On being a glutton with a half-empty stomach

Powerful Tisha B'Av service tonight.

What hit me the hardest was Lamentations 1:11 - the Artscroll translation in the Tisha B'Av siddur I was using has this translation:

All her people are sighing, searching for bread. They traded their treasures for food to stay alive. "Look, HASHEM, and behold what a glutton I have become!"

The Koren Tisha B'Av siddur, which I also had with me, translated the last phrase instead as, "look how abject I have become."

The word in question, זוֹלֵלָֽה, which I looked up when I got home, could legitimately be translated either way - and the 2006 JPS Tanakh has "how abject" with a footnote saying it could be, with bitter irony, "what a glutton" and notes that the word is used in that sense in Proverbs 23:20-21.

The glutton translation resonates with me not only because of the bitter irony that can be read in the verse but also because it speaks to the experience of oppression, whether abject physical poverty or emotional or spiritual abuse. When one can only barely - if even that - meet one's basic needs and must give up the luxuries that give life joy to do so, one can begin to see the meeting of one's basic needs as gluttony, rather than as basic needs. One experiences this in emotionally abusive relationships, where one is made to feel guilty for wanting the bare minimum needed for emotional and spiritual well-being, as if one were asking for too much and were somehow selfish for wanting it.

May we all experience redemption and never be made to feel like gluttons when our stomachs are half-empty.