This week’s Torah commentary, written by Rabbi Dr. Allan Kensky, Professor of Rabbinic Literature at Hebrew Seminary, has been sponsored anonymously.
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One of the important, often overlooked, periods of the Jewish year is the ten-week period that begins on the 17th of Tammuz and ends the week before Rosh Hashanah. The fast of the 17th of Tammuz opens a period of three weeks that climaxes with Tish’ah Be’Av, the Ninth of Av, when we mourn the destruction of the both the first and second Temples of Jerusalem. For three weeks, the Torah readings in the synagogue are followed by haftarot—prophetic readings—that were addressed to Israel before the destruction of the first Temple. In these haftarot, the prophets rebuked the people for their failings and warned them of impending disaster. On Tish’ah Be’Av, we mourn the disasters that occurred and their accompanying loss of life, suffering, displacement and exile.
Immediately after Tish’ah Be’Av, the mood invoked by our liturgy shifts dramatically. For seven weeks, beginning with this Shabbat, our theme is one of comforting. On each of these seven Shabbatot we read haftarot, prophecies of comfort, all coming from the second half of the book of Isaiah (often called Second Isaiah). The opening line of this week’s haftarah sets the theme for the following weeks: “Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, says your God” (Isaiah 40:1). Over the course of these seven weeks the prophet, speaking to the Jewish exiles in Babylon, speaks of return and rebuilding the land, of reconciliation between God and Israel, of Israel and God rejoicing with one another.
Rabbis have long asked why it is that there are three weeks of rebuke followed by a full seven weeks of comfort. The most common answer is that the seven weeks of comfort indicate that God’s aspect of comforting, of compassion and healing, is at least double God’s aspect of rebuke and punishment. I have always suspected that there is another reason why the period of comforting is longer than the period of warning and rebuke. I believe the reason is that after destruction, after trauma and loss, comforting and healing take considerable time. That is why Jewish mourning practices acknowledge stages of grief and have structured a whole system of mourning—the intense period of a shiv’ah, the sheloshim, the first month of mourning, with a full year in the case of the loss of a parent. In the Jewish tradition, as soon as a loved one is buried, it is common for us to turn to the mourners and say, “May God comfort you together with all mourners in Zion and Jerusalem.” This line is the call to the community to reach out to the mourners and comfort them, in the spirit of God, who after the destruction of Jerusalem calls on the people via the prophet and says, “Comfort ye, comfort ye.” In the face of a loss experienced by a member of the community, we the community are called on to be agents of God’s comfort and healing.
This message about comforting has always been important to me. This portion is the anniversary of my bar mitzvah, and I have always taken it as a special charge in having become bar mitzvah on the Shabbat when we read the Ten Commandments, the first portion of the Shema, and the call of our haftarah, “Comfort ye, comfort ye.” I have always seen the role of comforter as one of the most important roles of the rabbi. In a stress-filled world, where our daily lives are filled with challenge and complexity, where so many of us face the additional challenges of illness, misfortune, pain and loss, the need of the rabbi to serve as comforter, as healer, is paramount. Along with the roles of teacher, preacher, and community leader, rabbis must seek to be a source of comfort and healing to their communities. As one who became bar mitzvah on Shabbat Nachamu (“the Sabbath of Comfort”), I have always seen myself as being called on to bring comfort to others.
Of course, during these weeks of comfort, the message of comfort is addressed to the Jewish people in its entirety. As I, for one, have looked at Jewish history, I have seen it as often alternating between difficult, trying periods and periods of healing, rebuilding, and comforting. Destruction has often been followed by periods of rebuilding and rebirth. In recent times, the Sho’ah was followed by the establishment of the State of Israel and the rebuilding of our Jewish homeland. Destruction was followed by rebirth.
The past two years have been difficult ones for our people, in Israel and in the Diaspora. The losses of October 7, with the ongoing nightmare of the hostages ever since, and the brutal war on several fronts that has followed, have been trying times for our brothers and sisters in Israel and for us right here in the United States. Israelis are still reeling from the trauma of October 7, and the war continues. We in the United States have faced a resurgence of antisemitism and have agonized at the great losses of the war in Gaza, including the immense toll on civilian lives in Gaza.
What the Jewish people desperately need now is a period of comforting and healing. I pray daily that this period of comfort will come, that the war in Gaza will cease, that lives will be rebuilt on both sides of the border, and that the divisions in Israel and in our own communities can be repaired. I pray that our leaders will turn to us and say, “Comfort ye.” And in the meantime, I pray that all of us will turn to each other in love and support, and that we will offer comfort to one another in these turbulent times.
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