Isaiah, Abarbanel, and Us
Three flavors of faith
This week’s Haftarah is from Isaiah 51 and part of chapter 52. I’d like to focus on the start of Isaiah 52:
“Awaken, awaken, don your strength, Zion. Don the garments of your splendor, Jerusalem, the holy city, as the uncircumcised and the impure will not continue to come among you any longer. Shake off the dust, arise and sit, Jerusalem. Open the restraints on your neck, captive daughter of Zion.”
Abarbanel focuses on a basic question: Who is this prophecy being addressed to?
He brings the interpretation of Christian scholars who say that these verses are referring to Jesus, an interpretation that Abarbanel then disproves. He goes on to explain that the prophecy is most likely speaking either to the Jewish people as a whole or, alternatively, to King Josiah.
For me, this is a fascinating moment to consider the three points of history that intersect in these verses.
First, there is the time when Isaiah himself spoke these words. This was before the exile had even occurred, before the destruction of the First Temple. Isaiah was already speaking about Zion shaking off the dust, Jerusalem rising, and the captive daughter of Zion removing the restraints from her neck.
Then there is the time when Abarbanel wrote his commentary, after he himself had been expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. Abarbanel reads Isaiah’s words not merely as an ancient prophecy, but as a Jew who had personally experienced exile, upheaval, and displacement.
And then there is our time.
Photo by Uri Baruch
We are reading these words at a moment when the Jewish population of Israel is approaching the Jewish population outside the Land, in the diaspora. We therefore encounter these verses from yet another point in Jewish history.
There is the future faith of Isaiah, the faith in the depths of despair of Abarbanel, and our faith: having faith in the moment of redemption. There’s more to say on the challenges we face now, but for today, I want to meditate on the entire range of experiences of faith.
Our faith carried the Jewish people through all of our history and that has expressed itself, perhaps most powerfully, in our darkest, darkest moments.
One of the messages of reading these prophecies now is not simply to recover from the sadness of the Ninth of Av. It is also to prepare ourselves to coronate God once again.
Today, on Rosh Hodesh Elul, we are approaching Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Jewish High Holiday season, when we consider the history and the dance of the Jewish people between God and us.
Isaiah spoke these words before the destruction. Abarbanel studied them in the aftermath of exile. And we read them now, in our own remarkable moment of Jewish history.
Hopefully, we will be able to coronate God once again—and see the complete redemption.
Shabbat shalom.