems?

Evangelical Christians have sometimes been uncomfortable with the book of Lamentations. The theology is confusing, and the images are too unsettling. Why do we want to read about infants starving at their mothers’ dry breasts or piles of corpses? Or more importantly, what do we make of God meticulously planning these horrors (2:8)? What do we make of the doubting elliptical question at the end: “Unless you have utterly rejected us, and you remain exceedingly angry with us . . .” (5:22)?

If you ask someone to recite a section from Lamentations, it probably would be 3:22­–23, “The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” It is not likely to be Lamentations 4:10: “The hands of compassionate women have boiled their own children; they became their food during the destruction of the daughter of my people.”

So, what do we make of this book? I want to gesture at some clues to the “achievement” of Lamentations by drawing our attention to the book’s original context, the therapeutic mystery of remembering and telling in trauma, and the book’s liturgical use within the Jewish tradition. The book is a gift to soothe our personal griefs and to secure our membership within a cloud of suffering witnesses to the faithfulness of God.

“By day I studied Talmud and by night I would run to the synagogue
to weep over the destruction of the Temple.”
Elie Wiesel, Night

The Historical Context of Lamentations

The book of Lamentations tells of horror that is almost unimaginable to a modern reader. It is a paradigm case of traumatic horror. It is one of the major events in the shared story of the Jewish people. It is probably difficult for any modern reader to appreciate the psychological cataclysm of the destruction of Solomon’s temple to person in the ancient Near Eastern world.

Harold Turner explains that the temple was the center of the world, where the sacred met the mundane. It was no ordinary place. He writes that the temple was “where contact may be made with a much more real and solid world than that of everyday uncertain and changing experience.” The temple was the gateway to transcendence; it was the point of contract with “the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land” (Jonah 1:9) The people of Judah captured this place of contact when they called the Jerusalem temple “his footstool” (Ps 99:5; 132:7; cf. Lam 2:1)

So, to lose the temple was to lose all sense of orientation and to feel a deep alienation from the Master of the Universe. It shattered the paradigm of king, temple, land, and covenant.²F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp, Lamentations. In Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (eds. James Luther Mays and Patrick D. Miller; Louisville: John Knox Press, 2002). The temple represented a foothold in the land of promise (Jeremiah 7:4). Its destruction was the collapse of this certainty. Harold Turner captures the pathos and chaos of its destruction: “In such situations the loss of all points of reference threatens the total dissolution of one’s world, and leads to panic.”³Turner, From Temple to Meeting House, 19.

The poetic construction of the book aims both to capture the chaos and to order it. Its form communicates as well as its content. The chaos is captured by stunning ironies. Dobbs-Allsopp highlights how the poet captures the disorder in the unnatural irony of the question, “should women eat the fruit of their womb?” This question alludes to the blessing and curse motif in the creation story and in God’s subsequent covenants (Gen 1:28, 3:16; Deut 28:4). Blessing is for fruitfulness and curse frustrates it.

The poet also startles the reader by using poetic enjambment (the B-line finishes the thought of the A-line) in unexpected ways. For instance, Lamentations 2:22 begins, “You summoned as if to a festival,” only to conclude with, “terrors on every side.” There are layers of metaphor and poetic device all reinforcing a basic point: chaos and death has destroyed shalom, prosperity, love, respect, and hope for the future.

There is also a poetic ordering of this chaos. We see it in the acrostic structure of the poems. The first four chapters are arranged by the Hebrew alphabet, each stanza or line beginning with the next letter. The acrostic pattern begins each stanza for Chapters 1, 2, and 4, and each line for chapter 3. The ordered treatment of the suffering matches its chaos, from aleph to tav. Leslie Allen also sees coherence in the narrative that the book tells. It takes piecemeal, intrusive sensory episodes and puts them in roughly chronological order. Traumatic horrors often leave strong sensory memories. Narrative ordering gives this a mental framework, even if not yet meaning or closure.

“Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live.”
Elie Wiesel, Night

Integrating Traumatic Experiences

Trauma literature also helps us understand Lamentations. Experiences of horror events like the destruction of the temple threaten the integrity of the individual and the community. They threaten our capacity to make sense of the world.

Not every experience of suffering is traumatic. Bessel van der Kolk tells the story of a young boy named Noam who witnessed the first plane crash into the north tower of the World Trade Center. And yet Noam did not experience serious psychological scars. Van der Kolk explains, “Noam was fortunate. His entire family was unharmed, he had grown up surrounded by love, and he was able to grasp that the tragedy they had witnessed had come to an end.” (Body Keeps the Score, 51)

Those who experience psychological trauma have two core features: overwhelming helplessness and inability to integrate the experience into their lives. Trauma disrupts the absolutisms like “I’ll see you later.” It alienates us from our fundamental assumptions, our sense of place, of belonging, of purposefulness. Trauma threatens our narrative identity. It is narrative collapse. We cannot imagine what comes next because it destroys the story that we thought we were living.

This is why narrative retellings are a standard component of trauma intervention. Debra Kaminer surveys how these narrative retellings seem to help trauma survivors. She observes that the creation of a linguistic representation achieves a sort of emotional catharsis.⁴Debra Kaminer, “Healing processes in trauma narratives: A review,” South African Journal of Psychology 36(3) (2006): 481–499. Joseph LeDoux explains that re-accessing a triggering memory in a safe environment can diminish its emotional potency.⁵Joseph LeDoux, Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (New York: Penguin Books, 2015) 52–81. A linguistic representation also can give context to the event. It can integrate sense memory chronologically, and, as time passes, suggest some explanation or meaning.

“Everything depends on where you stand, my master used to say. With God anything can be said. Without God nothing is heard. Without God what is said is not said.”
Elie Wiesel, Memoirs

Liturgical Use

If the integrity of the individual and the community are threatened by traumatic horrors, we can also see how the liturgical use of Lamentations has held these together, the individual in community, and the community as a chorus of witnesses, of rememberers.

Allen claims that the book of Lamentations is best understood as “the script of a liturgy intended as a therapeutic ritual.” He suggests that it was used liturgically very quickly after its composition, citing Zechariah 7:5 as evidence that the community had fasted the fifth month to commemorate the destruction of the temple.

The book is associated with the day of communal mourning on the Jewish liturgical calendar, Tisha B’Av, the ninth day of the fifth month (Av). This typically occurs in July or August. A centerpiece of Tisha B’Av celebration is the public reading of the book of Lamentations in the synagogue.

The purpose of this day of communal mourning is to remember major calamities that occurred on this date to the Jewish people, and but especially the destruction of the first and second temples. The date is also closely aligned with several subsequent calamities, including the first crusade and official approval of “The Final Solution,” the planned mass murder of European Jews in the Holocaust.

In preparation for this day, observing Jews mourn for the three weeks leading up it. Some abstain from shaving or eating meat, especially in the last nine days. Some visit the graves of loved ones in a solemn remembrance of loss.

Observation of Tisha B’Av primarily reinforces collective memory, not only of dates, people, and times, but of orienting the body toward grief and toward one another. It serves an important psychological and social function.

To the individual, Lamentations teaches us the language of prayer during suffering. It also gives permission to express our deepest emotions to God. As Allen writes, “For broken piece after broken piece to be picked up and wept over.” Through the words of Lamentations, we express our griefs and our complaints to God.

For the community, Lamentations ritually enables bonding through suffering. The liturgy of grief binds the community to a shared narrative of suffering, of perseverance, of deliverance. The act of remembering together is the act of rehearsing a shared narrative and shared script. This draws the community into a shared future underwritten by the gracious intervention of God. Just as the community remembers their shame (5:1) their weariness (5:5), their powerlessness (5:6-13), their sadness (5:14-15), so they also cry together to the LORD, whose throne endures forever, to bring them back.

Why must we remember? Why must we tell?

Because in telling our suffering together, we are able lift our heads together and to call out together for to a God whose “steadfast love never ceases,” whose “mercy never ends” (3:22). In remembering together, we bind ourselves together in hope. The book of Lamentations offers us a pathway of ritual solidarity that can teach us to hope together. The book is a gift to soothe our personal griefs and to secure our membership within a cloud of suffering witnesses to the faithfulness of God.

Lamentations, Translated by Matthew A. LaPine (2020)

Chapter 1

A las, she sits alone, she a city, once great with people,

She a great woman among the goyim⁶Gentiles or Nations
She a princess among the provinces, she, reduced to the yoke

Bitterly, she weeps the night through, her tears run along her jaw
She has no solace from all her lovers

From all her friends she reaps betrayal, they’ve become to her, enemies.

Carried to exile and crushed with affliction,

Judah, she likewise sits among the nations
She has found no rest, all her pursuers overrun her in the narrows

Dismal mourning soaks the steps to Zion
For no steps track to the place of meeting
All her gates are desolate, her priests groan
Her virgins forced, she wasted with gall

Enemies at ease have brought her low
For YHWH smites her for her defiance
Her children walked lightly the path to captivity
Before the faces of watchful foes

From the daughter of Zion, all glory is gone out
Her princes are does, driven out of pasture
Her princes went feebly to nowhere
Before the faces of vigorous pursuit

Ghosts of reminiscences, Jerusalem—destitute and displaced
She, summons these precious tokens of days of old
When her people fell into the enemy’s grip—no hand to stay
Her enemy standing, sneering at her fall

Her own grievous sin makes Jerusalem defiled
Those who adored now abhor; the lovers loathe
For they have seen her nude, stripped, exposed
And she shamed, sobbing shrinks away

In crimson streaks her uncleanness drips from hem
From not considering the issue of guilt
Her drop shocks away all comforters, no one for her
“Look YHWH! On my condition—my enemies rise”

Jerusalem’s treasures snatched by the palms of her foes
She suffered horror as the goyim penetrated her sacred place
Those whom you had commanded
That they should not enter your place of meeting

Keenly searching for crumbs of bread, all her people sob
They have betrayed their treasures in lieu of life, of food
“Look YHWH! Perceive what I have become!
Squandered, despised, worthless, spent.

Look! You who pass on the road! Perceive!
Is it nothing to you, you who lightly pass me by?
Could there be any pain like mine, which has afflicted me
—with which YHWH has afflicted me in his wrath?

My bones burn with the heavenly fire he sent
He set a snare too for my feet and turned me back on it
He left me appallingly desolate all the day
All the day he left me faint, wan, ill

Noose-like, my sins wrapp’d ‘round my neck
Trussed and cinched by his own hand, fixed
I staggered, my strength ragged, in tatters
And my Lord handed me to those I can’t repel

Our warriors my Lord heaped up—in our midst
He called an assembly against us to shatter our young men
My Lord has stomped the grapes
The virgin daughter of Judah bleeds red

Pitifully I weep; grim images fill my eyes
My eyes flow with torrential tears
For far away is anyone to comfort, to revive my soul
My sons are abandoned, decaying, where my enemy prevailed

Ruined Zion opens her arms, but with no one to embrace
YHWH has issued a verdict against Jacob
Converting near neighbors into fierce enemies
Beloved lady Jerusalem has become filthy, grotesque to them

Surely God is right—can I believe it?
For I rebelled against his commands—how I feel it!
But please! Listen! All people! Look on my woe!
My daughters and sons have walked away into captivity

Tenderly I had called for my lovers
And they deceived me—they, delusions of dreams
My holy priests and honored elders perished within the city
Having scoured for food, for life—delusion of a dream

Upon my distress, please Lord look
My heart turns; my belly boils—how defiant was I!
Outside the sword maims, claims, bereaves
Inside the house is the silent expectation of death

Why is there no one to comfort me? When they have heard my groan!
My enemies have heard of my woe, and rejoice
Bring on them the day you promised
That they may be like me.

Yea, bring all their wickedness before you, publish it!
Run your scythe through them as you have with me
You have done it, because of my rebellion
My groans are unceasing; my heart is crushed

Chapter 2

A las, the Lord has blackened and marred her in his wrath
The Lord has flung down the daughter of Zion
Israel’s beauty is toppled from the heavens to the mire
In his anger he did not remember his footstool, his temple

Bitten, gnawed and swallowed up were all the dwellings of Jacob
With no mercy the Lord has done this
He has smashed the strongholds of the daughter of Judah
He has trampled to the ground the kingdom and its rulers—to disgrace

Chopped, cleft, cut off is every horn of strength
In fierce and fiery anger the Lord has done this
His protecting right hand is withdrawn before the hordes
As a flame, a fire, he has burned, consuming everywhere

Drawn is his bow, as an assailant
Stationed as a foe is his strong hand
He has slain his beloved, she beautiful in his eyes
In the tent of the daughter of Zion
The flame of his fiery wrath was burned

Even the Lord has become an enemy
He consumed Israel, consumed its palaces
He has devastated its fortresses
He has buried the daughter of Judah in mourning

For he has destroyed his “booth”—his holy temple, his place
YHWH has seared from memory forgotten festivals and sabbaths
He has scratched out his places, his times, his people
In the umbrage of his anger, he has disdained king or priest

Given into the hands of the enemy
The Lord has forsaken his altar—abhorred his sanctuary
And they give shouts of celebration, absurdly
In YHWH’s house, as in the day of festival

He decided to shred the breastworks of daughter Zion
YHWH set a line to survey their ruin, planned their fall
He did not withdraw his fist from seizing it, ripping it
He caused rampart and wall to howl with crashing languish

Into the dead earth, her gates have sunk
He busted and broke to bits her bars
Her king and chiefs are adrift among the nations
There is no Torah.
Her blind prophets see no visions from YHWH.

Judicious elders, struck dumb, sit down in the dust
Daughter Zion’s wise heap it on their heads
Carelessly, thoughtlessly, emptily, in rags
Virgin daughters abase their faces to that dust

Knotted and knifed my bowels erupt
The bile of my bitterness spews dusty lines of grief
My eyes have spent their tears
On account of my broken daughter, my broken people
Feeble children are fainting in city streets

Loudly bawling for vacant mothers
Where is food? Where is drink?
Like their wounded fathers, they faint in city streets
And breathe out their souls on mothers’ dry breasts

Metaphors fail for you, daughter Jerusalem
What does your suffering mean? What can I say?
What could bring comfort do you, virgin Daughter?
Who can heal wounds deeper than the sea?

Nugatory and sham visions the prophets imagined
Not exposing your vice, restoring your fortunes
For you they saw, false fortunes, comforting chimeras

Onlookers mock you with jeering gestures, passing by
Leering heads hiss vicious cuts at Jerusalem, Daughter
Did we call this place Beauty realized? Joy of our land?

Pompous enemies spread yawning jowls jeering
Hissing, whistling, gnashing, baring yellowed ivory
Their cry, “we have swallowed her!”
“For this day we hoped, it came, we taste!”

Resolutely YHWH has done what he purposed
His words, fulfilled, have knifed, threats from long ago
He has no pity on us; the enemy has joy over us
He has exalted the might of those who kill us

Shout and wail from your hearts to YHWH
You broken defenders of daughter Zion
Let your tears run the channels of the river
Day and night, do not stop their flow
Neither allow your eyes relief

Take your place on broken ramparts to sing your grief
During early hours, when watchmen would worry
Pour out your heart like water before the Lord
Lift up your hands to him…over children starving, dying
On every street

Under the gaze of YHWH, these children die, Look! See!
Who have you ever treated this way?
Should women eat their own fruit? The children they love?
Should someone be slain in God’s sanctuary? Priest? Prophet?

Wasted in the dust of the earth
Are the corpses of our men, boys and aged
Virgins and suitors equally emptied, expired by the sword
You slaughtered them in the day of your anger
You butchered them without pity

You summoned as if to a celebration my terrors on every side
Not on this day, the day of YHWH’s anger
No one escaped, no one survived
Children I held in my arms, and raised in hope
My enemy has destroyed

Chapter 3

A ffliction alone I have experienced under the rod of his wrath
A vagrant, I amble aimlessly to captivity, driven desperately in the dark
Attacking me alone, he turns and returns his fist relentlessly

Bones broken, my skin and flesh he scrapes, worn like a garment
Built battlements enveloping me with bitterness and woe
Beleaguered by darkness and despair I sit as one long dead

Callously he has clamped and cramped me with walls, shackles I can’t escape
Calling, crying for help, my prayers are also caged
Cut paths made crooked and obstructed, choked with stones

Devouring creatures lurk, stealthy bear and stalking lion; they are YHWH, who
Dismembered me where I fled, and left me a carcass, desolate
Deftly toying with me, his target, as a bowman aims for sport

Every piercing arrow from the bow of God has entered my entrails, my heart
Each onlooker with wrinkled eyes of mirth, with ecstatic giggling taunts
Eating, I am filled with bitter nothing, drinking, I am sated with acid thirst

Frequently grinding gravel, ivory gnawing, I cower covered in dust
Forgetting Shalom, in which my soul once rested, now bereft, forgetting goodness
Falteringly stuttering, “My endurance—his splendor, my hope—from YHWH, have failed”

“God, remember, my homelessness, my bitter acid, my poison” 
Grievously, I remember. My soul remembers and fails
Grasping for words, I recall this, and I hope

His covenant love is not spent; his mercies do not end
He renews them each morning; YHWH’s faithfulness is great
Hope raises its eyes to him; he is my soul’s possession

Indeed, YHWH is good to those who hope, to the soul that seeks him
It is good to wait, silently, for the salvation of YHWH
It is good for a man to bear the yoke in his youth

Juvenile, injudicious, he must sit alone, sit silently, when yoke is put on him 
Jaw set, genuflect, lip kissing dust, on chance of hope
Jutting jaw now turned to receive patiently, reproaching blows

Knowing, the Lord does not cast off forever 
Knowing, though suing suffering, he will pity from his great love
Knowing, he does afflict, but not from his heart, nor grieves the children of men

Languishing slaves, pressed to the earth to work it, he will not crush underfoot
Laid bare and vulnerable, they have rights before the face of the Most High
Legally oppressed, their claim is not unseen; defraud not sanctioned by the Lord

Men’s mouths assert their power to will; all fail but the
Mouth of the Lord, when it speaks, so it is, both good and bad

May mere men moan, when weak sons of Adam suffer for their sins?

No, we must examine our ways, test them, and from this dust
Now raise our hearts and hands to the God of the heavens
Nevertheless, we have transgressed and rebelled, and you have not forgiven

Obscured, you dressed yourself in anger, pursued us to butcher us without pity
Obscured, you covered yourself with a cloud, choking our prayers from the sky
Offscouring and feces you’ve made us under the shoes of the nations

Prating tongues through parted lips pour down proud exaltation from enemy overseers
Panic and pitfall engulf us, plunging us into fracture and forlorn
Plowing tears furrow my cheeks, springing desert wadis for my shattered daughter people

Relentlessly, torrentially, the tears flow, a deep spring unceasing and unbreaking
Raining, wetting the dust until YHWH stoops to see from the heavens
Reminding my soul how deep is this well of grief for the daughters of my city

Stalked like prey, I have been, hunted, without provocation
Scrapped and stuffed solitary into a pit, penned, trapped, then stoned
Swelling, surging waves of destruction came over me; I studied death

Then I cried up, “YHWH!” from the lowest depth of this pit, this grave
This cry, you heard. “Do not close your ears to relieving my plight!”
Then you came near when I called, you said, “Do not be afraid”

Unfaltering, the Lord has taken up my cause, redeeming my life from the pit
Undertaking to notice the unrelenting oppression, my exploitation; he judges my case
Unseen became seen, all their vengefulness, their cleverly devised atrocity

When they taunted, you indeed heard it, YHWH; when they plotted, you saw
While I unaware, their lips spoke daily treason against me, their minds devised domination over me
Witness their sitting and rising, the habits of evil; I am the one they mock!

YHWH, you will return the investment of cruelty to the measure their hands have earned
You will give them a tortured, anguished heart, may your curse engulf them
You will pursue them in anger, and erase them from under your heavens

Chapter 4

A urum is dulled; bereft is glittering gold; its purity is paled

Abandoned jewels lie scattered in the crossings of the streets

Boys, the sons of Zion, its true treasure of gold

Are like scattered shards, littered broken pottery, fashioned then destroyed

Crazed and cruel we have become, like Ostriches choosing children to live

Even jackals offer their teats to nurse their young, but not our daughters

Dry tongues stick to dry palates of dehydrated suckling innocents

Shy children solicit bread from shamefaced agèd who avert their eyes

Easy connoisseurs, fattened by delicacies, dwindle to dust in the streets

Darlings adorned with dyes now dying amidst the refuse

Far greater than the punishment of Sodom, is this iniquity done to my people

Whose overthrow was but a moment, without the contorted hands of panic

Grand devotees dazzled like snow, Nazarites purer than milk

Their bodies salmon like coral pearls, their hair cobalt like lapis lazuli

Humiliated, they now vaunt black visage, sooty features grimace,

Not recognized in the streets, shriveled tree-bark skin shrouds bones

It is fortunate to have died, better to be violated by the sword than by hunger

Wasting slowly, pierced by pangs of the fruitless wasted fields

Juicy morsels of children have grimed the compassionate fingers of loving mothers

They, delicate fare for my cracked daughter people

Kettle whistling, the boiling wrath of God was fit, fiercely to pour;

He scorched Zion melting its foundations

Long unimaginable, neither the kings of the land, nor the inhabitants of the world

Could brave belief of an enemy entering the gates of Jerusalem

My eyes have seen it, by the sins of her prophets, by the iniquity of her priests;

They poured out an offering in the midst of the people, the blood of the righteous

Noxious, unclean, the blind men wander madly in the streets

Defiled by the blood they poured, so no one risks touching their garments

Outraged, they cry, “Turn aside! Unclean! Turn aside! Do not touch us!”

The roaches scatter incoherently; “they cannot stay,” it is said among the tribes

Personally, YHWH has shattered and scattered them away from his protective watch

The priests are not esteemed, the elders not revered

Ragged, weary eyes failed, vainly peering for unpromised help

From exposed towers we watched for a nation that would not save us

Steps marked by enemy hunters, poachers sighted us in deserted streets

Our lives had been spent, their days counted to the bitter end

Those who stalked us swooped deadly swift like the eagles of the heavens

Relentlessly pursuing us onto the mountains only to ambush us in the wilderness

Unexpectedly, our breath of life, YHWH’s anointed king, was caught in their snare

Of whom we had said, “We live in his shadow, his shelter from the nations”

Well up in triumph! Rejoice! Daughters of Edom, who dwell in the land of Uz, for now!

You too will drink from this cup; you will be drunk and exposed

Your iniquity is full and finished, Daughter Zion, the exile will not always endure

But God will avenge your iniquity, daughter Edom; he will expose your sins

Chapter 5

Lord, remember what has happened to us; look at us; see our disgrace

Our possessions were given to strangers, our homes to squatters

We are fatherless, orphans, our mothers are widows

We pay for our water, and also our wood to heat and to eat

We are constantly exploited, we are weary with no rest

We’ve pledged to Egypt and Assyria, simply to eat our bread

Our fathers sinned and are dead, while we bear their iniquity

Slaves delight to rule us, we’ve no escape from their whip

We exchange our lives for our food, the sword sneaks in the wilderness

Our skins burn like fire, the fever of hunger

The women of Zion they raped, the virgins of the city of Judah

Princes they hung by their hands, respect they stripped from the elders

Young men rattle the millstone, boys stagger under their loads

Wise elders have abandoned the gates, young men quit their songs

Our hearts have abandoned their joy, our bodies that danced now mourn

The crown has crashed from our head, woe to us, sinners

In all these things, our hearts retch, in all these things our eyes swim

Mount Zion is desolate, foxes forage, scavenge its hill

You, YHWH, are enthroned forever, from generation to generation

Why do you forget us forever? Why have you forsaken us so long?

Bring us back to you, so we return, and renew the days of old

Unless you have utterly rejected us, and are settled in your anger

End Notes

1. Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), viii.

2. F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp, Lamentations. In Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (eds. James Luther Mays and Patrick D. Miller; Louisville: John Knox Press, 2002).

3. Turner, From Temple to Meeting House, 19.

4. Debra Kaminer, “Healing processes in trauma narratives: A review,” South African Journal of Psychology 36(3) (2006): 481–499.

5. Joseph LeDoux, Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety (New York: Penguin Books, 2015) 52–81.

6. Gentiles or Nations

Image created by Rubner Durais

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