Shabbat Nachamu

Shabbat Nachamu is the name of the first Shabbat after the Ninth of Av, which according to tradition, is when both Temples were destroyed. Its name is taken from Isiah 40:1, “Comfort, Comfort my People says your G-d,” which is the first verse of this week’s Haftarah

This Shabbat officially ends the three weeks of mourning which culminate with the fast of the ninth of Av. Its Parasha  aims at offering solace and consolation for the suffering our People endured as a result of their transgressions that preceded the destruction of the Temples.

I believe I first remember it being mentioned when I was seven years old. Though I am certain that “Shabbat Nachamu” had been mentioned many times before, it was only when I reached that age that I finally grasped their profound meaning.

For my parents and many other Jews, Shabbat Nachamu was the day on which they were liberated from the Nazi Death Machine. It ended the darkest chapter in our Jewish history.

Each time I heard them, and there were many, they scorched my Jewish essence forming yet another painful scar that refuses to heal.

As symbolic as the liberation of my parents and my unborn older brother which occurred on this Shabbat may be, I kept pondering on the reasons that brought about the destruction, Churban, which, incidentally, is what the Shoah is referred to in Yiddish, that befell them and their generation. What sins could my two wonderful parents have committed to have brought such a punishment upon them? What crimes could my young little cousins have possibly carried out before they perished in Ponar, I ask, as the waves of grief refuse to subside. I try to find some logic, some order, in the chain of “cause and effect,” in the great world that G-d once created for us.

Alas, no matter what, the answers evade me.

Instead of resuming to torment my soul, I have decided to focus on the future and the lessons that we could apply  towards it, lessons which our Jewish history has been trying so desperately to teach us.

As we are approaching the end of the period that is referred to as “between the straits” (bein hametsarim), the three weeks of mourning over the tragedies that befell our People over two thousand years ago, I look around me. I observe our People, “The People of the Book,” the ones who were destined to be “A Light unto the Nations,” their practice of our cherished values, or rather their lack thereof, I keep asking, have Jews learned anything from our sanguineous history?

We are still exercising vain hatred and continue to intensify that already deep divide among us, while our enemies continue to weave their web of design to destroy us. We adopt foreign customs, we name our children after foreign deities and worship the golden calf.

Am Yisrael and fellow Jews, time to wake up and look inside ourselves. This is where we shall find the answers to the why and the what that has befallen us.  Let us practice that which we gifted the world. It is time to shed off all masks and be true to ourselves first.

Let us console, support each other and unite during these hard and trying times. Let us defy all odds, pursue justice, and continue to live up to that which we are commanded to do and “Choose Life.” We owe it to ourselves  and to our future generations.

Better days are ahead of us and despite and in spite of it all, the People of Eternity is here to stay, in our Jewish Homeland, in Eretz Yisrael.

Am Yisrael Chai