Vaetchanan 5783 / Shabbat Nachamu / 29 July 2023
This past Thursday was Tisha b’Av, a holiday in which we commemorate the destruction of the Temple. And not only the Temple—many hold that there have been many atrocities that have fractured our people that have coincided around this date in our Hebrew calendar. On Tisha b’Av, we observe the same kinds of restrictions that we do on Yom Kippur. Mourning practices, aimed at getting our bodies in on the action, to have a unified mind/body approach to grief. We sing kinot, wailing grief songs. We chant Eicha, the book of Lamentations. It starts out with a plea: Why, where? It can be read as us crying out to God. But it can be read as God crying out to us, as well. Where are you? What has happened? How has this world been left in such total desolation?
We come through this cycle year after year. It’s incredible, I think. A powerful way to deal with the reality of having one’s city razed to the ground, and being sent off into exile. And the rabbis of the period that set our calendar were smart. They paired this holiday with seven shabbatot of consolation that take us in time to Rosh Hashana, through haftarah readings that are geared towards comfort. We go through extreme collective grief, in an arc of time that starts us off towards Elul and the High Holidays, but in order for us to get towards the heart-opening work of the chagim, we have to be put back together again.
There is much that breaks us in this world. Individually and collectively. And our ancestors knew: comfort is as much part of the work of cheshbon hanefesh, soul-accounting, as is grief and teshuvah.
The shabbatot of consolation start today, with Shabbat Nachamu. Our haftarah today comes from Isaiah 40, and starts:
Nachamu nachamu ami, yomar eloheichem.
Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.
Isaiah 40:1
It is a beautiful statement and call—be comforted, it is telling us. Seek comfort and ease, after all the terror.
But I can’t talk about comfort only in the metaphorical here, untethered to the rest of the text and tradition.
The text continues:
Speak to the heart of Jerusalem and tell her that her service is fulfilled, that her sins are expiated, that she has received from God’s hand double for all her sins.
Isaiah 40:2
It is hard to see—where is the consolation?
Ibn Ezra, the medieval commentator, clarifies that kif’la’im, double, here means double what others received for their sins. In context, and in keeping with rabbinic tradition for how the destruction of the Temple was understood: the terror the Israelites had experienced was a punishment. The comfort offered an appeasement after that punishment. It now doesn’t seem so comforting, after all.
Rabbi Sarra Lev, my Talmud teacher at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, teaches on texts that are commonly called “texts of terror” in feminist Biblical studies—texts that make us cringe because of the interpersonal violence held in them—that in order to come to see what these texts may hold for us, we may need to shift our perspective in order to read the texts differently and to find whatever glimmer of truth they hold. It is an adaptation of a rabbinic principle, that everything in Torah is true. It’s not that everything in Torah is true, perhaps. But that there is a way to find something of meaning in all of Torah. We don’t need to accept the worldview contained. But we can find a way to work with it, and to glean some meaning for us today.
What Lev teaches about these texts of terror is that if we shift our understanding of what genre we are working with, we may find new ways to open the text. The genre they propose, they call a summons.1 These texts we read in such a way so that we find in them a summons to make the world different. The cringe of terror present in these texts gives us information and cues to injustice in the world, which we can use to identify what forms of justice we may see, want, or need in or from the text. Often that justice in the text is lacking, and so it is our work in this world to find ways through. Lev’s hope is that through this textual work, we are able to move towards new possibilities of healing in relation to our texts.
The cringe factor for me in this shabbat’s haftarah is this idea that the destruction of the Temple was punishment, that Israel was punished doubly for her sins, and that God is coming back, doubly, to comfort—nachamu, nachamu. It feels like a cycle of abuse and reconciliation, moving back towards a honeymoon, or calm, phase.
It is terrible. And also, at the same time, this framework of the weeks leading up to Tisha b’Av, and Tisha b’Av itself, I find incredibly meaningful. That we have a collective process that ramps up in intensity and asks us to grieve together for the harms that have impacted our people, together. It asks us to not hold that grief in, but to cry out, and to find each other in that crying out.
Similarly, I find this framework that brings us shabbatot of consolation, linking Tisha b’Av to the chagim incredibly meaningful. There has been total destruction, and now, our broken hearts need tended. Our world broke open, and as we begin to put ourselves back together again, we start to think about what ways we might rebuild this world differently. We grieve and we witness others in their grief. We comfort and we are comforted. And then we turn inward to assess. What we need to change in order to repair this world. Where we have participated in the breakage.
Nachamu nachamu ami, yomar eloheichem.
Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.
Speak to the heart of Jerusalem and tell her that her service is fulfilled, that her sins are expiated, that she has received from God’s hand double for all her sins.
Isaiah 40:1-2
I hear these first few lines of our haftarah in two ways. In one hearing, I feel an echo of the abusive households I grew up in. And in another read, I hear this: Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and tell her: enough is enough. She has endured enough. Everything she has gone through, it is double what others have had to deal with. It has been enough. It is over. It is time for comfort.
Using the first hearing, with Sarra Lev’s tools, we can look at this text as a summons to root out all the ways in our Torah that we find a victim-blaming mode to deal with sin and violence in this world, to shift that power dynamic and misogyny. That work is imperative, and I hope that we will all take that on.
At the same time, that’s not the summons I think our liturgical cycle has in mind.
Let’s look at the second hearing. And use Lev’s tools in another way.
When there is trauma, when there is terror, there is, so often, clenching. We contract in order to protect ourselves. In this mode, it is so common to engage in some amount of blaming ourselves, some questioning: what could I have done to prevent this? Some bargaining. In this mode, it’s assumed, we have done something to result in, or even, perversely, somehow deserve whatever has happened to us. Whether or not that is true is not the point. It is a feeling, not a fact. A feeling that many of us survivors have to contend with for much of the rest of our lives. But one that can often only be contended with after the danger has passed. After we have unclenched.
This text is curious. It starts with a command to comfort. And then, it says: your service is fulfilled. You have endured too much. It does not get into how that comfort is felt or given but speaks to the heart of the wound. Enough is enough. And in the process, accepts and affirms a worldview that blames Israel in the process of comforting. It stays focused: comfort, comfort. Double. It tells us the time of suffering is over. A thing we need to hear after such intense terror. It acknowledges the pain has been too much. It asks us to unclench. To expand. To become a little softer.
The summons in this may be to listen for, and find, comfort where and how it appears. Even if it is imperfect. Even if the noise is roaring around us. Even if we want and need the call to comfort to be better, kinder, to not blame us for whatever we have just endured.
I am not saying that we should accept frames we don’t agree with, but that we may be able to allow ourselves to find comfort even in the midst of chaos all around. Even if the comfort offered isn’t perfect. That we may need comfort, especially because of all the chaos and imperfection around. I think that is the summons of these shabbatot of consolation.
In this arc of time from Tisha b’Av to the Hagim, we move from destruction, through grief,
through consolation, to examination. That’s the work we point towards. But in the midst of that process, in Marge Piercy’s words—in the midst of the burning world2—we allow ourselves to be comforted.
Where, and about what, do you need comfort right now?
My invitation to you, to all of us over these next 7 weeks, is to identify just that.
Where is it that you need comfort, and where might you find it? Where might we offer comfort to others, to ourselves? Where might we shift our view just enough so that we can see a different pathway through? Where can we unclench? Expand? Become a little bit softer?
Nachamu nachamu ami.
May we find ways through, to comfort ourselves and each other in the midst of this burning world.
1 Sarra Lev, “Dipping a Finger in Honey: Sense Making in the Face of Violent Texts,” in Sexual Violence and Sacred Texts, edited by Amy Kalmanofsky, Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2020. Pp. 53-74.
2 Marge Piercy, “Nishmat,” in The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme, New York: Knopf, 1999.
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