Rabbi Charles P. Sherman
Andrea Horowitz, Bat Mitzvah
August 8, 2003
To Comfort the Disturbed and to Disturb the Comfortable
The Challenge of Religion
Today is obviously a very important day in the life of Andrea Horowitz and her family. Not only is today Andrea’s 13th birthday, but the day on which she becomes a Bat Mitzvah. This Shabbat is also a very important day in Jewish life. In fact, it is one of the few Sabbaths which has its own special name. If you look on a luach – a Hebrew calendar – you will see that this is Shabbat Nachamu, the Sabbath of comfort and consolation. While every Hebrew calendar throughout the world denotes this as a special Shabbat, I suspect that the overwhelming majority of Liberal Jews do not know the significance of this day, let alone people who are not Jewish. So let me put this day into context and explain what I think its important lesson is for us.
Yesterday was Tisha B’av, the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av. Among traditional Jews, yesterday was a fast day, which marked the end of a three-week period of mourning, a period of grief for unhappy events of the past. Jewish history has telescoped many of the major tragedies of Jewish life and fixed them on Tisha B’av – the destruction of both the First and the Second Temple, the fall of Beitar signaling the defeat of the Bar Kochba rebellion against Roman forces, the beginning of the Inquisition, and in our day, the Holocaust.
Yesterday, traditional Jews spent the day in mourning. They sat on the floor or on low stools in their synagogues with the lights dimmed. They covered the Ark with a black mantle and chanted in plaintive tunes Eicha, the Book of Lamentations. It was a day of weeping and mourning for the committed, traditional Jew.
In the three weeks leading up to this day, no weddings could take place. The Haftorah portions, the selections from the prophetic readings on the three Sabbaths preceding Tisha B’av, were distinguished by messages of dark foreboding, stinging rebuke and stern denunciation. It was intended to be a depressing season of the year for traditional Jews.
But today it is over and gone – gloom yielding to brightness, sadness to hope and comfort. This is Shabbat Nachamu, the first of seven Sabbaths of consolation. On each of these seven Sabbaths leading up to the New Year, the Haftorah – the prophetic selection – comes from the latter prophesies of Isaiah, because Second Isaiah is preeminently the consoler of Israel, the bringer of a message of hope and encouragement. The second half of the Book of Isaiah, beginning with Chapter 40, from which Andrea chanted so beautifully, is what we read during these seven weeks leading and building toward the New Year.
Yet it is absolutely remarkable that our texts for today and all seven of these Sabbaths should come from Isaiah because of the time and circumstances in which he lived and wrote. An overwhelming calamity had befallen the Jewish people. The mighty army of Babylon had sprung upon the Holy Land like a lion upon its prey – killing, tearing and mangling. To all outward appearances, the Jewish nation was left a bleeding corpse with no hope of recovery. The very heart of the community had been torn from the body as the magnificent Temple, the glory of our People, was reduced to a mass of ruins. The flower of the Jewish nation’s manhood had fallen upon the battlefield in heroic defense of their country. The Lamentations which were read yesterday on Tisha B’av, give a painfully vivid description of the horrors brought upon Israel by sword and famine. Pangs of hunger were so terrible that women slew their infant children and devoured their flesh. The country was little better than a desert after the Babylonian forces had passed through it. The nobles of the nation had been led in chains as captives to the conquering power. Others had fled as refugees into Egypt. Only the poorest, the most wretched elements of the population, had been left to a miserable existence amid the rubbish heaps of what had once been the beautiful cities of the Promised Land.
Perhaps the only way to understand this scene and the mentality of the vanquished people is to consider what happened in the Holocaust. We have read and heard descriptions of what conquered territory looked like; we have spoken to men and women who fled before the advancing enemy. We’ve been told what were the experiences of prisoners of war and internees in concentration camps. If we want to try to grasp the mentality of the Jewish People almost 2500 years ago, we need only consider the state of mind of Jews under Nazi terror. To such as these the prophet Isaiah came with the heartening message, Nachamu, nachamu ami – comfort ye, comfort ye, My People.
Isaiah said to his People in effect: to your human eyes the outlook is as hopeless as it could possibly be. To your human mind there appears no outlet from the horrible pit into which you have been plunged. But do not despair, do not lose heart, all is not lost. Your conqueror will be overthrown and humbled, your prison gates will be flung open, and you will return home freed men and women; the ruins will be swept from the fair land of Canaan and their place again taken by noble buildings.
Now when Isaiah came to his people with this exhortation – comfort ye, comfort ye – might they have very reasonably responded: you speak empty words. Nonsense. For what evidence was there that the day of deliverance would dawn for them. Babylon appeared to be invincible. The Jew in his misery looked around him and saw no other power which would dare to challenge the supremacy of their conqueror.
But Isaiah’s message consisted of more than the words “comfort ye, comfort ye, My People.” He added two further words which were supremely important – yomar Elohaychem – saith your God. And what a vast difference this addition made! It was no castle in the air Isaiah was building for them; his address of comfort was no invention of his own. He came as a messenger in the name of God. They were Divine words which Isaiah merely delivered. The people saw no ally because they were looking in the wrong direction. Let them turn their gaze upward and there they would find what they were seeking – a Helper before whom the nation of Babylon was as but a grain of dust. Let them fix their hope in God who had fought their battles in the past and had humbled powerful nations before them.
One of the primary functions which Judaism performs for us is to provide comfort in sorrow and solace in times which try our souls. Heinrich Heine alluded to this truth when he called our Bible “the medicine chest of humanity.” When we are bruised and burdened, when we suffer disillusionment and despair, when we grow tired of living and “feared of dyin’ ” we can find restoring balm in the biblical assurance that “God is near to all who call upon God, to all who call upon God in truth.”
Any student of Jewish history knows that it was the life-giving reservoirs of strength and hope which our people found in our heritage that enabled us to survive the repeated efforts to destroy us. In a tremendously moving essay, Lisa Kovitch provides graphic illustrations of the sustaining power so many Jews found in their faith during the cruelest of all epochs in our history. She writes: “Though the Nazi savagery and ruthlessness in carrying out the extermination of the Jewish People in Europe could have robbed anyone of his faith in God, the evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that Jews did not lose faith. Belief in God and God’s commandments often sustained Jews throughout the Holocaust period. And when they could no longer avoid death, their faith also enabled them to march to their deaths with a dignity that mocked everything the Nazis tried to accomplish.”
My friends, it is clear that one of the most important roles which our religion should play in our lives is to comfort us when we are disturbed. Judaism must teach us how to discover hidden, unsuspected reserves of strength within ourselves and others in order to survive the assaults and trials of our lives. Shabbat Nachamu, the Sabbath of comfort and consolation, reminds us of this fact. But I need to add an important caveat on this special Shabbat. Our religion should also disturb us when we are too comfortable.
The prophets who could soothe with motherly compassion when their people were heartsick, could also scold with bitter condemnation when their people appeared heartless. Isaiah, who called out “comfort, My people, comfort them,” was the same prophet who cried out “woe unto the rebellious children.” Of course, it makes better advertising copy to promote Judaism as a comforter rather than as a disturber. Heaven knows that in difficult days the need for comfort and solace runs deep. There are enough things in many of our personal lives to disturb us without turning to our religion for additional irritants.
And yet, and yet . . . we cannot escape the truth that when Judaism offers only serenity and contentment, when it focuses all of our attention upon our personal needs and turns its back on the rest of the world, at that point Judaism betrays its own character.
Norman Cousins once wrote “The enemy is any man in the pulpit . . . who is a dispenser of balm rather than an awakener of conscience. He’s preoccupied with the need to provide personal peace of mind, rather than to create a blazing sense of restlessness to set things right.”
Remember that when we Jews gather in our synagogues on the Holyday of Rosh Hashanah, the central ritual is the sounding of the shofar and the shofar is not a calming, peaceful sound. As Maimonides explains: “The shofar cries out to us AWAKE FROM YOUR SLEEP! SHAKE OFF YOUR LETHARGY! No, no, the shofar is not a lullaby, but an alarm clock. It does not encourage complacency; rather it shatters it.”
There are surely days, my friends, when religion should be a disturber of the peace, a goad to conscience and a blazing sense of restlessness to address the world’s wrongs. In a world where so many worry about overeating, two-thirds of its inhabitants worry about eating at all. In a world where terrorists are acclaimed as freedom fighters and nations buy missiles and tanks before they build hospitals and schools – in such a world our religion should be a disturber of the peace. In the richest country in the world, when one in six American children lives in poverty, when the average White household had a net worth of $84,000 last year compared to a net worth of $7,500 for the average Black household, where Blacks and Hispanics make up 63% of the adult prison population but only 25% of our nation’s population, religion cannot bless the status quo.
What is needed today is not only the reassurance that God is in heaven and all is right with the world, but also the reminder that there is so much wrong with the world that we must try to right. “Noble discontent,” it has been said, “is the path to heaven.” Judaism reminds us, even on this Sabbath of comfort and consolation, that noble discontent is also a good way to walk the earth. May God grant that our religious faith may always both comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. Amen
Inspiration for this message came from the writings of Rabbi Sidney Greenberg.
