From Death to Life

This reflection is part of the ongoing Forest Hills Haftorah Series. The rest of the content can be found here: https://www.sefaria.org/groups/FHJC-Haftorah-Series .

Yet again this week, we are invited to celebrate together with the Herald as he takes us back to the time and place in which the Judeans merited their long-awaited redemption.

Let's look back for a moment at a beautiful and encouraging moment in chapter 49.

At the beginning of this section, Zion, personified as a bereaving woman, is lamenting the fact that she has been abandoned completely by her god. And without missing a beat, YHWH responds.

Here is their back-and-forth:

Note the clever pun in verse 15. The root for compassion is the same root in Hebrew for "womb," for which YHWH uses a synonym a moment later. Poetically, another way of explaining verse 15 could be, Can a woman forget her own babe from the womb? The child of her belly?

The rhetorical point here is that the chances of YHWH abandoning Zion is beyond miniscule.

And then look at what happens next:

Note how the Herald, before YHWH's response, draws on some of the most emotionally-piercing images to convey the magnitude of Zion's experience.

What could be worse? Being abandoned by a parent? Or bereaved of one's children? (May YHWH forbid any of us from experiencing such a thing; and may he be a source of the greatest comfort, strength and support to anyone in the world who does or has.)

In (Deutero)-Isaiah, Zion experiences the despair of both, at one and the same time. She had imagined herself dismissed, forgotten, even, by her dear mother YHWH; While her children, her beloved Judean inhabitants, could not possibly have survived the Babylonian massacre and following captivity.

The entirety of Psalms 79 is one long cry of anguish over the fall of the once-glorious Judean-capital Jerusalem, with evocative lines which call to mind horrific scenes of devastation that Zion was forced to endure:

And then the representation of Zion as a bereaved parent is reinforced given the following:

If we think about the parallelism between the different "versets" of this verse, note how "captive" becomes "doomed to die," or more literally, the "people of death."

It seems that the witness writing out the words of this lament thinks that becoming "captives" is the least of the Judean prisoners' worries. Those that weren't killed during the razing are being led away "like sheep to the slaughter," to borrow a recurring motif (which even shows up in Isaiah 53).

Justifying this fear, the prose-account of this moment, found at the very end of the book of Kings, says the following:

As the narrative from the end of Kings explains; the leadership and common-folk alike were being hauled off to Babylon for judgement and execution, such that whoever composed the lament of Psalm 79 perceived every Judean prisoner as someone marked, or doomed to certain death.

And as for Zion - the beginning of the first lament-poem in Lamentations says it all:

But remember, this whole journey backwards into the horrors of the past was triggered by the Herald, whose mission it was, more than any other, to bring encouragement and hope in preparing exiled Judea for redemption! (In fact, were he to read this whole Haftorah reflection, he might very well criticize it for already focusing way too much on the darkness. But it is only by way of understanding the depth of Zion's despair can we really understand the extent of the miraculous of the redemption-to-come.)

So with that, let's look back at the passage with which we started, and shift our focus from looking backwards with sadness to forwards with the unshakable optimism that the Herald seems so bent on cultivating:

As Zion is wallowing in the darkest depths of her anguish, YHWH's voice of comfort breaks through, assuring Zion that she has the brightest of days to look forward to!

Our Haftorah is the next stage, in which she is told it is time to start taking action and making her preparations!

Recall that above, we saw that in chapter 49 Zion is told by YHWH that she will have so many children that there will not be enough room in her tents.

In this chapter, after YHWH's initial pronouncement, it seems that the Herald himself - who had been the go-between for this whole exchange - begins to speak in verse 2, urging Zion to expand her dwelling places in anticipation of the arrival of the many children.

I already mentioned parallelism above. This is a technique of Judean and Israelite poetry I very much enjoy analyzing. What makes it so satisfying to pick up on and to really read slowly and carefully is the fact that it is rarely a case of two lines being equally synonymous with each other. Almost always. there is some kind of progression, or forward thrust or development.

With that, take a closer look at the opening line of our Haftorah:

Note how we have two pairs of parallels here, all of which fall into one single verse, such that the verse can be divided in half, with nearly the same idea expressed twice. The convention is to call each half a verset.

Look at how:

• "Shout for joy" of the first verset parallels "burst out joyfully and exult" in the second verset, while;
• "Barren one" of the first verset parallels "never went into labor" of the second verset.

But note the narrative progression here, or the intensification. First YHWH starts out by telling Zion to "shout joyfully," using the single root ר-נ-נ as a root for a verb.

But then in its parallel in the second verset, the verb ר-נ-נ is replaced with פ-צ-ח, bursting forth!, while the verb ר-נ-נ of the first verset now becomes the noun, that which the פ-צ-ח emits, in the second.

As I try to imagine the scene in my mind, I picture Zion initially responding to YHWH's invitation to sing by doing just that - singing; but then very quickly she becomes utterly overwhelmed and carried away by the emotion, such that she is no longer doing the singing, but the singing itself is bursting, or gushing forth out of her, as she continually reaches new heights of bliss, playing out the moment in her minds eye when she and her children will finally be reunited!

In verse two, we get the tent-imagery, and it seems to me that the Herald is really taking us on a step-by step journey through this procedure:

1. The place of the tent, i.e., the ground itself, has to be prepared - possibly by being cleared of debris etc;
2. Stretch out the curtains;
3. Lengthen the cords;
4. Strengthen the tent pegs.

It seems like there is quite a lot that goes into this - and remember, poor Zion has been dwelling in complete solitude, with none to help her.

What emerges for me from all of this is that the Herald's excitement is matched by the urgency with which he says to Zion how close this moment of redemption is. Hurry! They're coming, they're coming! There's not a second to lose and much to be done!

If the Herald is associated with redemption, Jeremiah is his polar opposite; known as the Weeping Prophet, and for good reason. (You might recall a week when this was even our focus, some time ago: https://www.sefaria.org/sheets/250613?lang=bi .)

Unfortunately for Jeremiah, his ministry was fated to be during the devastating beginning of the 6th century; the period in which all of the trauma we see Zion suffering from began. He dedicated his life to warning his fellow Judeans about the impending horror, begging them to take this possibility seriously and to act accordingly so as to hopefully change their fate.

Now with the above passage of the Herald in mind, take a look at what Jeremiah says in chapter 10 of his oracles:

This is an incredible comparison, which the Jewish Study Bible Commentary brought my attention to! Here we hear the voice of Zion, as portrayed by the "doomsday-prophet" Jeremiah acting as a "Harbinger of Death," lamenting the systematic destruction of her dwelling places, her tents;

While on the other side of history, our Herald of Hope draws on the same imagery and vocabulary in order to rouse up a downcast Zion.

Perhaps the underlying message of the Herald is the following:

Jeremiah spoke for our god, foretelling a future of destruction and darkness; and it was so. I now come in the name of the same god, proclaiming hope and redemption and a future of renewal and greatness; This, too, shall come to pass!

There is another recurring theme that the Herald plays with throughout this oracle that I want to draw your attention to; augmentation and expansion.

Remember our first verse above, in which we saw the songs of joy bursting forth from Zion?

Then look again at the tent-building of verse 2, and you'll see that each of the three verbs used tie back into this (widen the space, stretch the curtains, elongate the cords), and then of course we have the negative injunction to not to spare, or not to hold back.

Here is verse 2 again, but this time continuing on into verse 3:

The Herald even seems to be playing a bit with sound in the Hebrew. While he used פ-צ-ח to mean burst forth in the first verse above, here in verse 3 he uses פ-ר-צ, which is not only synonymous in meaning but plays on the פ-צ theme.

I'll leave you with but one possible interpretation for this one;

Perhaps the Herald is trying to poetically capture the moment when Zion - who had for far too long been curled or huddled up in solitude with her misery and her tears - begins returning to life!

She stands up, shakes off the dust (as we saw last week) holds her head high, and opens up her arms in anticipation of embracing, at one and the same time, her long-lost children as well as life itself once again.

For anyone who has a hard time accepting the idea of YHWH being מחיה המתים, or he who brings the dead back to life, may I suggest that you revisit such passages as our Haftorah from the works of the Herald. This, in my eyes, is truly a case of YHWH demonstrating his might and incomparable power bringing about the most miraculous resurrection.