O, man. Where art thou?

In the Midrash Rabba’s introduction to Megillat Eichah (paragraph 4), Rabbi Abahu compares the experience of the nation of Israel in the land and being exiled to the experience of the first identified man in the Torah, Adam. “Like Adam, they violated the covenant.”

Adam was placed in the garden, was commanded, he violated the command, was judged, expelled, and G-d lamented over his downfall. Israel had the same experience: brought into Israel, commanded, they violated the command, they were judged and expelled. G-d lamented over their downfall.

The lament in both cases is highlighted by the midrash with the same word — at least in its spelling: Alef Yud Kaf Heh. The difference between the two words is that in Adam’s case, the word is pronounced Ayekah, while the lament for the Israelite nation is pronounced Eichah.

In essence, when Adam is hiding after having eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, and G-d calls out to him saying, “Ayekah” (“Where are you?”), G-d is lamenting that Adam feels his newfound knowledge gives him the ability to hide from G-d(Bereshit 3:9).

With regard to the Israelites, “O how has the city that was once so populous remained lonely!” (Eichah 1:1) It’s a lament for what could have been, had the Israelites only kept G-d’s word.

Yirmiyahu said in 16:11 that the exile happened because the people abandoned G-d and did not observe the mitzvot. The Midrash here (Eichah Introduction, paragraph 2) quotes Rav Huna’s expounding on this that “If only they had abandoned Me and did not abandon My Torah! Because observing the Torah would have brought them around to G-d again.”

The term “Eichah,” which Moshe utilizes in our parsha when he says “Eichah Esa L’vadi?” (1:12) — how could I carry this burden myself — is a powerful term which expresses a longing for every ideal imaginable: time, circumstance, peers, community.

In a sermon he delivered in 1964, Rabbi Norman Lamm argued that the intention behind paralleling Adam to Israel is the teaching that “Israel’s exile issues from a human failing rather than a specifically Jewish weakness.”