Veterans Day and Eicha

    This week we finished the first perek of Eicha. To me, Eicha is very depressing. I thought Kohelet was sad, but Eicha made me realize Kohelet is happy and Eicha is really the one that is sad. The name Eicha translates to the word "How?" Just from that, you get a hint that it will not be the most joyful thing you will ever read. The first perek is divided into two parts. The first part of the perek, 1- 11, the narrator is talking. The narrator is talking about Yerushalayim and why she is so upset and lonely. The narrator starts off in passukim 1-4 talking about how Yerushalayim veiws herself. In passukim 5-11, the narrator describes his view on what is happening in Yerushalayim and what she did to make herself so lonely and sad. In the second part of the perek, passukim 11- 22, Yerushalyim herself is talking about how she is so lonely.
   
 In the first section spoken by the narrator, he describes that Yerushalayim caused the loneliness for herself. She did something to cause it. The other nations who were her friends became her enemies. She says that she has no one tom comfort her, she feels betrayed by her 'friends', and she blames her loneliness on her enemies. The narrator explains she thinks she is lonely because of her friends betraying her, but she is really lonely because of HER sins. The people living in the land sinned greatly and since they were her people, she was held accountable for not stopping them. This caused the destruction of the temple. The narrator explains that although she keeps on blaming others for her loneliness, the destruction was because of her. She did it all to herself.
In passuk 11, Yerushalyim starts talking, explaining her pain. She starts off by blaming Hashem saying that Hashem caused all of her pain and He was the reason of the destruction. In passuk 18 though, she hits a turning point and starts to think that her loneliness was because of her own sins. She comes to the realization that she was in pain because she rebelled against G-d. She realizes that she put all of her faith in her children and all they did was rebel and do bad. She finally has realized that the destruction was because of her. Yerushalayim wraps up perek 1 by realizing that her former friends were not good to her and not considered friends. She wants her friends to be punished in the future just like she had been punished.

This is the overall summary of what happened in perek 1. In perek 1 there are a bunch of pitiful adjectives to describe Yerushalayim. Sadness, lonely, widow, betrayed, suffering, and sinful are just a few. We learn that all Yerushalyim does is grieve about the past and cry. In class we learned that the essence of the ideas being conveyed in the first perek is that Yerushalayim is giving an emotional perspective of the aftermath of a huge tragedy, the destruction. In her emotional experience we see that Yerushalayim is basically paralyzed. She is so sad and bitter, she cannot get over it. To me, this is not the first time I have heard about someone being paralyzed after a traumatic incident, I also remember hearing about it on Veterans Day when Rabbi Stein gave us a presentation about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
According to PubMed Health (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001923/#adam_000925.disease.causes) The definition of PTSD is "A type of anxiety disorder. It can occur after you have gone through an extreme emotional trauma that involved the threat of injury or death." Although the definition is not completely fitting toward Yerushalayim, I thought it was pretty similar. Two symptoms of the disorder that were very close to Yerushalayim were  feeling detached and being emotionally numb and not caring about anything. On Veterans Day I clearly remember Rabbi Stein telling us that some soldiers brains are locked in traumatic experiences that took place in the army that either they are constantly depressed or they have random flashbacks and cannot get over it. I thought it was very fitting to talk about PTSD because to me it seems that Yerushalayim herself had a trauma ( The destruction of the temple and her children sinning) which led to her paralyzed mind almost seeming like she had this disorder.