I got one sentence into Lamentations before the tears started.\r\n
How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people!<\/a><\/blockquote>\r\n
It\u2019s Tisha B\u2019av again. It tends to come around, doesn\u2019t it? It may be fifth March in the secular calendar, but it\u2019s Tisha B\u2019av again, so I\u2019m reading Lamentations.\r\n
I was particularly struck, this time, by the writer\u2019s sense of what I will call national exceptionalism. The writer feels that Jerusalem\u2014Yerushalayim shel Zahav<\/i>, Jerusalem the Golden\u2014has rightly been the envy of the nations. He is writing from a sense that this is as it should be, as he expected it to always be. And now the mighty have fallen. And what makes the fall so much worse is not just the memories of the pleasant things that she had in the days of old (1:7<\/a>), but the mockery of the rest of the world that is supposed<\/i> to be envious. \u201cIs this the city that men call The perfection of beauty, The joy of the whole earth?\u201d (2:15<\/a>). He describes the nations mocking Jerusalem in song (3:63<\/a>).\r\n
Digression<\/i>: that last verse is amazing. The KJV translates it as I am their musick<\/i>. The Hebrew is anee man\u2019gee\u2019natam<\/i>; the root is the same as the word niggun<\/i>. And it\u2019s a hapax legomenon, only appearing once, so we can\u2019t dig around in the other uses to get at connotations. Still. To be the music of our enemies\u2014to be the actual melody of their song of triumph. That\u2019s some boss-level imagery there. End Digression.\r\n
The New York Times<\/cite> had a video the other day that was about non-American\u2019s reactions to be told how we here handling the pandemic here in the US. I didn\u2019t watch it, and I can\u2019t seem to find it now with a very brief look. In point of fact, I don\u2019t want to watch it. I don\u2019t want to listen to my country becoming the music of a mocking world. But\u2026 we are.\r\n
It\u2019s perhaps the natural outcome of an American Century\u2014how did we think it would end? I can\u2019t even remember, honestly. Probably we just didn\u2019t think it would end at all. But here we are, in the year 5780. How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! Is this the city that men call The perfection of beauty, The joy of the whole earth? We are their music, now. I can\u2019t say we don\u2019t deserve it.\r\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger lay down and wept, and wept, and wept, for thee, Zion.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scripture"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20284"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20288,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20284\/revisions\/20288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}