This week we read the Torah portion Va'etchanan, but unlike my usual source of the Torah to drive my weekly thoughts, this week I look to the Haftorah instead. Isaiah's words open the reading with "Nachamu, nachamu ami" ("Comfort, comfort My people [says Gd]" Isaiah 40:1). These are not incidental words to me as they are the words I read at my own bar mitzvah. But even more so, my own name, Nehemia, shares its root, nun-chet-mem, “to comfort,” “to console,” with this very opening. And if this was not enough of a reason to write about it, this Haftorah carries the additional weight of being the first of seven haftarot of consolation that carry us from the mourning of Tisha B'Av, which we recognized yesterday, all the way to Rosh Hashanah.
It is impossible not to be drawn to the repetition of the word "comfort" in this reading’s opening words. Although the rabbis of the Pesikta ask why, with one answer claiming that the double comfort is to address our double sorrow, since Isaiah says in the following verse that Jerusalem has received "double for all her sins" (40:2). But to me the repetition is to highlight that “to be comforted” is not one act; it is two. Someone must offer comfort, and someone must be able to receive it. Both require effort. We are taught early in our lives how to console others. Yet we spend far less time, if ever, learning how to let ourselves be consoled.
For me this is one of the deepest challenges of being Jewish. I am often asked to explain being Jewish in modern categories; is Judaism a religion, a culture, an ethnicity? The honest answer is yes, and yet none of those words are big enough. We are an am, a people, a nation, the Children of Israel, a category millennia older than the modern vocabulary built to describe tribes and faiths. We speak a cultural language others do not easily understand. And so, our long history, destruction and rebuilding, exile and return, mourning and dancing, do not reconcile into a tidy definition. It resolves, instead, into a relationship. A people who has needed comfort, and a Gd who insists on giving it, twice over.
Let us not forget that later in this seven-week cycle, we are commanded to be "a light unto the nations" (Isaiah 49:6), words from this same prophet who opens this period of consolation; but no one lights candles at noon. We are asked to shine because the world has real darkness in it. May we have the courage this season not only to comfort others, but to let ourselves be comforted. Because we are Stronger Together.
Shabbat Shalom.
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