Haftorah This Week
Welcome to Haftorah This Week, the place where you will find thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on this week's Haftorah.
HAFTARAT VAYESHEV
(Amos 2:6-3:8)
Jewish traditions have struggled to comprehend the promise God gives to Israel at Mount Sinai:
If you listen to my Voice
And sustain our covenantal relationship
Then you will be My chosen treasure from among all the peoples.(Exodus 19:5)
The Jewish Spanish poet Yehuda HaLevy ascribed roles to all peoples, but declared Israel the heart of humanity. In our age, Mordecai Kaplan rejected Israel's chosenness as anachronistic, proclaiming a doctrine that saw all human beings and their communities as potentially chosen.
Now, at the end of this century, we ponder our remarkable success in becoming so fully modern that we have lost the unique purpose of sustaining the Jewish story. The prophet Amos anticipates this malaise.
Amos surveys the world of the ninth century B.C.E. and is dismayed. The Torah in which he believes cannot tolerate the violence and decadence he sees. The just God of the universe, whom Amos loves, holds all the nations surrounding Israel accountable for rape, pillage, genocide and unbearable cruelty. All nations are chosen to display a divinely judged basic civility and universal morality.
Yet Israel is held accountable to dramatically higher standards. They shall be judged for failing to comfort the widow and protect the orphan, the weak and homeless. They are condemned "because they sell the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes; they hunger after the dust of the earth on the head of the poor as they assault the way of the humble" (Amos 2:6-7).
The children of Israel are forbidden smug self-righteousness and a relativist's moral complacency. God challenges Israel through the voice of the prophet, reminding this people that they were liberated from Egypt to rid Eretz Israel of its evil. God declares, "It is with you that I seek intimacy from among all the families of the Earth" (Amos 3:2). I am in love, the prophet says of God, with the children of Israel. And as lovers we must share a passion for justice, righteousness and compassion.
If the nations that surround Israel practice terrorism and murder, there should be no comparative joy in Jerusalem as long as there are hungry children in the streets or corruption in the government. If its neighbors abuse the civil and human rights of their minorities, the Jewish people still are required to protect and care for the stranger in its midst.
Frankly, such chosenness is the serious and powerful burden that results from the relationship of love and responsibility we sustain with the God of justice and righteousness. Over the millennia, our people even increased the burdens of this passionate love affair by taking greater responsibility to do God's work in the world.
We have spent decades chasing other voices and experimenting with other loves. Amos brings us back home, asking us to maturely return to the God that cherishes us. His prophetic voice provides a vision of Jewish chosenness that seems ever more inextricably linked to our people's personal and communal sense of mission.
(David Elcott)
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