This week, with Shabbat Nachamu, the Shabbat of Comfort, we read the first of the seven haftorahs of comfort which will link us from this shabbat to Rosh Hashanah.  With this shabbat we transition from the mourning of the three weeks to the process of teshuvah and the Days of Awe.

Tisha B’av is the moment of God’s greatest hiddenness.  The Divine presence which dwelled among the Jewish people, facilitated by the Temple, was, as it were, gone.   Pulled back and ascended from its abode at the Temple among the people.   The days of Elul, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are just the opposite, they are days in which God is close, days when we return to God and in mirror image, God returns to us.   As the prophet Malachi says, “Return to me and I will return to you, says God.”

How do we make such a radical change?  How do we transition from, as Rabbi Solovetchic in his book Lonely Man of Faith put it, “Deus Absconditus, Who comes uninvited and unwanted, like an everlasting shadow, and vanishes into the recesses of transcendence the very instant I turn around to confront this numinous, awesome and mysterious ‘He’”, to God as the, “Mysterium Tremendum…The most obvious, and most understandable truth, the life-giving and life-warming breath…”

We encounter God, Rabbi Solovetchik is saying, as opposites.  As close and far, hidden and revealed, infinite and intimate.   This shabbat I think is the transition from one to the other.   Perhaps this is a reason it is called Shabbat Nachamu, the shabbat of comfort.   The word Nachamu, from the root “nichem”, does not actually mean comfort, it means to change, to change one’s mind or to regret a path and change one’s ways.   Perhaps this is the shabbat of change and transition, from God’s distance to God’s closeness and the fulfillment of the words of Zecharia, who said that our days of mourning and fasting will be turned into days of joy.

My blessings for a joyous shabbat nachamu!