How do you have a joyful conversation about the most devastating book in the Bible?
That is exactly what my colleague Shira Schechter and I found ourselves doing when we sat down to discuss the Book of Lamentations for Bible Month. And the theme that kept emerging, quietly but insistently, was grief. Not grief as despair, not grief as defeat, but grief as the purest expression of love. Because you cannot grieve something you did not love. The depth of the mourning is always, always a measure of the depth of the love.
The Book of Lamentations was written by the prophet Jeremiah, a man who spent forty years trying to warn his people that destruction was coming, who watched it come anyway, and who then sat in the rubble of Jerusalem and wept. This is his grief poured onto a page. And what makes this book extraordinary is that Jeremiah deliberately wrote it without naming himself, without anchoring it to a specific moment in history. He wanted it to speak to every Jewish tragedy across every generation. He wanted anyone who ever loved something and lost it to be able to pick it up and find themselves inside it.
Jeremiah was not only grieving a city. He was grieving potential. The Jerusalem he mourned was not just the Jerusalem that was — it was the Jerusalem that could have been, that should have been, that God had intended it to be. The temple was meant to be a house of prayer for all nations. The people were meant to be a light to the world. And none of it happened the way it was supposed to. The grief of unlived potential, of a future that got cut off before it arrived, is one of the most quietly devastating kinds of grief there is. And Lamentations holds it without flinching.
Grief, we learned is a definition of love. Jeremiah is not falling apart because he is weak. He is falling apart because he loved Jerusalem, loved his people, loved God’s vision for what this nation was supposed to become, with everything he had. And that love had nowhere to go.
And it’s not only Jeremiah who grieves. God was grieving too. Read Lamentations from that angle and something shifts. The God who allowed the destruction, who seemed to have withdrawn His presence from the temple and His protection from the city, what if He was also mourning? What if the question “how could You let this happen?” was being asked in both directions? The people crying out to God, and God is watching His people and feeling the same ache. The people He loved so deeply had turned away. How could they? The grief ran in both directions.
That is not a comfortable thought. But it is a deeply loving one.
And right in the middle of this devastated, grief-soaked book, in the very center of five chapters of mourning, Jeremiah writes this:
New every morning. Not despite the grief. Inside it. That verse does not arrive after the darkness lifts. It arrives in the middle of the darkness, surrounded on all sides by devastation, and it says: love is still here. God has not finished. Whatever has been lost, whatever potential has gone unrealized, whatever future got cut short — the mercies are new every morning. There is still tomorrow. There is still a return. There is still a God who has not let go.
That is the message of Lamentations. Not that the grief was wrong. Not that the mourning should be shorter or quieter or more dignified. But that grief and hope are not opposites. They are the same love, expressing itself in different directions. One looking back at what was lost. One looking forward at what is still possible.
If you have been carrying a grief you cannot quite name, grief over the state of the world, over the rise of antisemitism, over a society that seems to be losing its moral footing, over an exile that has lasted far too long, this book was written for you. Jeremiah wrote it without a name and without a date precisely so that you could find yourself inside it.
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