Haftarah Sermon for my shul on 4/1/2022

The unity of the Holy Scriptures were a crucial component of early rabbinic belief. Any time it seemed that biblical passages contradicted one another, there was, almost always, an interpretative solution. It was one thing for the Torah to contain internal disagreement. Clearly, though, the later books of the Prophets & Writings, couldn’t contradict the Torah.
And then, oh goodness, there’s the Book of Ezekiel. As a member of the priestly class, this prophet was fascinated with the details of sacrificial practice. Several of his thoughts on the rituals & details of sacred service—which from exile he wanted to see restored—are found in our collection of haftarot readings. Notably, the haftarah for this week is laden with priestly instructions. After all, Shabbat HaHodesh is all about ritual preparedness for Korban Pesah, the Passover offering.
So you can imagine the intense anxiety our early rabbis felt when they read Ezekiel “going off the reservation” about certain ceremonies. In particular, in this haftarah, Ezekiel gives instructions for purging the Temple grounds of impurity in the first & seventh months, Nisan & Tishri. But wait, no such ritual is ever mentioned in the Torah. Some might think of Ezekiel as possibly one of the first ever…well…Reform Jews.
How did the early rabbis address these contradictions? In the early rabbinic period, they sought to silence Ezekiel’s voice by hiding his book away, which in so doing, would have been forgotten. It was the first century C.E. sage Hananiah ben Hilkliah who salvaged Ezekiel from obscurity: “Said Rav Yehudah: Indeed, remember that man for good—Hananiah ben Hilkiah was his name—for without him, the Book of Ezekiel would have been lost, for its words contradicted the Torah’s words. What did he do? They brought up for him 300 gallons of oil, he sat down in the balcony and he expounded upon it & successfully resolved all the contradictions.”
~Talmud Bavli: Shabbat 13b.8 [See also: Hagigah 13a.12, & Menahot 45a.19]
Here’s Hananiah ben Hilkiah, a maverick in his time, saying, “You can’t merely get rid of a book that doesn’t conform to your expectations. So I’m locking myself in a room that isn’t easily accessed, & I need enough fuel to keep this space well-lit, because I’m studying this as long as it takes to make sense of this entire book so that it’ll be accepted. It may require deep immersion, but I’ll find its meaning eventually.” And so he did. All 48 chapters of it.
How many other great texts would have been destined to disappear & be forgotten through the ages were it not for people as courageous as Hananiah ben Hilkiah. The question is, did Hananiah have to twist Ezekiel’s words until they conformed to the mainstream of his own time? Or was it enough that he invested in the time & efforts to make enough sense of it to keep Ezekiel a part of the canon, & thus enabled our continued conversations to this day?
What do we do with books & writers who contradict an accepted truth? Maybe the presence of Ezekiel in the Hebrew Bible, & even more so the use of his writings in the haftarah cycle, can teach us how to incorporate discordant voices in a more sacred fashion. And in so doing, we can prevent them from being lost to history, as had almost happened to the Biblical Text of Ezekiel…which actually includes our very Haftarah Reading for this week. Hodesh Tov & Shabbat Shalom everyone.
~Christo Chaney [כָּלֵב דָּנִיֵּאל]
Congregation Sha’areth Israel - Lubbock TX
Torah: Leviticus 12.1-13.59 Numbers 28.9-15 (Maftir) & Exodus 12.1-20
Haftarah: Ezekiel 45:16-46:18 | Shabbat HaHodesh (on Rosh Hodesh)