When I was starting to become religious, there was a man at our synagogue. His name does not matter. I knew almost nothing about him: not where he lived, not his age, not his family story. Only that he was a German Jew, a yekke of the classic kind, precise about everything, and that every single week he walked a very long way to shul, arriving at exactly the same time, at exactly the same moment. Every week of the year except two: this week, Re’eh, and the week before, Eikev, his summer break. Even his absence was precise. You could set the calendar by him.

I never learned why he walked so far or what the walk cost him. But his regularity told me something no sermon could: consistency is a form of care. Showing up, week in and week out, unspoken and unadvertised, was his devotion, and to a boy finding his way into Jewish life it was a real comfort. I have been thinking about him this week, because the Jewish calendar is in the middle of teaching exactly that lesson.

Three weeks of grief carried us down into Tisha B’Av. And now the calendar prescribes not three weeks of comfort in return, but seven: the shiva d’nechemta (the seven weeks of consolation), marked by seven haftarot (prophetic readings) of comfort, read every Shabbat until Rosh Hashana. Comfort, it seems, takes more than twice as long as mourning. This week’s haftarah is the third of the seven, and it opens not with reassurance but with a problem:

עניה סערה לא נחמה “Afflicted one, storm-tossed, not comforted.” (Yeshayahu 54:11)

“Afflicted one, storm-tossed, not comforted.” (Yeshayahu 54:11)

Two weeks of consolation have already been read, and Zion is still not consoled. The comfort has not worked. Anyone who has ever tried to comfort a mourner knows this moment: the sentence that sounded right in your head falls flat in the room, and you face a choice, retreat into safe silence or stay and try again. For me personally the process is very tough. I want to suggest that this failure is precisely the point, and that it explains why the Sages chose one particular prophet, and only him, to carry all seven of these weeks.

Every one of the seven haftarot of consolation is drawn from the book of Yeshayahu (Isaiah). He is not a guest in this season; he owns it. The Rabbis teach that his father Amotz was the brother of King Amatziah of Judah, which would make Yeshayahu royalty: a prophet who walked the corridors of power as an insider, not an outsider throwing stones over the wall.........

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