Rend Our Hearts: Haftarat Shabbat Shuvah: Joel 2:15-27

In case you’ve ever wondered why services for the High Holy Days are so boring, you can blame the prophet Joel:

Blow a horn in Zion,
Solemnize a fast,
Proclaim an assembly!
Gather the people,
Bid the congregation purify themselves….

Between the portico and the altar,
Let the priests, the Lord’s ministers, weep
And say:
‘Oh, spare Your people, Lord!
Let not Your possession become a mockery,
To be taunted by nations!

The people purify themselves – and then they stand there. And stand there. And stand there. They are completely quiescent, waiting silently for it to end. Sound familiar?

Michael Fishbane explains that this selection serves partially as the Haftarah for the Shabbat Shuvah (between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) because it reflects the “activity of repentance,” and the rewards that come for it. But the selection doesn’t say anything about repentance at all. Repentance is an internal process by which a person turns (or “returns”) to a purer, more spiritual, more ethical way of life.  The vision from Joel is all public and external. What is going on here?

As I have suggested in earlier commentaries, Haftarah generates power through redaction: if we look carefully at passages close to the chosen passage but left on the cutting room floor, we can sometimes see a pattern.

In contrast to the passivity of the Haftarah, just a few lines beforehand, Joel earlier states God’s own demands:

Turn back to me with all your hearts,
And with fasting, weeping, and lamenting
Rend your hearts
Rather than your garments,
And turn back to the Lord your God.

Now that’s more like it. That’s tshuvah. So why in the world did that get cut? Well, let’s think this through.

We know little about precisely when the custom of Haftarah developed, or even why, but we know that the final canonization of selected passages came rather late. In the Talmud (Megillah 23b), the rabbis attempt to lay down rules for Haftarah – for example, that they needed to be at least 21 verses – that congregations often violated. (Haftarat Ki Tetze, for example, is only 10 verses). And if anything, Haftarat Shabbat Shuvah is even later, perhaps as late as the Middle Ages, because its Ashkenazic and Sephardic versions diverge (the passage from Joel is Ashkenazic: more on Sephardic passages in another cycle).

That makes Haftarat Shabbat Shuvah particularly intriguing. It centers on two points: 1) worship by priests; and 2) appealing to God for the sake of God’s reputation. By the time different Haftarah portions were canonized, both points were somewhat silly. The priestly caste had been gone for centuries, and by the Middle Ages, the idea that God would do something to enhance the divine reputation seemed ridiculous: it might have made sense during the prophetic era, when different peoples had different gods, but it was absurd for the One God, recognized by both Christianity and Islam, to have such concerns. And in any event, the oppressed Jews of the 9th-10th centuries had already been “taunted by nations”. Obviously that appeal to God didn’t work.

And that was the entire point. The redactor of the Haftarah emphasized the passive congregation and priests praying for us not as a model, but as something of an ironic farce. It is as ridiculous as appealing to God on the basis of divine reputation. Maintaining the farce meant that the earlier verses — which were anything but farcical — could not be included.

All of this should make you think twice about going to shul on the High Holy Days. The point, as God tells us, is to “rend your hearts.” Does that occur for you in the synagogue on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when the rabbi, and the cantor, and the choir, recite prayers for you as they do in Joel? If so, then go. If it does not, then observe it some other way. No one can rend our hearts for us; we must be active worshippers, even if that means active listening. In this sense, I believe that Arnold Eisen did not have it quite right when