The word eikha ("how") appears three times during the week of Parashat Devarim: in Moses' complaint, "How can I myself alone bear your trouble, your burden, and your strife" (Deut. 1:12); in Isaiah's rebuke, "How has the faithful city become a harlot!" (Is. 1:21); and sometimes, depending on the year, in Jeremiah's lament read on the 9th of Av, "How does the city sit solitary" (Lam. 1:1). Though eikha is a neutral word, it has become an expression of sorrow and these three usages are not coincidental, but mark stages of a single, unfolding tragedy.

Moses' cry centers on the word "alone" (levadi). His pain was not the burden of leadership itself, but that no one else truly cared. Despite an entire generation who had heard God's voice at Sinai, only Moses felt responsible for the people's fate. This passivity, people willing to receive but not to create, did not disappear with Moses. It deepened.

By Isaiah's time, apathy toward corruption had allowed injustice to take root of society itself: no king or court can sustain justice if the public tolerates wrongdoing in silence. And by Jeremiah's time, this same lack of involvement had reached its most bitter conclusion, a city left "solitary," bereft of the communal responsibility that might have saved it.

Only through the trauma of exile did this pattern finally reverse. When Cyrus permitted the Jews to return, no one compelled them, they went up of their own volition. This marked a new era: a people no longer dependent on a single towering leader, but bound together by mutual, voluntary responsibility- "we have taken upon ourselves."

The lesson threading through all three eikhas: a community sustained only by one person's devotion is fragile. Redemption demands that each of us become an active participant, not a passive one.

Questions to Contemplate

Moses' loneliness stemmed from the fact that an entire nation stood at Sinai, yet only he felt truly responsible for their fate.

Where in your own life family, community, work do you find yourself carrying a "trouble, burden, and strife" that others could share, but don't? And is there a burden you yourself have quietly stepped back from, leaving someone else to carry it alone?