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 NOAH
(Isaiah 54:1-55:5)
The world is established on the bedrock of a partnership of committed love—covenant (brit, in Hebrew). God's loving commitment is to establish and sustain a world of natural law and order within which life can flourish. Humanity's loving commitment is to create and nurture life, to build a better, more perfect world within the natural order and with full respect for it.
This foundational partnership is the Noahide covenant, made with Noah and his family—the ancestors of all humanity—and with all living things (Genesis 9:8-11). The covenant with Jewry is an extension of this universal pledge. Jewry—the family of Abraham—is meant to be a pacesetter on humanity's journey toward the promised perfection. The people, Israel, is to teach the infinite worth of human beings and that the world can be transformed to sustain this dignity. Jewry is to serve as a model community, showing how to live in justice, equity, and peace with each other and with the Other. Its mission is to inspire all of humanity to learn from its example and to go on to build a paradise here on earth.
But Jewry and the Jewish vision itself is vulnerable—to anti-Semitism, to destruction, to failure. We feel fragile and limited. How can we be sure that we will overcome hostility and defeat?
The prophet's answer is: look around you at the world. The round of life, the laws of nature, the cycles of planets and stars, the geology of the mountains and the seas prove that the world is sustained by God in an eternal order. The regularity, solidity and permanence of nature is the visible statement of the Noahide covenant. The rainbow symbolizes the variety, the harmony, the beauty, the permanence of the covenant; it brings with it the promise that after the rain will come order, after the storm will come peace.
The Jewish covenant did not replace or destroy the Noahide covenant—for God's love and promise of life's final triumph is forever. This is the best guarantee that the Jewish covenant will never end. The eternity of the high hills, the vast stretches of starry space and time, imply that God's anger, or any triumph of evil, will always be temporary. Hope, love, and goodness will abide as long as the mountains.
The prophet's teaching goes one step further. The mass and solidity of the mountains are a bit misleading. They make human life and hope appear to be insubstantial and transient. But ideals, vision, love, wholeness—life itself—are really more powerful than waterfalls and avalanches. Even if the mountains grind down to hillocks—as they will, even if the seas run dry—as they do, the steadfastness of God's love, the covenant of wholeness and peace, will outlast them all.
(Irving Greenberg)
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