Every year, on the Shabbat right after Tisha B’Av, we read a haftarah that opens with words that have shaped Jewish identity for centuries: “Comfort, comfort My people, says your God” (Isaiah 40:1). Not comfort once. Comfort twice. It’s as if the prophet already knew that real national pain, pain seared in by the fire of destruction, doesn’t heal in a single burst of hope. It takes a process. It takes work.

This year, Shabbat Nachamu isn’t landing as just another point on the calendar. It’s landing as a real test. Not only a test on the battlefield, but a much deeper question: do we still know how to be one people?

Our sages taught that the Second Temple fell because of baseless hatred among Jews themselves. Not because of a stronger enemy. Not because of military weakness. Internal division. That’s a hard lesson to accept, because it’s always easier to blame someone outside than to look inward. But that’s exactly where the power of the idea lives. If the destruction came from division, then rebuilding can come from unity.

The Bible is full of proof of this. When the people of Israel stood at the foot of Mount Sinai, the text uses an unusual grammatical form. It describes the entire nation “encamping” in the singular, not the plural, as if hundreds of thousands of people had become one body. Our tradition reads this as the people........

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