Shabbat Nachamu – Two Pathways to Comfort
This Shabbat, the first after Tisha B’Av, is known as Shabbat Nachamu, the “Sabbath of Comfort,” named for the opening words of the Haftarah from Isaiah:
נַחֲמוּ נַחֲמוּ עַמִּי, יֹאמַר אֱלֹקֵיכֶם – “Comfort, comfort My people,” says your God (Isaiah 40:1).
Isaiah’s vision offers one Jewish concept of comfort – God’s own voice and presence reaching into the pain of a people recently crushed by loss. This is a divine embrace, a reminder that no matter the destruction, God’s covenantal love endures. In this reading, comfort is not something we have to create; it is given, descending upon us like gentle rain on parched earth.
Yet Jewish tradition also offers a second pathway to comfort: the comfort we generate through community and the reliable rhythm of mitzvot and ritual. After the trauma of exile and dispersion, Jewish life has been sustained not only by divine promise but by the steady heartbeat of Shabbat candles lit week after week, Torah read year after year, prayers recited in minyan after minyan. This kind of comfort is built from the ground up — by human hands, familiar melodies, shared tables, and sacred deeds that bind us together.
This Shabbat we also read Parshat Va’etchanan, where Moses pleads to enter the Promised Land and is told, painfully, that he will not. And yet, here we are, living in a miraculous chapter of Jewish history — when the People of Israel have inherited their land once again and the State of Israel thrives.
Even in the face of disappointment, we are comforted by the knowledge that God’s promises continue to unfold in our own days, and that both divine compassion and the faithfulness of our people carry us forward.
May this Shabbat Nachamu bring us both kinds of comfort — the comfort that comes from Above, and the comfort we weave together here below.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Bolton