Shabbat Nachamu and the Attempted Erasure of Jewish History

This Shabbat, the one that follows Tisha B’Av, Jews around the world will hear one of the most beloved passages in the Hebrew Bible: “Nachamu, nachamu ami,” “Comfort, comfort My people,” says your God. (Isaiah 40:1).

Shabbat Nachamu does not ask us to forget destruction. It asks us to refuse to let destruction have the final word. That message has carried the Jewish people through every empire and enemy that believed it had written our ending.

Nearly two thousand years ago, Rome erected a monument to exactly that belief. The Arch of Titus, which still stands in the Roman Forum, commemorates the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Carved into its marble is one of history’s most recognizable Jewish images: Roman soldiers carrying the seven-branched menorah looted from the Second Temple.

The relief is more than a work of art. It is Roman imperial propaganda. The Roman Empire was not “antisemitic” in the modern sense of the word. Rome crushed many peoples who challenged its authority. But in celebrating the destruction of Jerusalem and displaying the Temple’s menorah as a trophy of conquest, it created one of history’s most enduring images of Jewish defeat and exile. The Arch proclaimed that Jerusalem had fallen, the Temple had been destroyed, and the Jewish people had been stripped of their national center.

Rome believed it had done more than win a war. It believed it had ended a civilization. The Romans were wrong.

Yet the story Rome celebrated that the Jewish people had been severed from their land, their Temple, and their future proved remarkably durable. Later generations reshaped it to fit their own worldviews. Some argued that God had rejected the Jewish people. Others denied that Jews were a nation at all. Still others insisted that Jewish ties to the Land of Israel were a modern invention rather than an ancient reality.

The forms changed and the underlying story remained. Every enduring form of antisemitism has depended, in one way or another, on rewriting Jewish history. 

Three symbols tell that story. The first is the Arch of Titus. The second is the Kotel. The third is the menorah that appears on the emblem of the State of Israel. The Arch tells Rome’s story. The Kotel tells the Jewish story. The menorah tells the story that neither Rome nor any of its ideological heirs could have imagined.

The Kotel, the Western Wall, is the last visible remnant of the retaining walls that supported the Temple Mount. It is not the Temple itself. It is something equally powerful: enduring physical testimony that the Jewish connection to Jerusalem is neither metaphor nor mythology. Long before there were modern states, peace negotiations, or competing national movements, there was a Jewish civilization rooted in Jerusalem.

For nearly two thousand years after the destruction of the Temple, Jews never stopped orienting themselves toward that place. Three times each day we pray facing Jerusalem. At every Passover Seder we declare, “Next year in Jerusalem.” At every wedding we break a glass to remember a city we had not forgotten.

The Jewish attachment to Jerusalem did not begin in 1948. It did not begin with Zionism or modern nationalism. It is woven into Jewish law, Jewish liturgy, Jewish memory, and Jewish identity. Which is precisely why it has had to be denied by those who seek to deny Jewish legitimacy. 

The explosion of antisemitism in a post-October 7 world did not invent that lie. It depended upon it. You cannot portray Jews as settler-colonists unless you first erase centuries of Jewish memory. You cannot deny Jewish indigeneity unless you first deny Jewish history.

You cannot celebrate the murder of Jews in their homeland unless you first convince yourself that it was never their homeland at all. Before there was violence, there was historical erasure. Before there were murdered families, there was the insistence that those families did not truly belong where they lived. The road from the Arch of Titus to October 7 is not a straight line. History never is. But both rest on the same dangerous premise: that the Jewish people can be separated from their history, their homeland, and ultimately their humanity.

Then came the third symbol. When the modern State of Israel chose its national emblem in 1949, it made a remarkable decision. It did not choose David’s harp or the Lion of Judah or a sword or a crown. It chose the seven-branched menorah.

The very symbol Rome had carved into the Arch of Titus as proof of Jewish defeat became the symbol of Jewish sovereignty reborn. What Rome displayed as a trophy, the Jewish people reclaimed as a testament to continuity. What Rome believed was the end of the story became the emblem of its next chapter.

That is the promise of Shabbat Nachamu. Isaiah promises that destruction is not destiny. To this day, the Arch of Titus still stands in Rome, the Kotel still stands in Jerusalem and the menorah still stands at the heart of the Jewish state. Three symbols, one story. No empire, no ideology, and no act of terror gets to write the final chapter of the Jewish people.