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 RE'EH
(Isaiah 54:11-55:5)
This prophecy contains a line much beloved by the rabbis: "All your children [banayich] shall be taught by the Eternal, and great shall be the peace of your children [banayich]" (Is. 54:13). The Midrash suggests, "Do not read [the second occurrence of [banayich] as your children, but rather as your builders [bonayich]" (Berakhot 64a), implying that the peoplehood of Israel is built up when children study sacred texts.
What kind of study makes children into "builders"? One answer lies in the Torah text to which this Haftarah is linked. Parshat Re'eh deals mainly with laws that create ethnicity, peoplehood, and high levels of group visibility, cohesion and loyalty. These include, among others, injunctions to destroy and shun all foreign religious cults, to eat only certain animals prepared only in particular ways, and, in the sabbatical year, to forgive the debts of fellow Israelites (although you may dun foreigners). Such practices help give a people a firm sense of its identity. They create boundaries making it abundantly clear who is "in" and who is "out." They build up the group.
In our age, however, these laws may make us feel intensely uncomfortable. They are ethnocentric, even discriminatory. They are not democratic, and we who cherish democracy have difficulty accepting them. But there they are. The Torah and Haftarah texts, taken together, challenge us to feel comfortable with the need for some level of ethnocentric, non-multicultural pride in our group's identity, if our people is to survive. And survive we must, if only because our mandate to work for the universal betterment of life depends on our survival.
How do we make children into builders? Not, first of all, by teaching them the glorious universal moral principles of our tradition, but by instilling in them a clear sense of who they are, and to what people they belong. In the context of that awareness, the high moral ideals will be learned, acted upon, and passed on to the next generation.
(David Nelson)
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