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 LEKH LEKHA
(Isaiah 40:27-41:16)
Every morning, as we awake refreshed from sleep, the prayer book, quoting Isaiah, reminds us that the Holy One "gives strength to the weary." We are reminded that sleep need not be an inert suspension of active life. According to midrash: "In sleep our souls leave behind the wearying boundaries of the body and find their way to the limitless realm of the Divine." As a metaphor, the daily blessing celebrates the renewed strength we may feel as we return from this world of new visions. We may leave behind our cynical weariness and awake ready to see possibilities beyond our restricted vision of the day before.
Isaiah knew that peoples too grow weary. He saw an Israel exhausted by defeat and exile, humbled and humiliated to the edge of despair. If, after all, the Holy One of Israel did not care, why should the people of Israel? He perceived that such despair could easily become a paralyzing cultural cynicism, blocking all vision of return, renewal and repair. And he opened himself to the power of the presence of the divine word to free the exiled people Israel from the limits of their situation.
The Divine word in Isaiah links us to the inexhaustible power of old that created the cosmos with a wisdom which, like the depths of divine power, can never be fathomed. We are reminded of the divine creative force that joins us when we confront the seemingly unsurmountable difficulties of transforming a real world into an ideal one. In Isaiah, the Divine voice offers us trust in its power to go beyond the limits of our present understanding and abilities and bring us home to our deepest sense of ourselves as individuals and as a people. It calls upon us to transcend the cynical alibis and excuses we use in order to avoid our moral and spiritual responsibilities.
(Tsvi Blanchard)
To join the conversation about the weekly Haftorah at CLAL Torah Talk, click here.
To access a CLAL commentary on this week's Torah portion, click here.
To access the Haftorah This Week Archive, click here.
To access the Torah This Week Archive, click here.
To receive The Haftorah this Week column by email on a regular basis, complete the box below:
