Jazz and Word

The Hebrew Bible contains national laments. The most famous communal lament is the book of Lamentations. Tradition often connects this collection of poems with the prophet Jeremiah. This collection consists of five chapters. Four chapters of Lamentations are acrostic poems. That is to say they use the alphabet as a structural element. The Hebrew alphabet has twenty-two elements.
Kathleen O’Connor in her book Lamentations & The Tears of the World has noted several classical works that attend to the themes of Lamentations. Thomas Tallis (“The Lamentations of Jeremiah”), Pablo Casals (“O Vos Omnes” English “O Ye People”) Leonard Bernstein (“Jeremiah” symphony), Igor Stravinsky (“Threni” in 1958) The Battle Hymn of the Republic and Dixie were songs that began as anthems of regional causes that emerged as elegies and laments for lost dreams and lives. Hungarian composer Lajos Bardos wrote a setting for eight verses of chapter five. He wrote this for Lent of 1956 as an interpretation of ht e Soviet occupation of Hungary.
The laments, whether national, communal or personal, all begin with a world gone wrong. The relationship of privilege has disintegrated. This posited election separates the Hebrew laments from the blues of today. Even if election is a fiction it acts as a necessary component for the poetic logic of the lament. O’Connor says “Lamentations opens upon a universe of sorrows.” (17) This universe of sorrow is a scientific fiction world. If there is a world of matter it is the world of anti-matter. It is the place where election becomes derision. The universe of sorrow is an alternate reality, even if the world of reality posited by the lament is itself but a fiction.
The first two chapters acrostic poems twenty-two verses of three lines each, one verse per letter with a total of sixty-six lines. O’Connor calls this “pain and suffering in alphabetical order.”(p12) Other biblical acrostic poems include: Pss 9-10, 25, 34, 119, 145, Na 1; Prv 31:10-31. (See Soll, “Acrostic” in the Anchor Bible Dictionary) A careful examination of these parallels indicates that most of these are wisdom poems that use the acrostic as a pedagogical rubric. However, O’Connor makes the point that the writer of Lamentations does a very different strategy. The acrostic is a very structured genre. The universe of sorrow on the other hand chaos permeates the universe of sorrow. Just as one might use the sonnet as a way to sing the blues, the writer of lamentations uses the structure of the genre to combat the contingency of life.
When one reads the history of ancient Israel and Judah, or even our history, one understands that he stability imputed on the past is usually at some level a fiction created by history writers in order to accent the present crisis.