Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth,
For the Holy One has spoken:
“I reared children and brought them up —
And they have rebelled against Me!
An ox knows its owner,
An ass its master’s crib:
Israel does not know,
My people takes no thought.
The book of Isaiah begins with strong rebuke for the children of Israel, who have become alienated from the Source of Blessing. This is stern stuff, resplendent with metaphor and permeated with the prophet’s fury. Here we have condemnations of empty religious practice, fiery exhortations to make teshuvah and act righteously, and an indictment of our shortcomings that continues to resonate today. No wonder this is the haftarah for Shabbat Hazon, the last Shabbat before Tisha b’Av.
For me, the most painful passage is this:
That you come to appear before Me–
Who asked that of you?
Trample My courts
No more;
Bringing oblations is futile,
Incense is offensive to Me.
New moon and sabbath,
Proclaiming of solemnities,
Assemblies with iniquity,
I cannot abide.
Your new moons and fixed seasons
Fill Me with loathing;
They are become a burden to Me,
I cannot endure them.
To think that our very attempts at marking time, at embodying festival celebration, and at serving the Holy One could be unbearable to God…! The Israelites of old, it seems, failed to bring their whole selves to the religious experience of sacrifice. Their celebrations of Shabbat and new moon were hollow. Their iniquities permeated even the times when they sought to gather in worship.
That this reading still stings is proof that we are not immune to the mistakes of our forebears. If the Israelites of old were guilty of polluting their sacrifices with wickedness, how then might today’s offerings — avodah she’ba lev, the service of the heart — be received On High? Could a modern-day Isaiah argue that our religious observance has become too shallow to hold holiness? When we allow ourselves to be distracted by our to-do lists and to race through our prayers without considering their meaning, are we guilty of these same transgressions?
Isaiah condemned the people of his day for hubris, for failing to recognize that God alone can (and should, and must) be exalted. This too is an indictment that rings out across the generations. How many of us must own the mistake of exalting someone — a leader, a rock star — as though his power were innately his, instead of remembering that like the moon we do not shine but reflect the light of a greater Source?
This is difficult stuff, but not everything in this week’s haftarah reading is angry. There’s cause for hope here too, or at least a message about how to improve our circumstance. After this harangue comes an exhortation:
Cease to do evil;
Learn to do good.
Devote yourselves to justice;
Aid the wronged.
Uphold the rights of the orphan;
Defend the cause of the widow.
Stop actively screwing up, Isaiah says. Do the inner work of identifying and understanding why we so often miss the mark. Only then can we learn to do good, to begin the near-infinite task of repairing the broken world which we so often cause to crumble further.
What might it mean to devote ourselves to justice and to aid the wronged? Are we feeding the hungry, educating those in need, rehabilitating those incarcerated in our prisons? Do we provide affordable health care? Do our poorest cousins receive high-quality educations like our richest ones do?
Less than a year ago Hurricane Katrina swept through New Orleans and its environs. Did we do all that we could to protect the people of New Orleans, especially those who didn’t have the resources to evacuate in time? Have we since done all we can to rebuild their lives? Do we remember them? What about those in ordinary poverty, here and elsewhere: do we remember them? How do we uphold the rights of the poor and powerless? How do we comfort those whose lives have been torn apart by loss?
What about those whose lives are devastated by war: the wars we all know about, in Israel/Lebanon and Iraq, and the wars we maybe don’t know about, the places cited in this list of top ten forgotten emergencies?
The measure of suffering in the world is unbearable, when we stop to really face it. And we are not doing all we can to make things better. And we must, even though the work may never be complete. Judaism obligates us; our common humanity obligates us.
“Come, let us reach an understanding,
–declares the Breath of Life–
Be your sins like crimson,
They can turn snow-white;
Be they red as dyed wool,
They can become like fleece.”
If, then, you agree and give heed,
You will eat the good things of the earth.
God knows we miss the mark. And God knows when our teshuvah, our repentance, is real. No matter what we have done — sins of comission, or of omission — Isaiah’s words remind us that we can begin again. And when we make ourselves mindful of our responsibilities, when we remember the obligation to live in holiness, there will be abundance in our lives and sustenance for both body and spirit.
The crescent moon of Av is waxing, and Tisha b’Av is almost upon us. Next week we will mourn the destruction of the Temple, once the place where we understood ourselves to be in connection with the Source of All. Tisha b’Av marks the beginning of a historical exile, but more than that I think it points to a fundamental condition of exile from God — one which, as Isaiah notes, we create ourselves when we allow our observances to be empty, and our lives to be marred with wickedness.
In every calamity lies the seeds of new beginning. From the ashes of the Temple, and of that old form of Judaism, rose the sprout of the rabbinic tradition that enabled us to carry our connection with God into the wide world. From the desperate pit of our sorrow, our prayers can rise like incense to the Infinite, a spiritual rope we can climb out of despair.
Destruction and rebuilding are recurring underlying themes of the festival cycle, for we are meant to create a mishkan or sanctuary in our lives. As God states, “Let them make for Me a sanctuary and I will dwell in their midst” (Exod. 25:8) If Tisha be-Av marks the failure in the attempt to build such a sanctuary, the failure to construct our lives as though creating a human sanctuary for God, then we quickly move to try once again, beginning with Yom Kippur when we have readied our own selves to be dwelling places for God, to begin to create spaces where God can dwell in our midst.
(So writes Michael Strassfeld, in The Jewish Holidays.) The journey to the Days of Awe begins next week. Until we allow ourselves to grieve what we’ve lost, we can’t rebuild. May our reading of Isaiah this Shabbat prepare us to go deep into sorrow — so that we may move through and beyond that pain, and into the renewed effort to make a place for God in our world and in our lives.