Every year, the moment Tisha B’Av ends, something remarkable happens. The fast day of mourning, the day the Jewish people remember the destruction of both Temples and centuries of exile and persecution, gives way almost immediately to Shabbat Nachamu, the Shabbat of Comfort. The name comes from the opening words of that week’s prophetic reading, Isaiah 40:
For generations, commentators have asked a simple question about this verse. Why does the prophet repeat the word? Every word in the Torah is essential, why not simply “comfort My people”? What is the double language trying to tell us?
I believe the answer to that question is only fully visible now, in our own generation, and that it points to something larger than comfort after mourning. It points to a double blessing that the prophets could see coming but that no earlier generation could have actually lived to see.
The First Comfort: Return
The first layer of comfort is the one Jewish tradition has always understood. After exile, return. After destruction, rebuilding. After the loss of the land, the land restored. Return. Rebuilding. Restoration. This is the comfort of baseline, of things being set right after being broken. It is the comfort captured in the closing words of the Book of Lamentations, which describes the desolation of Jerusalem: “RESTORE us to You, Hashem, and we will RETURN; RENEW our days as of old.” That is a prayer to get back to where we were. It is a real and necessary comfort, and for two thousand years it was the only comfort the Jewish people dared to hope for – to be back in our land, the way it once was.
The return to the land of Israel, the rebuilding of Jerusalem, the regathering of Jews from every corner of the earth after centuries of dispersion: this is the fulfillment of that first comfort. It is already, in itself, one of the most remarkable stories in human history. But it is only the first half of the double language, the first “nechama.”
The Second Comfort: A Blessing Never Seen Before
The prophets did not only promise a return to what was lost. They promised something greater than what had ever existed. Jeremiah declared that a day was coming when people would no longer swear by the God who brought Israel out of Egypt, but by the God who gathered Israel’s exiles from every land under heaven, a redemption so much greater that it would eclipse even the memory of the Exodus. Zechariah went further still, promising that the very fast days of mourning, the days set aside for grief, would themselves be transformed into feast days of joy.
Notice what these prophecies are describing. Not a return to baseline, but a surpassing of it. Not comfort as compensation for what was taken, but comfort as blessing beyond anything previously known. That is the second comfort hidden inside the double language of “comfort, comfort.”
Why Now?
What makes our generation different is that we are positioned to witness both comforts at once, and to see how they depend on each other. The first comfort, the return of the Jewish people to their land and their sovereignty, has largely happened in living memory. It was purchased at enormous cost, and October 7th reminded the world how real that cost still is. But the second comfort, the one the prophets seemed almost unable to describe except by borrowing and then exceeding the language of miracles their listeners already knew, is something new: the sign that Israel’s restoration was never meant to end with Israel.
It is no accident, I believe, that in the very week the Jewish people move from mourning to comfort, we are seeing something else happen that would have been unimaginable to earlier generations. Each year, Steve Wearp and others organize the “Nations Ninth of Av” where Christians around the world, descendants of nations and churches that for centuries treated Jewish suffering as proof of divine rejection, are instead standing with the Jewish people in their grief and in their hope and fasting on Tisha B’Av. When those who once stood as accusers and persecutors become, instead, comforters, that is the second comfort arriving. It is the sign that the blessing of Israel’s restoration was always meant to flow outward, to Jew and Gentile alike, exactly as the prophets promised.
This is what I have come to call Universal Zionism: the recognition that the return of the Jewish people to their land is not the end of the story but the beginning of a larger one, in which Israel becomes, as it was always destined to be, a light to the nations.
Shabbat Nachamu, with its strange, doubled cry for comfort, was always pointing toward this. It took our generation to finally understand why the prophet could not say it just once.
