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 YOM HA'ATZMAUT

(Isaiah 10:32-12:6) 

Judaism dreams of a world made perfect.  Despite the millennia of oppression and war, after eons of human hunger and suffering, the final word will go to the forces of justice, equity and peace.  In the prophet's vision, the world will be restored to its wholeness in the Messianic age.  In the Kingdom of God, the just ruler will treat the weak with equity and give justice to the poor as well as the rich.  They will neither harm nor destroy anywhere on God's holy mountain (the earth).  The war of humans against other creatures and of animals with each other will finally be transformed into peace.  The wolf will lie down with the lamb, the lion will eat straw, and a little child will shepherd a mixed flock of calf, lion and fattened sheep safely and peacefully (Isaiah 11:3-9).  

But what assurance do we have that this will all happen?  Whence comes the validation of the Jewish dream of perfection? 

The primary source of Jewish hope is the actual redemption which the Jewish people experienced.   In the Exodus, the Israelites were taken from slavery to freedom Jews experienced the ennobling shift from being used to being treasured, from being outsiders without rights or dignity to becoming citizens in their own country by right.  This taste of liberation validates the hope of future redemption for Israel and for the whole world.    

But thousands of years have passed since that first Exodus.  What assurance is there that the Exodus was not a onetime fluke in history and that the status quo will not reign forever?  Isaiah's answer is that the liberation will happen again.  In his lifetime, he envisions yet another Exodus.  Again the seas will be parted and the returnees will walk on   dry land.  This time they will come from Assyria and beyond as once they came out of Egypt.  This restoration proves that the Exodus is not a onetime event, but an ever recurring deliverance that will happen again and again until the whole world is made whole. 

The restoration in Isaiah's time happened more than 2500 years ago.  Maybe that impulse is also spent?  Does the final victory go to oppression and war after all?  The answer is that in our century, comes yet another Exodus--from Europe, from Egypt and Iraq, from Ethiopia and Russia and Syria.  The irresistible upsurge and triumph of deliverance proves again that the hope of healing and perfection is not false.  Of course, this is a natural, step-by-step, unfolding redemption, but it points beyond itself to universal freedom.  Therefore, the Jewish people rereads Isaiah's messianic promise on Israel Independence Day; then they chant aloud:  I believe in the coming of the Messiah; no delays can break our expectation that the final redemption of dignity and peace for all will come.

 

(Yitz Greenberg)     


    



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