Jeremiah Met a Woman in Black and She Was the City Itself

The road to Jerusalem climbed through ash. Jeremiah lifted his eyes to the mountaintop and there she was, a woman seated alone on the high stone, her clothes black as a covered well, her hair loosed and unkempt across her shoulders. She was crying out into the empty air. "I am looking for someone to comfort me," she called, and no one answered her but the wind.

He stopped on the path. The same cry was already in his own throat. "I am looking for someone to comfort me," he said back to her, and the two voices met over the broken ground and neither one of them was comforted.

The Prophet Tests the Mourning Woman

He came nearer. A man who had spent his life among signs and false signs did not trust a figure that wept on a mountain after a city had burned. "If you are a woman," he told her, "then speak with me. If you are a spirit, then go away from me." He waited to see which she would be.

She did not vanish. She turned her ruined face toward him. "Do you not recognize me?" she said. Then she gave him her grief like a deed of property. She had borne seven children. Their father had gone away across the sea, and while she was going up to weep for him a prophet had met her with worse news. The house had fallen on her seven children and crushed them. "I do not know," she said, "for whom I am crying first, and for whom my hair hangs loose."

She Names Herself the Ruined City

Jeremiah heard the arithmetic of it and something in him hardened against his own pity. He had a grief of his own to measure against hers. "You are no better off than my mother Zion," he told her, "who has been made a pasture for the beasts of the field." He thought he was teaching a stranger that other mothers had lost more.

She answered him without flinching. "I am your mother Zion. I am she." The mother of seven, cut off. The woman on the mountain was the mountain. The black clothes were the burned walls and the unkempt hair was the smoke still hanging over the streets, and the seven dead children were the crowds that had filled her gates on festival mornings and would not fill them again. Jeremiah had come up the road to mourn a city, and the city had come down to sit on the road and mourn herself.

The Argument From Job

He could not comfort her with less, so he reached for the worst story he knew. "The blows you have taken are the blows of Job," he said, and he laid the two ledgers side by side. Job's sons and daughters had been taken from him, and Zion's sons and daughters from her. Job's silver and gold had been stripped away, and so had hers. God had cast Job onto the ash heap, and Zion He had made into the ash heap itself.

Then he turned the ledger over. "Just as He came back and consoled Job," Jeremiah said, "so in the time to come He will come back and console you." Job's children had been doubled in the end, and hers would be doubled. Job's gold and silver had been doubled, and hers would be too. God had shaken the filth of the ash heap off of Job, and of Zion it was already written, "Shake yourself from the dust, arise." Flesh and blood had built her, and flesh and blood had thrown her down. But the builder of Jerusalem was the One who gathers the outcasts of Israel, and He would lay her stones again. The woman on the mountain heard a man promise her the future in the tense of a thing already done.

Heaven Refuses to Believe the Sentence

Far above the burning city the angels could not accept what they were seeing. "Master of the world," they said, "is this really Jerusalem? This is the one You set down in the middle of the nations." Every plea they raised, He answered with her own record. They begged Him to act for the sake of the forefathers, and He named the fathers kindling the fire. For the sake of the children, and He named the children refusing to listen. For the priests, the kings, the prophets, the students of Torah, tribe by tribe, and each time He read back the verse that convicted them. "Act for our own sake," the ministering angels finally said, and He answered that the people had mocked the very messengers He had sent.

They made one last grasp. "Is this not the city of whom You wrote, 'See, I have engraved you on the palms of My hands'?" And He answered with the verse where His own hands come together to put His fury to rest. The angels fell silent. Below them, when Zion saw that He would not be appeased, she rose up off the stone and spoke the line that had been waiting in her all along. "The Lord has forsaken me," she said. "The Lord has forgotten me."

Where the Sources Say She Has Nothing, She Has

But Rabbi Levi had a habit of reading the empty places. Wherever the verse insists she has nothing, he taught, look again, and she has. The prophet had called her the poor storm-tossed one who was not comforted, the Zion whom no one seeks out, and into that exact wording the next breath smuggles a redeemer coming to Zion. Sarah had no child, the verse said flatly, and then Sarah conceived and bore a son. Hannah had no children, and then she bore three sons and two daughters. Sing, you barren woman who never gave birth, and in the same chapter she turns and asks who could have borne her this crowd of children that surrounds her now.

The woman in black sat on the mountain above her own ashes, certain she had been forgotten. Every place that swore she was empty was the place the tradition went looking to prove she was full.