City of Ruins: Mourning the Destruction of Jerusalem Through Jewish Apocalypse

This study addresses the way in which a psychoanalytic model of mourning relates to a set of Jewish apocalypses concerned with the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple. These texts respond to the traumatic symbolic loss of Zion and attempt to heal it through the apocalyptic narrative, the visionary experiences of the seers, and the emotional transformation that results from the interplay of the two. The seers react with rage, paralysis, and self-annihilating sentiments, and hence these texts resemble incomplete, stalled mourning, or melancholia. Through the course of their narratives and a ’working-through’ of the Jewish past, true mourning and psychological recovery occur, prompting visions of the establishment of an ideal society in the future.

Dereck Daschke, Ph.D. (2000) in Divinity, University of Chicago, is Chair of Philosophy & Religion at Truman State University. He most recently co-edited A Cry Instead of Justice: The Bible and Cultures of Violence in Psychological Perspective (T&T Clark, 2010).