When I was 21, I lost a close friend to leukaemia. Heidi was just 19; she was vibrant, super-intelligent, and possessed an extraordinary appetite for Torah and the intellectual life. A runner-up in the World Bible Quiz and a brilliant university student, she had an insatiable curiosity, sharp intensity, and a capacity to connect to others with ease. She fought her illness with courage, composure, the support of her singular family and a wide group of friends. Her death left us, her friends, reeling. We were too young to be touched by premature death, unsure how to navigate the road of mourning, the journey towards meaning in the face of the unfathomable.
I am writing about Heidi because, on the Jewish calendar, we are in the seven weeks of comfort that follow its saddest day. This was the 9th day of Av. It is a day steeped in tragedy, drenched in tears through Jewish history; a 24-hour fast day recalling events like the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem and expulsion from Spain in 1492. It has been associated with so many other awful events in our long chronicles.
It was a few months after Heidi’s death when I was at her family synagogue for Shabbat where her dad read the famous words of the prophetic section that week, the Haftarah, the first of those seven weeks of consolation leading up to Rosh Hashana:
“Be comforted, be comforted, my people says your God” (Isaiah 40:1).
These are poignant words at any time, but on this Shabbat, they tore at my heart, not only because I was longing for solace, but because of the way he read those anguished words. Joe was a formidable and determined East European Jew; we were in awe of his incisive intellect, his Talmudic and general knowledge, and his vigorous eloquence. He was a former student of the great Reb Aharon Kotler. He was a man of the mind; objective, rational, not given to the softness of emotion. Tears were not in his book. Yet on this Shabbat when he read the Haftorah you felt the tears, the depth of his loss; the unbearable ache of the words all wrapped in the plangent sound of the traditional tune. It was on this Shabbat I began to get a deeper understanding of the acuteness of loss and the awesomeness of condolence.
The Prophet Isaiah understood all too well how fragile life is: “All flesh is grass and all its kindness is like the flower of the field… the grass will wither; the flower will fade… ” (Isaiah 40:6). Isaiah also recognised how potent giving comfort is. He pictures God Himself gathering us up like a shepherd gathering lambs in his arms and carrying them endearingly close to Him.
It’s not only God who gives comfort, but one of the gifts of being human is our capacity to reach out and support others in pain. In fact, the words “Comfort, comfort” can mean to give comfort to one another. The recognition of our pain and touch of another can often be the most healing force.
We are living in the time of unbearable loss and anguish for the Jewish people. A time of multiple losses; those who died on October 7, those hostages snatched from their homes, those young lives being lost fighting for Israel. Our angst at the losses of innocent life in Gaza. And then there are the existential losses. The jettisoning of our belief in the invincibility and moral superiority of the Israeli government, army and security services, and closer to home the crushing of our confidence in Australia as a place of comfortable security, a society that cherishes us, and the contribution we have made to its success and sensibility.
We are in mourning and desperately in need of relief and reassurance. We probably require seventy weeks of consolation. Yet we are not ready to receive it, since the war is still continuing, lives are still being lost, and the hostages are holding on by a thread.
The seven weeks are ultimately about the power to reconstruct, to build again, and to hope after devastation and destruction. It’s ingrained in the Jewish psyche, it makes us the Hatikva people of the long vision. And as I ache for the ending of the war in Gaza, I yearn for the solace of peace and healing – and to adapt the Ani Maamin refrain, even if it tarries, I will wait and work for it with all my heart and soul. I will give support to others even if my spirit is struggling.
And Heidi remains my inspiration. She is a reminder to me of the unbearable losses of life, as well as the unbelievable ways we can hope and cope, renew, and reinvigorate.
Rabbi Ralph Genende OAM
