Galit Hasan-Rokem Bodies Performing in Ruins: The Lamenting Mother in Ancient Hebrew Texts Laments have been part of human expressive culture since earliest antiquity, found in ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian texts, as well as in literary docu- ments such as Homer’s Iliad, the book of Lamentations, and other texts in the Hebrew Bible. Laments are also part of most traditional oral literary systems. Without claiming universality for this genre or any other genre, cultural differ- ences notwithstanding, the genre of laments shows remarkable similarities in content and style across linguistic and cultural boundaries as well as signifi- cant stability in the longue durée.1 1 Death, language, and the body It is the study of laments perhaps more than of any other genre that has stimu- lated the study of classical Greek sources illuminated by ethnographical, folk- loristic, and anthropological research, and especially the study of oral perfor- mance in the work of Margaret Alexiou (1974) and in particular in the feminist scholarship of Nicole Loraux (2002),2 much inspired by Jean-Pierre Vernant (e.g., 1989). It is thus somewhat surprising that the study of the Biblical book of Lamentations has not generated similar studies, and especially that there has been almost no research relating to its descriptions of bodily performance of lament singing.3 Ilana Pardes has masterfully outlined the intriguing and colorful transfor- mations of the Song of Songs as a “cultural text” from the scrutiny of Enlight- 1 I dedicate this text to Na’ama Rokem and Ariel Rokem with love, gratitude, and apprecia- tion. 2 See also Holst-Wahrhaft 1992, 2000. 3 Maier (2008), who applies the semiotic concept of body as sign, comes close to moving from the suffering body to the performing body, though without making reference to actual expressions in the text: “The personified city responds to the experience of destruction by using her body, her voice, to lament … The wailing body of Jerusalem represents the space of survivors living in the ruins, trying to cope with the loss” (2008, 152). DOI 10.1515/9783110339963.33, © 2018 Galit Hasan-Rokem, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. 34 Galit Hasan-Rokem enment scholars to contemporary Israeli cultural performances both elite and popular, showing its power as a major generative force in the production of art and meaning (Pardes 2013).4 Historically the book of Lamentations cer- tainly holds a central place in Jewish ritual: it has for generations been read – in some customs even more than once – during the 9th of the month Av [Tisha B’Av], the annual day of commemoration of the destruction of both temples in Jerusalem, the first by the Babylonians in 586 bce, the second in 70 ce by the Romans. In a number of Christian denominations it is included in various formats of the Tenebrae (“shadows”) service performed on the days before Easter, commemorating the Crucifixion. And yet the cultural transformations of Lamentations and the history of its research do not reveal anything like the vibrancy and liveliness of the Song of Songs, which spreads its splendor of Eros and nature across wide and various semiotic systems.5 Its sublime and well-crafted poetry notwithstanding, the pain and sorrow of Lamenta- tions did not suffice to introduce it into the heart of the discourse on poetics. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), a central figure of the German Enlight- enment as well as of Romanticism, and a forerunner of modern folklore stud- ies, devoted an entire book, Lieder der Liebe (SongsofLove), to the Song of Songs (Herder 1827 [1778]) but did not devote many lines to Lamentations in his elaborate essay “Vom Geist der hebräischen Poesie” (“On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry,” [Herder 1993 (1782–1783), 663–1308]).6 Lamentations totally lacks the healthy, pastoral milieu animating Song of Songs that communicat- ed the (Romantic) wholesomeness of the past, which enabled Herder to envi- sion a return of the Jews of Europe to the soil from which the vines and figs sprouted in the Song, so different from the ruins of Lamentations. It is among the ruins that Lamentations must be read, the ruins in which human bodies survive and lament.7 4 A different perspective: Brenner 2000. For an exegesis informed by folk literary and perform- ative approaches, see Zakovitch 1992. 5 The theme of the representation of the destruction of Jerusalem in the visual arts is even more beyond my expertise than most of the other topics that I address in this article. I thank Richie I. Cohen for wisely guiding me and the other members of the “Exegetical Imagination” group (see below) through some examples, especially the monumental painting of Wilhelm von Kaulbach, Titus Destroying Jerusalem (1846, Neue Pinakothek, Munich) and Jeremiah La- menting the Destruction of Jerusalem by Rembrandt (1630, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). See also Ronen 1998. 6 English translation: Herder 1971 [1833]. But see also the English author whom Herder quotes in the first sentence of that essay: Robert Lowth, from his Lecture XXII, “On Elegiac Poetry” (Lowth 1815). 7 With regard to Pardes’s fine analysis of the enchanted embrace of Song of Songs by Zionist culture, the different reception of Lamentations may be understood as a too-harsh reminder Bodies Performing in Ruins: The Lamenting Mother in Ancient Hebrew Texts 35 The earliest ethnographically informed comprehensive study of the book of Lamentations was Hedwig Jahnow’s (1879–1944, in Theresienstadt) Das he- bräische Leichenlied im Rahmen der Völkerdichtung (The Hebrew Dirge in the Framework of Folk Poetry [Jahnow 1923]),8 later drawn on by Hermann Gunkel (1862–1932), who had established the comparative study of genre within the school of form-critical research of the Hebrew Bible in his work on Lamenta- tions (Hiller 1992, 32; see also Berges 2002, 45). Jahnow’s work was based on earlier studies of Middle Eastern folk customs and oral literature collected mainly in Palestine by pioneering scholars in the field such as Gustaf Dalman (1855–1941). Jahnow’s comparative method echoed contemporary Central and North European folklore studies and drew inspiration from Sir James Frazer’s “Myth and Ritual” school. Although she describes various concrete instances of folk life – burial customs, folk medicine – there is no reference whatsoever to the corporeal performance of laments in her analysis. When she mentions such gestures as shaking the head and teeth grinding she considers them to be apotropaic, warding off evil forces, rather than expressive, and not necessarily connected to the lamenting at all (Jahnow 1923, 187).9 Combining the field work experience of Vered Madar, who has studied Yemeni Jewish women’s lament- ing in Israel (Madar 2005a, Madar 2005b, Madar 2011),10 and my own reading of the bodily aspects of narrative performance in ancient Hebrew texts (Hasan- Rokem 2005), I review here the Biblical book of Lamentations focusing on bodi- ly expressions associated with lamenting that appear in the text. Madar’s work beautifully shows how the lamenters turn their bodies into versatile and ex- pressive tools, and how their poetic language focuses on the body, both as the object of pain and longing and as the instrument of their artistic performance. My reading of this ancient Hebrew text will thus complement the disembodied conceptualization of Lament/Klage as a historically saturated characteristic of of the past that was instead integrated with much idealization through texts that had not circulated in traditional Jewish culture, such as Josephus’s account of the “heroic” events of Massada. See Zerubavel 1995. 8 Jahnow is guided by an almost Grimmian historical view of the genre – devolution until its destruction (Jahnow 1923, 55–56, 265), partly motivated by the emergence of Christianity, which she links to the belief in resurrection. 9 I should also note here Hilma Granqvist (1890–1972), a Swedish-speaking Finnish anthropol- ogist working in the Holy Land, who published her first volumes on marriage and birth in 1931 and 1935, respectively. Her work on death and burial rituals was published as late as 1965. 10 Inspired by fieldwork collecting folk narratives, folk songs, and proverbs among Jews from Yemen in Jerusalem in the nineteen-thirties and forties, Goitein (1957) proposed a daring theo- ry about women as creators of the poetic genres of the Hebrew Bible. 36 Galit Hasan-Rokem language per se,11 or as an expression of philosophical or emotional modes.12 I shall emphasize the phenomenology of laments as language in bodies, and not less as the language on bodies. That brings us directly to the heart of the matter: the inseparable linkage between laments and motherhood. Laments are above all about separation and the severing of ties between mothers and their children, or other relationships often configured as ties between mothers and their children. It may not be an exaggeration to suggest that it is exactly the harsh contrast between the intui- tive, wished-for inseparability of the mother-child relationship and the finality of the separation caused by death that constitutes the bleeding heart, the burn- ing epicenter of laments. And thus, in an inverse move, lament proves to be all about life (cf. Dobbs-Allsopp 2002, 2). It is this subverted longing for life presented when death has dominion that may account for the subversive tone associated with female lamenting, perhaps a desperate, ultimate expression of the continued resistance to the series of separations that motherhood imposes on the female body and psyche. The separation of the body of the child in its death or of the parent in her death is a link in a series of separations beginning when the fetus becomes a recognizably separate being moving inside the mother’s body, causing evident changes in her size and physical sensations; continuing with the often painful, 11 I refer here to the various discussions by Gershom Scholem that were the focus of the symposium at the University of Antwerp, 6–8 February 2013, organized by Vivian Liska and Paula Schwebel.