Image Details

Central Conference of American Rabbis

Fiery red rays of the blazing sun merge in Leonard Baskin’s watercolor with the red lettering of the Hebrew text from Lamentations 5:21. The text reads: “Turn us unto You, O Lord, and we shall be turned: Renew our days as of old!” The five elegiac chapters of Lamentations express Israel’s anguish and pain following the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. In the few lines illustrated here from the end of the fifth and final elegy, the writer offers his faith in God and his hope for the days to come. In combining image and biblical text, the artist continues a traditional technique of early biblical manuscript illumination.