Panel essay · Jeremiah 31–39; Lamentations · October 26–November 1, 2026 · Rabbi
Written by an AI persona giving a Jewish reading in the voice of a rabbi — not a real rabbi.
For a Jew these nine chapters are not mainly a reading assignment. They are a calendar. "In the ninth year of Zedekiah king of Judah, in the tenth month, came Nebuchadrezzar… and they besieged it" (Jeremiah 39:1): that is the Tenth of Tevet, still a fast day. "In the eleventh year of Zedekiah, in the fourth month, the ninth day of the month, the city was broken up" (39:2): that is the breach of the walls, remembered in the fast of Tammuz. (Taanit 28b keeps the ninth for the First Temple; the fast falls on the seventeenth, the Second Temple date.) Then comes the burning of the Temple in the fifth month, and the Ninth of Av, Tisha B'Av, when we sit on the floor in the half-dark and chant Lamentations in a melody used for nothing else. A Christian reader meets Jeremiah 39 as history; we meet it as the days we do not eat.
So let me read this block the way the synagogue reads it, with the Talmud, the midrash and the prayer book open beside it.
"A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping; Rahel weeping for her children refused to be comforted" (31:15). One small note first: in most Hebrew Bibles the verses of this chapter are numbered one lower than in the King James, so the rabbis cite this as 31:14.
Why Rachel? She was buried by the road "to Ephrath, which is Bethlehem" (Genesis 35:19), not in the family tomb at Hebron, and the dying Jacob apologizes to Joseph for it (Genesis 48:7). Rashi, the great eleventh-century commentator, explains the apology: Jacob buried her by the roadside at God's command, so that when Nebuzaradan marched the exiles down that road, Rachel could come out of her grave and weep for them, and God would answer her with the next verse: "Refrain thy voice from weeping… and they shall come again from the land of the enemy" (31:16). Commenting on Jeremiah itself, Rashi links the weeping in Ramah to the scene where Nebuzaradan released Jeremiah at Ramah from among the chained exiles (Jeremiah 40:1).
The midrash goes further, in one of the boldest passages in rabbinic literature. In Eikhah Rabbah, Proem 24, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses each plead with God over the exile, and none of them is answered. Then Rachel speaks. She reminds God that she had given Jacob secret signs so her father could not swap Leah in on the wedding night, and then, in pity, taught the signs to Leah so her sister would not be shamed. "If I, flesh and blood, was not jealous of my rival," she argues, why should the eternal King be jealous of idols that are nothing, and exile my children for it? And God's mercy is stirred: "For you, Rachel, I will restore Israel to its place." The patriarchs argue merit; Rachel argues that God should be at least as generous as she was, and she wins.
This text lives in Jewish practice. The second-day Rosh Hashanah haftarah is Jeremiah 31, and it ends on "Is Ephraim my dear son? is he a pleasant child?… my bowels are troubled for him" (31:20, numbered 31:19 in Hebrew), a verse also recited among the Remembrance verses (Zikhronot) of the Rosh Hashanah additional service. On the day we say God judges the world, we hear God say that His insides churn for a wayward child. Rachel's tomb outside Bethlehem is one of the most visited places of Jewish prayer, and its busiest day is the eleventh of Cheshvan, the traditional anniversary of her death. This year that fell on October 22, four days before this lesson begins.
Here is what a Christian reader usually misses. Matthew 2:18 quotes the refusal, "would not be comforted, because they are not," over the children of Bethlehem, and stops. Jeremiah does not stop. The very next words are an order to stop crying, "for thy work shall be rewarded… there is hope in thine end, saith the LORD, that thy children shall come again to their own border" (31:16–17). In Jewish memory Rachel is not inconsolable grief. She is the mother whose weeping works.
"Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah" (31:31). This is the only place in the Hebrew Bible that uses the phrase berit ḥadashah, and Hebrews 8 quotes all of it, then draws the conclusion: "In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old. Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away" (Hebrews 8:13). For centuries that verse was used to treat the Jews as a fossil. So let me say plainly what Jeremiah says and does not say.
First, look at who the covenant is made with: "the house of Israel, and… the house of Judah." Not a new people. The same two houses that went into exile.
Second, look at what is written on the heart: "I will put my law in their inward parts" (31:33). The Hebrew is torati, "my Torah." Jeremiah does not promise a different Torah. He promises the same Torah inside instead of outside, the hope Deuteronomy already voiced, "the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart" (Deuteronomy 30:14). What failed before was not the Torah but the keeping of it: "which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them" (31:32).
That is exactly how Radak (Rabbi David Kimhi, Provence, around 1200) reads it. The newness of the covenant, he writes, is that it will be kept and not broken like the covenant at Sinai. And he points to the closing charge of the last prophet, "Remember ye the law of Moses my servant, which I commanded unto him in Horeb" (Malachi 4:4), as proof that no other Torah is coming. Maimonides puts the principle as law: the Torah is a commandment "remaining forever without change, addition, or diminishment," and a prophet who claims to replace it is shown by that claim to be false (Mishneh Torah, Foundations of the Torah 9:1).
Third, and this is the thing almost no Christian study group notices, read the next three verses. Hebrews stops quoting at 31:34. Jeremiah keeps going: "If those ordinances depart from before me, saith the LORD, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me for ever… If heaven above can be measured… I will also cast off all the seed of Israel for all that they have done" (31:36–37). The prophet who announced the new covenant immediately swears by the sun, the moon and the sea that Israel will never be cast off. Chapter 33 repeats it: God will cast away the seed of Jacob only if day and night stop (33:24–26). Read in its own context, the new covenant arrives with an answer to Hebrews 8:13 already attached.
I do not say this to take the passage away from anyone. Latter-day Saints, I understand, speak of a "new and everlasting covenant" (compare 32:40) as something ancient restored rather than something obsolete replaced; that instinct is closer to Jeremiah. The Hebrew root for "new" also names the new moon, which is the old moon coming back.
Jeremiah 32:6–27 is the haftarah for the Torah portion Behar, which contains the law of land redemption by a kinsman (Leviticus 25:25). Hanameel invokes that law precisely: "the right of redemption is thine to buy it" (32:7).
What moves a Jewish reader is how legal the hope is. Jeremiah weighs out seventeen shekels, calls witnesses, seals one copy and leaves one open, and has Baruch store them in a clay jar (32:9–14) while the siege ramps rise outside (32:24). Jewish hope has often looked like this: not ecstasy but a deed, a contract, a wedding held during a war. And the prophet himself is not sure. His prayer begins "there is nothing too hard for thee" (32:17) and ends, in effect, but why did you tell me to buy a field in a city you are handing to the Chaldeans? (32:24–25). God answers with Jeremiah's own words turned into a question: "is there any thing too hard for me?" (32:27). That is where the haftarah stops.
The rabbis tie the two halves of this week's reading together. Jeremiah 36:23 says that as Jehudi read "three or four leaves," the king cut them off and threw them on the fire. Which scroll? The Talmud (Moed Katan 26a) says it was Lamentations. They read the king "How doth the city sit solitary" (Lamentations 1:1), and he said, "I am king"; then 1:2, and 1:3, and "The ways of Zion do mourn" (1:4), four verses, four "leaves." At "Her adversaries are the chief… for the LORD hath afflicted her" (1:5), he cut out the divine names and burned them.
And the "many like words" added to the second scroll (36:32)? Rashi says: the original scroll held the three single acrostics, chapters 1, 2 and 4, and Jeremiah added chapter 3, "I am the man," in which every letter is tripled. So, in the tradition, Lamentations 1 is what a king burned, and Lamentations 3 is what the prophet wrote back, tripled at every letter.
Most modern scholars doubt that Jeremiah wrote Lamentations; the Hebrew book is anonymous, and the attribution comes from the Greek Bible's preface and the Talmud (Bava Batra 15a). But the midrash is not doing history. It is saying that the response to a burned word is more word.
It also produced law. Because 36:24 complains that the king and his servants "were not afraid, nor rent their garments," the Talmud rules that one who sees a Torah scroll burned must tear his clothing, and from "after that the king had burned the roll, and the words" (36:27) it derives that he tears twice, once for the parchment and once for the writing (Moed Katan 26a).
The one man in the palace who acts decently toward Jeremiah is "Ebed-melech the Ethiopian," a Cushite foreigner, who even thinks to send down rags so the ropes will not cut the prophet's armpits (38:7–13), and is promised his life "because thou hast put thy trust in me" (39:18). Our tradition did not always know what to do with him. The Talmud (Moed Katan 16b) reads "the Cushite" as a nickname for Zedekiah, distinguished by his deeds as a Cushite is by his skin; Rashi on 38:7 also records a reading that makes Ebed-melech into Baruch. Those readings honor Zedekiah and Baruch but erase the point. The plain sense, the peshat, is that the righteous man in Jerusalem's last days was an outsider. A rabbi should say so.
Lamentations is called Eikhah, "How," after its first word; Eikhah Rabbah opens by pairing it with Moses' "How can I myself alone bear your cumbrance" (Deuteronomy 1:12) and Isaiah's "How is the faithful city become an harlot" (Isaiah 1:21). The rabbis were fiercely protective of hope, and they often found it by reading very closely. "How is she become as a widow" (1:1): Rav Yehuda in the Talmud (Taanit 20a) notes the word "as." She is not a widow; she is like a woman whose husband has gone overseas and means to come back. He even reads "as a menstruous woman" (1:17) as a blessing: that state ends.
Then there is the line observant Jews say before getting out of bed. The morning prayer Modeh ani ends with rabbah emunatekha, "great is thy faithfulness," taken from Lamentations 3:23. In Eikhah Rabbah, Rabbi Alexandri reads the verse this way: because You renew us every morning, we know Your faithfulness is great to raise the dead. We take the brightest line from the darkest book and say it with our eyes barely open.
But I would be misleading you if I let 3:22–33 stand for the whole. "We have transgressed and have rebelled: thou hast not pardoned" (3:42). "Thou hast covered thyself with a cloud, that our prayer should not pass through" (3:44). Compare 3:8, "he shutteth out my prayer." The chapter ends not with comfort but with a demand for vengeance (3:64–66). The scholar Alan Mintz, in Hurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature, argued that in Lamentations the awareness of sin is secondary to the experience of abandonment. The confession is there (1:18), but the dominant note is a woman with "none to comfort her," a refrain heard five times in chapter 1 (1:2, 9, 16, 17, 21).
Jewish practice does not resolve this; it does something more interesting. On Tisha B'Av we read the whole book, including its last verse, "But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us" (5:22). We do not skip it. Then the congregation repeats the verse before it: "Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old" (5:21). Rashi explains: because the book ends with reproof, we repeat the previous verse. Many congregations also sing those words, Hashivenu, every time the Torah is returned to the ark. The tradition will not pretend the last word is gentle. It simply refuses to let it be the last thing said.
Abraham Joshua Heschel's The Prophets offers the best modern Jewish frame: divine pathos, a God who is moved by what happens to His people. It makes sense of "my bowels are troubled for him" (31:20) and "he doth not afflict willingly" (3:33). Read that way, Lamentations is not a theodicy that explains suffering but a record of grief on both sides of a covenant not yet repaired.
One more verse, the one in this block Jews hear most often. "Again there shall be heard in this place, which ye say shall be desolate… the voice of joy, and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride" (33:10–11). Jeremiah had used those same four voices as a curse: God would make them cease from Jerusalem (7:34; 16:9; 25:10). Here he reverses them. Under every Jewish wedding canopy, the seventh of the Seven Blessings quotes this verse: kol sasson ve-kol simhah, kol hatan ve-kol kallah. The city that sat "as a widow" supplies the words for every Jewish wedding. That is what "I will turn their mourning into joy" (31:13) means in our practice: the fasts are not cancelled, the weddings happen anyway, and at each one we quote the prophet who said they would.