Today's date and time:

Sermon for Sidra Va'etchanan
Shabbat Nachamu, August 2009
by Rabbi Geoffrey Hyman

I want to share with you a message on the theme of Shabbat Nachamu, “the Shabbat of Comfort”. This designation for the Shabbat is derived from the opening words of the Haftarah taken from the book of Isaiah: “Nachamu, Nachamu Ami ... – Be comforted, be comforted my people”. Appropriate words after the mournful mood of Tisha B’Av on Thursday, as we now begin the seven weeks of the Haftorot of consolation.

On Tisha B’Av I spent some time reading a book by Rabbi Dr. Eliezer Berkovits, entitled: “With G-d in Hell”. Rabbi Berkovits, (1908 – 1992) was a famous orthodox rabbi, philosopher and educator, who served as rabbi around the world, in Berlin 1934/1939, Leeds in England, Sidney in Australia and Boston in America. Much of his writing is on the subject of faith and spirituality and many of his books are dedicated to faith and the holocaust. Something that I read in his book left a deep impression that I want to share it with you today.

In the preface he writes, that after his book on the ‘Faith after the Holocaust’ and after numerous lectures on the subject, he realised that whilst he had dealt with how faith can still exist after the holocaust in spite of not solving all the problems that arise from the holocaust, he had failed to deal with the question of the very nature of faith. He writes that whilst the questions are asked, how can you believe in G-d after the holocaust? How could G-d remain silent in view of the Germans' inhumane bestiality of a kind previously unknown in the annals of man? However, none even those with faith, stopped to deal with the most awesome aspect of the issue, what is the meaning of faith within Judaism? Or what is faith?

He then continues that this realisation came to him as the result of a flight home to Chicago after a scholars’ conference in New York. He was seated beside a gentleman who turned out to be the cultural director of a Jewish secular organisation. The person being familiar with Dr. Berkovits works on the holocaust, the conversation was spent on the subject, but the director shared with him the following: “On a Holocaust Memorial Day, his organisation’s guest speaker was a rabbi who was not orthodox, who declared during his speech that because of what happened during the holocaust he could no longer believe in G-d! The audience was deeply shocked. So Dr. Berkovits asked the director why were they so shocked, after all, your organisation is made up of secular members, so why were they so disturbed by the rabbis’ comments? His answer was simply, that many of the audience were actually holocaust survivors. Explains Rabbi Berkovits, for this person that was an adequate explanation. He continues that these survivors who may well have lost their faith from their experiences were angered by the successful American Rabbi’s dismissal of the possibility of faith in G-d. They must have thought, that this man who grew up in the most prosperous country on earth, whose life was never been threatened, who never went to bed starving, who never saw the clouds of smoke over the crematoria, what right has he got to lecture us about the loss of faith? What does he know of the anguish of the believing Jew who loses his faith because he is so overwhelmed by the inhumanity of man that he can no longer believe? With that the rabbi understood that faith hadn’t been dealt with.

He then continues to write the following which I fully quote: “I began then to understand that we have been talking and writing about faith lightly, without fully appreciating what we were about. Suddenly I saw before me tens of thousands of Jews for whom Judaism was the sustaining well of their entire existence – Jews for whom the loss of faith was, indeed, a greater disaster than the loss of their worldly possessions. I could not help thinking of the multitude of Jews who, having lost their faith as well as their lives in the gas chambers, pleaded before the heavenly court: “Almighty G-d! We can forgive You everything that was done to us on Your polluted earth. Only one thing we cannot forgive: that you did not look after our faith in You; that You allowed such trials to be heaped upon our heads to which our faith was unable to stand up!”

And so he dedicated a book illustrating how Jews during the darkest moments in the ‘hell’ of the camps fought to keep their faith alive by striving to keep the daily observances of Judaism, giving them humanity, in the stark contrast to the bestial behaviour of their persecutors, the Nazis.

That is the faith so nobly expounded by the great prophet Isaiah and that is our hope and salvation, to always remain with our faith.

May Shabbat Nachamu inspire us with faith. Amen.