Lamentations אֵיכָה

Eichah — the Book of Lamentations — is the Torah's book of grief. Five elegies over the destruction of Jerusalem and the First Temple, ascribed by tradition to the prophet Jeremiah, who saw the city he had warned go down in fire. The book takes its Hebrew name from its first word — Eichah, "How…" — the cry of one standing before something that should not have been possible: How does the city sit solitary, that was full of people! Grief here is poured into the strictest of forms: chapters 1, 2 and 4 are alphabetical acrostics, chapter 3 a triple acrostic of sixty-six verses, as if to say that this mourning runs from alef to tav — complete, and yet contained. (In chapters 2 through 4 the verse for pe precedes the verse for ayin; this is the authentic order of the Masoretic text.) At the book's exact center, in the depth of chapter 3, stands its turning point: the lovingkindnesses of Hashem are not consumed, His mercies are new every morning. Eichah is read aloud in the synagogue on the night of Tisha B'Av, by candlelight, sitting low; and when the reading reaches the somber final verse, the congregation returns and repeats the verse before it, so that the book ends in return: Turn us to You, O Hashem, and we shall be turned.

This edition presents each verse word by word: the Hebrew, its transliteration, its root, its gematria, and a form-true English gloss, beneath a complete modern English translation adapted from the public-domain Jewish Publication Society version of 1917, with the Divine Name rendered "Hashem." Three classical commentators accompany the text — Rashi, Ibn Ezra, and the Alshich (Palgei Mayim) — so that the plain sense, the grammar, and the consolation hidden inside the lament can be studied on a single page. May the One who remembers Zion turn our mourning into gladness.