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 BEMIDBAR
(Hosea 2:1-22)
An invisible, all powerful, all knowing God is too distant to engage in relationship. Philosophers explore the meaning of the Divine from a safe distance. Not so Israel's prophets. They were embroiled in discourse with a God who could not bear to be distant. They sought ways to portray God in relationship with Israel by using the most human language of all, the vocabulary of human loving. For that prophet Hosea, God is husband, Israel is wife and their life together is marked by yearning, exaltation, disappointment, anger, sadness, and hope.
Hosea was a prophet of the Northern Kingdom in the eighth century BCE. His prophetic career begins when he is commanded to marry a woman (with a reputation) and to bear children with her. Hosea's marital experience is to serve as a living metaphor for the relationship of God to Israel. As the story unfolds, the marriage becomes a testimony of God's ultimate desire to be in the most intimate relationship with Israel, even after failure and disappointment. What appears at first as a mere pedagogic device becomes Hosea's real life. Hosea falls in love with Gomer, bears three children with her, and discovers his prophecy through her.
Who was Hosea? Was he a holy man who never married? Was Gomer, indeed, his first love? Might it be that Hosea becomes a prophet only by virtue of his fateful marriage to this lost and confused girl? Could it be that to begin to understand the Divine, one must first experience irrevocable human love? Perhaps it is only through the joy and pain of human longing and disappointment that we can begin to understand the Divine longing for us, calling us to return. Hosea becomes a prophet when the words he preaches become the life he leads, when he can empathize with God's rage and sadness, and comfort Israel with God's rage and sadness, comfort Israel with God's still undying hope of love renewed.
(Steven Greenberg)
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