Q&A: Lamentations for what we shouldn’t be lamenting, and for what we should be there are no lamentations. Is that normal?
Originally published:
This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.
Lamentations for what we shouldn’t be lamenting, and for what we should be there are no lamentations. Is that normal?
Question
I understood that in the Crusades, apparently somewhere between hundreds and a few thousand Jews were killed.
(Throughout the world, in the Crusades, heaps and heaps were killed.)
Even so, the narrative we built around this goes on and on… forever.
But there are lamentations about it, and it is treated as a dramatic event.
A few decades ago, about a third of our people—6 million—were brutally murdered, and about that they don’t print lamentations.
Is there a satisfying explanation?
Answer
There are lamentations about that too, and nobody is preventing you from saying them. Obviously, the authority of the medieval authorities (Rishonim) and the antiquity of those lamentations have an influence. But all of that is psychology, not essence.
https://forum.otzar.org/viewtopic.php?t=35381