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 TOLDOT
(Malachi 1.1-2.7)
Malachi is the last of Israel's prophets. He makes his appearance between the biblical and rabbinic ages. With Malachi, prophecy will mark its end. God's word will, from now on, be mediated by reasoned argument, the give and take of sages uncovering the meanings of sacred texts. Rabbinic culture will require hundreds of years to bear its fruit, but its beginnings are marked here. The book reads as an argument between God and Israel. The conversation begins with God's assertion of love for Israel and the people's doubt.
The signs and tensions of an age of change appear in our portion. One set of leaders has become spiritually tone deaf. The priests were intended to serve in the Temple and to rule on matters of purity. Malachi expects them also to be teachers, caretakers of the Temple and the Torah:
True Teaching was in his mouth,
And nothing perverse was on his lips;
He walked with Me in peace and fairness,
And many did he return from iniquity.
For the lips of the priest guard knowledge,
And the people seek Torah from his mouth,
For he is a messenger of the Lord of Hosts.(Malachi 2:6-7)
Nowhere else in the Torah is there such a wide set of expectations from the priest. The priest in Malachi is portrayed in terms that soon come to be understood as those describing a sage of the law. Furthermore, the back and forth style of this chapter in Malachi is reminiscent of a talmudic argument. Although the form itself is not unique to Malachi, nowhere else in the Tanakh is the response of the people to Divine questions pursued repeatedly. Malachi constructs a developed argument between two speaking parties. This style points toward the movement of God's voice from the declarative to the interrogative, from pronouncement to inquiry.
As the second Temple period begins, the priest and the prophet seem to be disappearing. The priest will be relegated to the decreasing importance of the cult and prophecy will cease. Still, it may be that aspects of each were combined over five hundred years to shape the leader of the new age, the rabbi. Malachi hints at this in the last line of our Haftarah. Although the roles of priest and prophet were counterpoints in biblical tradition, Malachi sees them as one. The ideal priest is a "malach," a messenger of the Lord of Hosts. Whoever Malachi was, he is named in God's voice: "My messenger."
(Steve Greenberg)
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:
