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 EKEV
(Isaiah 49:14-51:3)
In the heat and bareness of the summer, when the hills of Jerusalem are parched brown from waterless skies, our people remembers the destruction of the Temple of Holiness and the Exile of those who loved it. The bitterness swells, the Lamentations are intoned, the millennia old horror relived as if no consolation will ever ease the pain. And then, for six Sabbaths, the words of the prophet Isaiah are chanted. Deep in exile, Isaiah imagines a Divine love that nurses God's bleeding children and promises to bring them home:
Zion says,
"The Lord has forsaken me,
My Lord has forgotten me."
Can a woman forget her baby,
Or disown the child of her womb?
Though she might forget,
I never could forget you.(Isaiah 49:14-15)
No realist, this Isaiah. Only a dreamer or a madman could dare promise a forlorn people that hope and faith in redemption is more real than their palpable pain. But Isaiah does not waver as he proclaims the future:
Thus said the Lord God:
I will raise My hand to nations
And lift up My ensign to peoples;
And they shall bring your sons in their bosoms,
And carry your daughters on their backs.
Kings shall tend your children,
Their queens shall serve you as nurses.
They shall bow to you, face to the ground,
And lick the dust of your feet.
And you shall know that I am the Lord--
Those who trust in Me shall not be shamed.(Isaiah 49:22-23)
He is a driven man, a flaming soul that ignores the long held political and religious truths that defeated nations abandon defeated gods because he cannot and will not accept that the promise of the Jewish people is dead, that the covenant is shattered.
Strange, is it not, that the realists and pragmatists abandon the Jewish people convinced that the conquests of empires and the faiths of the majority are true and enduring? They are lost to the Jewish people even as the civilizations they embraced atrophy and die. But the dreamer who denies the evidence, the prophet who will not let go of his vision, is remembered, recorded and recited every year as a loving voice of consolation and renewal.
(David Elcott)
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