Tzipiyah.com

One of the Zionist leaders, Duvdevani, after the holocaust, wrote a letter to Rav Charlop, one of the top students of Rav Kook, with a very painful question. He asked him: “Now that the holocaust is over, so many people come to me, after making aliyah, completely devastated, completely depressed. They lost their whole family. They lost all hope, all faith. They don’t know how to move on. How am I supposed to react to that? What should I tell them? ”

Rav Charlop answered with a very short letter: “Tell them Nachamu Nachamu Ami”.

Duvdevani was puzzled. How would that console people after the holocaust? He wrote back to Rav Charlop: “Your answer is puzzling! How will that make people who lost their whole family feel better? On top of that, this passouk tells us that God wants to prophets to consoles us, but not how they consoles us! I need to know how to console those people from Klal Israel that need it right now!”

Rav Charlop answered with an absolutely incredible answer: “You do not understand the passuk. You read it as “Nachamu Nachamu ET ami” - Go ahead and console my nation. But that is not the meaning of the passouk. The right way to read the passouk is as follows: “Nachamu Nachamu” - Be consoled, Be consoled! Now, we all ask, how can we be consoled after such a tragedy. How can we be consoled after the destruction of our temple or after the tragedy of a genocide of our nations? The answer is AMI! Be Consoled, Be Consoled because you are AMI! You are my Nation! Even when it seems that all is lost, and you ask yourselves if God has abandoned you, you should know that you will forever be God’s nation! Nachamu Nachamu Ami - Be Consoled, because you will forever be my nation!”

The Jewish Nation has an unfortunate history of tragedies. Often, we ask ourselves: “Where is God?”. Often, we ask ourselves, “Is this truly what it means to be a chosen nation?”. I don’t have truly satisfying answers to these questions. However, in this time in the Jewish Calendar of Nechama (consolation), our greatest consolation is the realization that even after all these tragedies, we are still standing. The Maharal says, in Netzach Israel, that sometimes, we can see and feel Netzach Israel (the eternity of Klal Israel) more through tragedies than we suffer, through galut, than through centuries of Gueoula, as tough as it is. Our consolation is that even after the tragedies, there is no doubt that we are still “Ami”, God’s nation. Even after we were burned to ashes, and there is no explanation which can satisfy our understanding of why this happened, but even after it happened, MEAFAR KOUMI!, we rise from the ashes, because we are Ami - God’s Nations.

May the coming weeks be weeks of consolation and inspiration to all of Klal Israel.