This anonymously authored ḳinah (קינה, song of “lamentation”) begins with the line “אוֹי נָא לָֽנוּ כִּי חָטָֽאנוּ” (oy na lanu ki ḥatanu, “Woe—alas—unto us, for we have sinned”). Although the ancient Roman Jewish historian Flavius Josephus blames the Roman Empire for the destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE—and Roman art even celebrates the Roman capture of the Temple’s candelabrum—this ḳinah suggests that the destruction of Jerusalem was, at least partially, the result of Jewish discord. The ḳinah, which was long part of the Romanian prayer service for Tish’ah b’Av, appears in few other traditional prayerbooks for Tish’ah b’Av. It seems that the author of this ḳinah was El’azar ben Kallir (ca. 570–640 CE), who composed approximately half of the kinot most commonly inserted into contemporary Tish’ah b’Av prayerbooks that include the 40-odd most common kinot (קינות, plural of ḳinah) Jews sang throughout Europe during much of the early modern period. The author did not sign their name but left us with an alphabetical acrostic listing of often-concrete reasons to mourn today. . . .

The poetic genre known as ḳerovot, brief poems woven throughout the repetition of the weekday Amidah, is nowadays most closely associated with Elazar biRabbi Qallir’s Purim “Qrovetz“, a majestically interwoven piece of piyyut if ever there was one. But there are many other ḳerovot that have historically been recited, and this one is by the same author! The weekday qerovot cycle for Ḥanukkah, retelling the story of the Greek oppression using intricate poetic language. Included within is a qedushtah that instructs us on some of the halakhic requirements for the Ḥanukkah lights. . . .