The Necessity of Lament with Sarah Bachelard

When the people of Jerusalem were exiled to Babylon in the 6th century BCE, their lament – expressed in psalms of exile – functioned a means of coming to terms with their loss, bewilderment and dispossession. At one level, this agony of the conquered may seem far from our experience. But in another way, it is perhaps quite close. Because thanks to the pandemic, we too are living in a kind of exile – as life as we’ve known it slips away. Of course, unlike the Jewish exiles from the 6th century BCE, we’ve not been forced geographically from home. In fact, many of us are more confined to home than we’ve ever been. Even so, we find ourselves in a strange land. And many of us are feeling profoundly dislocated and unsettled, bereft of a way of life. Like those ancient Jewish exiles, we don’t know when things will return to the way they were. We have to find a way of coming to terms with what has befallen us and what it could mean for our future. We are discovering the necessity of lament. The destruction of Jerusalem was a long time coming. Along with the destruction of buildings, families and communal life, came the painful collapse of the communities’ symbolic world. The life people had anticipated living just disappeared.