Hamakom Menachem Oti

It was 1973, after the Yom Kippur War.

Rabbi Shlomo Riskin was traveling to Israel to visit the wounded. On the plane (those who remember El Al flights in those days used to hand out Israeli newspapers before takeoff), he saw a notice about a Rav he had once known. Rav Schwartz.

A Holocaust survivor. A man who had lost his entire first family, wife and children, to the Nazis. He rebuilt. Remarried, lived for years on the West Side of Manhattan not far from Rabbi Riskin, and eventually made aliyah with his new family.

In 1967, his eldest son was killed in the Six Day War.

Now, in 1973, his younger son was killed in the Yom Kippur War.

Once they arrived at the hotel, Rabbi Riskin went to be menachem aveil. The apartment was packed. Over a hundred people. Total silence. He stood in the back, unsure if he would even be recognized. As he turned to leave, he quietly said the words we always say:

Hamakom yenachem eschem b’toch sh’ar aveilei Tzion v’Yerushalayim.

Rav Schwartz looked up.

“Rav Riskin?”

“Yes.”

“Why do we say Hamakom?” he asked. “Why ‘the Place’? Why not Hashem yenachem eschem?”

He paused.

“I understand it now for the first time. When my family was destroyed in the Holocaust, there was no comfort. It was senseless. Absurd. But now.”

“I am broken. Beyond words. And yet I am comforted.”

“Because this time my sons did not die for nothing. They died for the Jewish people. They died for Yerushalayim. They died for the Jewish future.”

Hamakom menachem oti.

The place, the land, the state, the future they died to protect. That is what gives me comfort.

There is a question that comes up every year when we lein Acharei Mos Kedoshim.

When two parshiyos are combined, the rule is simple: you lein the Haftorah of the second parsha. Tazria Metzora, you lein Metzora. Behar Bechukosai, you lein Bechukosai. The Haftorah follows the maftir.

Except here.

Acharei Mos Kedoshim, we lein the Haftorah of Acharei Mos, the first parsha. Not Kedoshim.

Both Haftorahs describe the same national darkness, the moral collapse, the aveiros that led to the destruction of the Beis HaMikdash. Neither one looks away.

But they end differently.

The Haftorah of Kedoshim, from Yechezkel, To’evos Yerushalayim, leaves you in the destruction. No turn. No light. Only accounting.

The Haftorah of Acharei Mos, from Amos, Halo Kivnei Kushiyim, sees the same darkness. But it carries something else in the end. Hope.

Rav Soloveitchik explains that this is exactly why we choose Acharei Mos. Not because we are naive. Not because we minimize what we see. We choose it because even when everything is broken, we refuse to tell the story as if nothing remains.

That is what Rav Schwartz was doing in that apartment.

Not minimizing. Not moving past it. He said explicitly: I am broken, beyond words. But he refused to let the loss be empty. He found what it was for. And that, somehow, became the only comfort available to him.

This is what the Jewish calendar is doing when it places these two days back to back.

Yom Ha’atzmaut does not come after Yom Hazikaron to replace the mourning. It comes to answer it. To say: this mattered. This built something. This continues.

We sit in the grief fully, every name, every family, every silence. And then, because we are Jews, we turn toward what that grief made possible. Not instead of the pain. Because of what the pain protected.

We choose the Haftorah of Amos every year for the same reason.

Not because it is easier than Yechezkel.

Because it is the only honest response to what we have lived through, and what we are still living through.

The greatest tragedy would not only be the loss.

It would be if we received everything they gave us, everything they died to protect, and slowly, quietly, without even noticing,

we lost it.

Hamakom yenachem osanu b’toch sh’ar aveilei Tzion v’Yerushalayim.

May the place, Yerushalayim, Eretz Yisrael, the Jewish future, be the comfort of every family that has given everything for it.