The fast: a means of transporting the sadness and pain of yesteryear; a way of making contact with sensations of absence and want.

In each time of pain, what has been lost is reissued, and becomes impregnated with our fears and frailties, as we confirm anew the ephemerality of existence’s sanctuary, the latter being much more fragile than the walls of the temple of Jerusalem even.

How to undertake such a trajectory? By rearranging and ever-so-slightly altering the five letters of the Hebrew word EICHA that terrible interrogative “how?”, which prolongs the suffering of the Lamentations, and by answering the former unanswerable question with ayeka, with the "here I am" that has characterized our people since its earliest laments.

It may well be that such questions are eternal, but grief, in their presence, becomes diluted. And the fast too will pass.