Shabbat Shalom. It is wonderful to be back with you all this Shabbat. I am filled with gratitude for everyone who stepped up, in big ways and small ways, to sustain the shul during my absence. I saw many of you over Tisha b’Av when I couldn’t exchange greetings and it is so great to be with you all over Shabbat when we can fully enjoy one another’s company.
My time in Israel was truly magical. The weather was perfect, reconnecting with cherished friends and colleagues was invigorating, and I patronized some of my favorite cafes and seforim stores. This was my fourth trip to Israel since October 7th and the first time since the start of the war without hostage posters on every street corner. Israel seemed more “normal” than it has in years, but every time I saw a young family pushing a stroller down a sidewalk, I wondered about the strain of hundreds of days of reserve service and whatever traumas of the war they continue to endure.
At se’udah shlishit this afternoon I’ll share more about my time in Israel and what I learned, the institutional ties that I strengthened, and some of the vexing questions of contemporary Israeli life that I confronted and considered. I hope many of you can join me.
Maybe because it seems more serious than other forms of social-media, I participate, with gusto, in several Whatsapp groups with rabbinic colleagues. We exchange drasha ideas, offer one another advice when facing professional challenges, and double-check our halakhic positions before sharing them publicly. There is one brief exchange that I had with a rabbinic colleague and friend last September that I continue to think about all these months later. I will paraphrase my words:
“Solidarity with one’s own family, with one’s own tribe or nation is very natural. All people, everywhere on earth have those feelings. The Torah was given to us to push back against those instincts and feelings and subject them to moral scrutiny and the demands of mitzvot. So, even if there is a need for balance, perhaps our role as teachers of Torah, is not to be so balanced, but to be the counterbalance to the natural human instinct towards self-justification, tribal loyalty and defending our people.”
My colleague replied, and I quote him word for word:
“Ironic. I take almost the opposite approach. The world is turning against our people. Now is a time to stand with our people.”
You can clearly see in that exchange why he’s such a successful rabbi, and also why his voice has echoed in my head since last September.
But is he correct?
The eponymous Shabbat Nahamu, named for the Haftarah that always follows Tisha b’Av seems to support my friend:
נַחֲמ֥וּ נַחֲמ֖וּ עַמִּ֑י יֹאמַ֖ר אֱ-לֹהֵיכֶֽם׃
“Comfort, give comfort to my people, says your God.”
In the aftermath of hatred and violence and suffering and destruction, God calls upon us to comfort God’s people.
The Avudraham, a medieval handbook on liturgy and the Jewish calendar reads the successive Haftaraot in the weeks that follow Tisha b’Av as a sort of dialogue.
At first, God calls out to the Nevi’im, the prophets, and instructs them to comfort us: נחמו נחמו עמי. But we reject this comfort and respond, at the beginning of next week’s Haftarah, ותאמר ציון עזבני ה “And Zion said, ‘God has rejected me.’ We refuse to be comforted by others. The following week’s Haftarah, עניה סוערה לא נוחמה is the prophets conveying to God that the Jewish people remains bereft and uncomforted. This leads God to declare, in the following week’s Haftarah, אנכי אנכי הוא מנחמכם “I am the one who shall comfort them” directly.
This entire narrative seems to support my colleague. God’s priority in the aftermath of hatred and suffering and destruction is our comfort.
But a closer look reveals a more complicated story. How does God call for our comfort? Immediately after נַחֲמ֥וּ נַחֲמ֖וּ עַמִּ֑י, the Prophet Yeshayahu adds
כִּ֤י לָֽקְחָה֙ מִיַּ֣ד ה כִּפְלַ֖יִם בְּכׇל־חַטֹּאתֶֽיהָ׃…
For she has received at the hand of the LORD double for all her sins.
Yeshayahu never takes back the harsh critical judgements that we read last Shabbat. Yeshayahu never pretends that we did nothing wrong. Only in the aftermath of the destruction, caused by our own sins, does Yeshayahu pivot to provide comfort, but his judgement is never withdrawn or even revised.
When God responds to our cries of ותאמר ציון עזבני ה – that God has abandoned us, it is with a promise that the covenant endures, not with a reassurance that our sins did not matter.
The same theme can be found in our Parasha as well. Starting in Devarim 4:25, Moshe predicts the future cycle by which we will grow corrupt and construct idols and worship them, thereby angering God. And then we will be punished and exiled and scattered across the earth. Moshe does not hold back in his depiction of our betrayal and he does not hold back in his description of God’s punishment.
Only after all of that are we told that God will not abandon the covenant and our relationship with God is always repairable.
כִּ֣י אֵ֤-ל רַחוּם֙ ה אֱ-לֹהֶ֔יךָ לֹ֥א יַרְפְּךָ֖ וְלֹ֣א יַשְׁחִיתֶ֑ךָ וְלֹ֤א יִשְׁכַּח֙ אֶת־בְּרִ֣ית אֲבֹתֶ֔יךָ אֲשֶׁ֥ר נִשְׁבַּ֖ע לָהֶֽם׃
For the LORD your God is a compassionate God: He will not fail you nor will He let you perish; He will not forget the covenant which He made on oath with your fathers.
The Torah teaches us that sins must be condemned. The Torah warns us that betrayal will have consequences. And the Torah promises us that the covenant endures forever and there will be some Jews who will continue to maintain the covenant and to try again to live up to its lofty demands.
Covenantal comfort is the reassurance that no matter far we have strayed and no matter how bitter the consequences of our actions, we remain God’s people, the gateway of repentance remains open, and God, mercifully, waits to embrace us.
Unconditional validation, of the sort a parent might occasionally offer to a child, or the sort that a patriot might extend to a fellow citizen, is not the language of the Torah. The reassurance that one has done nothing wrong is unknown to the prophets, and foreign to Judaism.
The Talmud in Makkot describes an occasion when Rabbi Akiva and several colleagues ascended to Yerushalayim to gaze upon the destroyed site of the Beit Hamikdash. They all tore their garments when they saw Har HaBayit in its ruin and desolation. And then a fox was seen crawling through the ruins, as the prophet Uriah had warned. Inexplicably, Rabbi Akiva began to laugh. His colleagues questioned him: The Torah says that the site of the Beit Hamikdash is so holy that a non-kohen must die if he trespasses on that sacred space and now, in its desolation animals roam to and fro! What is there to laugh about? Rabbi Akiva explained that Uriah’s prophecy of destruction is linked to Zechariah’s prophecy of consolation. Until Uriah’s prophecy of destruction, in all its horror, had been fulfilled, I was in doubt about the consolation of Zechariah, but having seen the desolation, having witnessed a fox crawling through the wilderness growing on Har HaBayit, I know that the consolation will come.
Precisely because the prophecy of destruction proved true, Rabbi Akiva could trust the prophecy of redemption
בַּלָּשׁוֹן הַזֶּה אָמְרוּ לוֹ: עֲקִיבָא נִיחַמְתָּנוּ, עֲקִיבָא נִיחַמְתָּנוּ.
His colleagues responded to Rabbi Akiva in this language: Akiva you have comforted us. Akiva you have comforted us.
Rabbi Akiva’s comfort does not deny guilt and it does not deny punishment. It reminds us that the same covenant that promises consequences for sin, will also endure forever, and after destruction there is always a next chapter.
My colleague is absolutely correct that “the world is turning against our people” and he is correct that “now is the time to stand with our people.” But one of the ways that we stand with our people is to constantly think about how we can be better and more faithfully uphold the covenant.
Every family, every sports team, tribe, ethnic group or nation in human history has known how to stand together in the face of adversity. If they didn’t know how to do that, they wouldn’t have endured long enough to be noticed. And the Torah does want us to stand together, but not only to confront outside threats, but also to demand ethical excellence from one another, and to support one another in living up to the highest ideals of our tradition.
The tragedy of unhinged antisemitic attacks, made in bad faith without any spirit of generosity or fairness, is that it elicits an equal and opposite response in which we devote the lion’s share of our time and attention to defend ourselves and miss the opportunity to engage in self-reflection or to strive to be our best. I saw this clearly for the first time in 2007 when unfair, distorted attacks on YCT Rabbinical School appeared in Orthodox newspapers. We circled the wagons and defended ourselves and were deaf to other criticisms, offered in good faith, and may have missed a potential opportunity for course correction.
If we the Jewish people only stand together against the outside world, then those external forces have robbed us of our ability to introspect and to grow in the ways the prophets asked us to, and in the way that God demands. This is the real tragedy of our fallen world . We live with the fear of being honest about our mistakes because we know that there are people waiting to jump on us. We do need to stand together and we also need to talk together – just between us, and God at first – about who we want to be.
Elections have been scheduled in Israel for October 27th and in anticipation of those elections there have been rallies and marches throughout Israel on each motzei Shabbat including one small march that made its way through Jerusalem passing under the mirpeset of our AirBnb apartment. I don’t know enough about Israeli politics to determine what, if any, partisan affiliation the marchers had. And I couldn’t clearly decipher all of their chants; they were different from the chants I heard two summers ago at large rallies on behalf of the hostages. But as the marchers passed directly under our mirpeset they began to sing a song that I know very well.
באנו חושך לגרש. בידינו אור ואש. כל אחד הוא אור קטן. וכולנו אור איתן.
It’s an old Hanukkah song.
We have come to banish the darkness. In our hands is light and fire. Each one of us is just a small light. But together, our light is great.
These men and women marching through the streets of Yerushalayim did not deny the darkness that surrounded them. They know very well that Israel faces real external threats. But they marched in a spirit of mutual responsibility and of hope, confident that by standing together, their lights could merge into something greater.
We have not banished the darkness, but we have not let the darkness extinguish our lights.
True comfort comes from knowing that the covenant endures and God is waiting for us, and expecting us, and counting on us, to one day get it right.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 