Nachamu

by Leo Baeck, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The seminar room on the second floor had nine chairs, and Joachim Hirschberg had been told to preach to all of them.

"Not to the three of you who are present," Dr. Eschwege had said in May, when he gave out the texts. "To the room. A congregation is not counted by the heads in it. You will learn that, or you will learn to stop preaching."

There were three heads in it on the Thursday in June when Hirschberg's turn came, and a fourth by the door, which belonged to Salinger, the caretaker. He had been asked to sit in because a sermon preached to one listener and a teacher was, in Eschwege's view, a conversation, and conversations taught nothing about the pulpit. Salinger held his broom across his knees like a rifle he had been issued and did not know how to return.

Hirschberg had walked from the cable works. His permit allowed him the tram to work and back, standing, on the rear platform; it did not extend to the Artilleriestraße, and he had not asked whether it might, because asking was itself an application, and applications were read. So he had walked, an hour and ten minutes along the Spree with the star on the left side of his jacket and his manuscript inside his shirt, and the pages had arrived soft at the corners. His hands smelled of the tar compound they used on the cable sheathing. He had washed them at the basin on the landing. They still smelled of it.

The windows had been papered for the blackout three summers before, and the paper had gone the colour of weak tea. Even in June the room was dim by six. Eschwege sat at the end of the long table with the register open before him, a pencil laid in the gutter of the book, his hat on the chair beside him because there was no longer a porter downstairs to take it.

Hanna Gutfeld sat at the window end. She had her bag on her lap, not on the floor, and she held it with both hands.

"Your text," said Eschwege.

"Isaiah, the fortieth chapter. The haftarah for Shabbat Nachamu." Hirschberg looked at his first page, though he did not need to. "This year it falls on the twenty-fifth of July."

"Then you are preaching on the twenty-fifth of July. Begin."

---

He had written it over three weeks, in the evenings, at the end of a table he now shared with two other men in a house off the Grenadierstraße where the community had been told to put them. One of the men was a retired corn factor from Stettin who slept in his overcoat and asked, every evening, what Hirschberg was writing, and every evening forgot the answer. The other said nothing at all. Hirschberg had written with the factor's question in his ear: what are you writing? A sermon for the Sabbath of Comfort. Ah. Comfort. Good. And he had tried to make it good.

He began with the date. The prophet had spoken, he said, to a people that had seen its city burned and its Temple pulled down and its sons led away along the road to Babylon. He described the road. He had found, in an old commentary from the library downstairs, a note on the distance from Jerusalem to Babylon, and he gave it, in kilometres, and paused after it, as he had practised pausing. Into that distance, he said, into that dust, the voice of God had come with a double word: Be comforted, be comforted, my people. Why twice? The Rabbis had asked it before him. Jerusalem had sinned doubly, they said, and was stricken doubly, and would therefore be comforted doubly. The measure of the comfort was the measure of the suffering. No suffering went unregarded. What had been taken would be returned in double —

Eschwege lifted the pencil out of the gutter of the book.

Hirschberg stopped. He had reached the bottom of his second page. There were five.

"Who is speaking in your verse?"

"God. Through the prophet."

"Read it to me."

Hirschberg read it in Hebrew. Nachamu, nachamu ammi, yomar Eloheikhem.

"'Says your God.' Good. God speaks. Now. Nachamu. What form is it?"

Hirschberg looked at the word. He had known it since he was nine years old.

"Piel," he said. "Imperative." Then, after a moment: "Plural."

"Plural imperative. Not 'be comforted.' Comfort. You, many of you, comfort my people. You have turned an order into a promise." Eschwege set the pencil down again. "Luther, for once, read the grammar. Tröstet, tröstet mein Volk. The Targum knew it too. Prophets, prophesy consolations to my people. Someone is being sent. You have preached three minutes about a gift and not one sentence about an errand."

"The Midrash says they will be comforted doubly."

"The Midrash says a great many things, and all of them are true in their place. Its place is not to excuse you from the verb." Eschwege did not raise his voice; he had not raised it in Hirschberg's hearing in four years, not on the morning after the November pogrom, when half his students had not come and the other half had come with their fathers' names on scraps of paper, and not in the spring when two of the chairs in this room had become empty in a single week. "A promise one receives sitting down. That is why your congregation will like it. It asks nothing of them but to wait."

Hirschberg stood with his five pages. Salinger had stopped turning the broom in his hands.

"Is it wrong to wait?"

"It is not wrong. It is not what the verse says." Eschwege turned a page of the register, though there was nothing on it to read. "Read the verse again. Only the verse. Slowly. As if it had not been read to you every summer of your life."

---

Hirschberg put the pages on the table.

He read it. Nachamu, nachamu ammi. He said the first word, and then, because he had been told to read slowly, there was a space before the second, and in the space he heard the first still in the room, and when he said the second it did not sound like the first said again. It sounded like an answer to it. Yomar Eloheikhem. Says your God. He had read the words perhaps a hundred times over the weeks of writing, at the end of the table in the Grenadierstraße with the factor asleep in his overcoat. He had not heard them. It seemed to him now, in the brown light, that the room had become larger, or he smaller, and that the verse had not been spoken by him at all, but had been spoken to him, and he had only repeated it, as a child repeats what it is told at the door before it is sent out on an errand.

Nobody said anything. In the street below a lorry went through the gears on the corner of the Oranienburger Straße and was gone. Salinger had taken his cap off, which he did not do for lectures.

"Twenty minutes," said Eschwege. "Write it again. Salinger, would you see whether the kettle will give us anything."

Salinger went out with the broom, as if afraid that someone would take it.

---

Hirschberg sat down at the table with a clean sheet. The library downstairs had had paper once; now they wrote on the backs of old examination scripts, and his clean sheet had on its reverse a translation from the Mekhilta in a hand he did not know, marked in red, gut, aber zu frei. He turned it over so that the red did not show.

He wrote Nachamu, and underlined it, and could not go on.

The sermon was not only an exercise. There was a prayer room in the back building of the house off the Grenadierstraße, two flats knocked together by a landlord who had since gone to Shanghai, and on Sabbath mornings eleven or twelve men came to it, and sometimes a minyan could be made and sometimes not. The old cantor there had asked Hirschberg in the spring whether he would say a few words on the Sabbath after the Ninth of Av, since he was, after all, studying for it. Hirschberg had said yes before he had thought. He had been thinking ever since. The factor from Stettin would be there in his overcoat. The man who said nothing would be there, if he was still in the house. A boy of fourteen whose bar mitzvah had been held in that room in March, with herring the women had saved for six weeks, would be there with his father. Hirschberg had written his five pages for those faces. He had wanted to give them something to carry home.

He looked at the word he had underlined. Comfort, plural, imperative. It would be said to the factor. It would be said to the boy. It would be said to the man who said nothing. Who among them had anything to give?

He wrote under it: To whom is it said? And then he crossed out the question mark, because it was not a question.

Across the table Hanna Gutfeld had opened her bag. She had taken out a bundle of printed pages folded lengthwise and a pencil stub, and she had begun to write on them, slowly, in block capitals. Hirschberg knew the form. Everyone in the house off the Grenadierstraße knew it; the factor from Stettin had been shown one by a cousin, and had wept, and afterwards could not remember why. Sixteen pages. Real estate. Securities. Life insurance. Then the household, room by room. A column for the object, a column for the number, a column for remarks.

Hanna was on the page for bed linen. He could read it upside down: Kissenbezüge. She wrote a number, crossed it through, and wrote another.

She looked up and caught him reading.

"They want the pillowcases," she said. "Not the value. How many."

"When did it come?"

"Tuesday. It has to go back Monday." She looked at the form, not at him. "I came because it is your sermon. I said I would come."

He nodded. He looked at his sheet. Nachamu, underlined.

Eschwege had not looked up from the register. He might have heard; there was nothing in his face to say so. He was writing something, small, in the margin of a page from some earlier year, and Hirschberg saw that it was a list of names, and that some of them had a short stroke after them, and he looked away.

Salinger came back with three cups and a tin pot of something brown that had been tea at some point in its history. He set a cup in front of Hanna, and one in front of Eschwege, and one in front of Hirschberg, and stood back by the door without one himself, and Eschwege pushed his own across the table to him without a word, and Salinger took it, after a moment, and sat down.

Hirschberg wrote four lines. He crossed out three. He drank the tea, which tasted of the tin.

At the end of the twenty minutes Eschwege looked at his watch, and then at him.

---

He stood. He did not take the sheet; there was almost nothing on it that had not been crossed out.

"The verse does not say be comforted," he said. "It says comfort. It is not said to the ones who will be comforted. It is said to the ones who are sent. Our Rabbis say: doubly. Doubly the sin, doubly the blow, doubly the comfort. I had thought that this was arithmetic. That it was a sum, which God would one day pay out."

He stopped. He looked at the nine chairs. Six of them were empty, and the other three held a caretaker with a borrowed cup, an old man with a pencil, and a woman counting her pillowcases.

"God says comfort," Hirschberg said, "to people who have no comfort to give. There is no one else here to say it to."

He had meant to go on. He had a second sentence; he had had it a moment ago. It had gone. He stood for perhaps half a minute and did not find it, and nobody helped him. Then he came round the end of the table, past Eschwege, and pulled out the chair beside Hanna Gutfeld and sat in it.

"Which page are you on?"

She looked at him. Then she turned the form towards him.

"Linen," she said. "I don't know how many tablecloths. My mother's are in the trunk. I haven't opened it since she went."

"Is the trunk in your room?"

"Under the bed."

"Then put the trunk down. One trunk, contents unknown. Write in remarks: Contents belonging to Frau Gutfeld —" He stopped. "What was her name?"

"Rosa."

"Frau Gutfeld, Rosa. They can count them themselves."

She wrote it. Her block capitals were very even. He watched her pencil go across the column and stop at the edge of it and come back.

"Next," he said.

They did the kitchen. Saucepans, four. Frying pan, one, iron. Coffee mill, one. Knives, forks, spoons, by the half dozen, and she was not sure about the spoons, and he said write six, a person has six spoons, and she said she had five, one had gone down the drain in the Mommsenstraße in 1938, and he said then write five, and she wrote five. Eschwege's pencil moved in the register. Salinger drank the rest of the tea.

Once, between the kitchen and the clothing, Eschwege got up and went to the shelf by the door where the seminar's own books were kept, the few that had not been carried down to the library to be listed, and took one, and came back with it, and sat. It was a Mikraot Gedolot, the Isaiah volume, its spine split. He opened it at the fortieth chapter and laid it on the table between himself and the two of them, turned so that they could read it, and did not say anything about it. Hirschberg glanced across once and saw the verse in its square letters in the middle of the page, with Targum and Rashi and Ibn Ezra crowded round it in their smaller types like people round a doorway. Then he went back to the form. The book lay open there for the rest of the hour, and no one read from it, and no one closed it.

They did the clothing. Hirschberg read out the printed headings and she answered, and when she did not know he waited, and when she knew she wrote. Overcoats. Winter dresses. Summer dresses. Stockings, pairs. Shoes, pairs. She paused at shoes, and he did not ask why.

At Bücher she put the pencil down.

"They want a number," she said. "Do they want titles?"

"A number."

She counted on her fingers, in silence, and her lips moved, and Hirschberg understood that she was going along the shelf in her room in her mind, left to right, from the Bible her grandfather had given her to whatever stood at the other end. She lost count once and began again. He did not look at her face. He looked at her hands.

"Forty-three," she said.

"Forty-three."

She wrote it.

---

At half past eight Eschwege closed the register. He did it carefully, with one hand flat on the cover for a moment afterwards, as if something inside might shift. Hirschberg saw, in the instant before the book shut, his own name in the column for the day, and beside it, in the small upright hand:

18. VI. 42. Hirschberg. Jes. 40,1. Probepredigt gehalten.

Gehalten. Delivered. Nothing about how well.

"Salinger has to lock up," Eschwege said, standing, and reaching for his hat on the chair. "And all of us have to be indoors by nine."

Hanna folded the form along its creases. There were six pages left to do: the furniture, the pictures, the debts owed to her, the debts she owed. She put it into the bag and fastened the clasp and then, before she stood, she put the pencil stub into Hirschberg's breast pocket, behind the star, without saying anything, as one returns a thing that was lent.

Salinger had the key in the lock at twenty to nine. They went down the stairs together, past the library door with the light off behind its glass, past the basin on the landing, past the porter's lodge with nobody in it. At the street door Hanna stopped to tie her shoe, and Hirschberg held her bag for her while she did it, and when she stood up he did not give it back. He carried it along the Artilleriestraße and across the Oranienburger Straße, past the synagogue, where the army now kept its uniforms, its gilded dome still catching what was left of the light, as far as the corner where her way went north and his went east, and there he gave it to her, and she took it in both hands, and went.

---

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā Leōne Baeck per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Leo Baeck, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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