“It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” – Yogi Berra
It’s a rare Haftarah that makes it into popular culture, but this one does, mainly due to the African-American poet, author, and civil rights leader James Weldon Johnson. It comprises Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of the dry bones coming to life, and Johnson immortalized it in his song “Dem Bones.”
The Haftarah is short. Ezekiel goes into a valley, where he sees thousands of dry bones spread out. God promises to the bones that they will once again have breath, sinews, flesh, and skin. Sure enough, “suddenly there was a sound of rattling, and the bones came together” — the toe-bone connected to the foot-bone, the foot-bone connected to the leg-bone etc. etc. etc. Then come sinews and flesh and skin, and breath:
And He said to me, “O mortal, these bones are the whole House of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, our hope is gone; we are doomed.’ Prophesy therefore, and say to them: Thus said the Lord God: I am going to open your graves and lift you out of the graves, O My people, and bring you to the land of Israel. You shall know, O My people, that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves and lifted you out of your graves. I will put My breath into you and you shall live again, and I will set you upon your own soil.” (37: 11-14).
The miracle here is not that God does the seemingly impossible: it is, rather, that God confounds time. Time appears to have an inherent natural progression: birth, growth, maturity, death, decay. God’s prophesy and power denies this inherence. And with this denial, Haftarat Hol Ha-moed Pesach denies the inevitability of history. If God can reverse death, then no one has any right to claim historical inevitability for anything. Such a belief forms a central tenet of classical Torah scholarship. “Ein Mukdam U’Meuchar BaTorah”, say the rabbis – there is no “early” and “late” in the Torah. Time constantly folds back on itself: we cannot make assumptions about the path of Torah, because God can change time back and forth according to divine will.
This point carries vast philosophical implications, for some of the world’s most influential ideological systems have staked their authority on historical inevitability. The most familiar to us might be Marxism, which claimed to have discovered a “scientific” theory of history. But Marx was not alone. He followed in the footsteps of other continental thinkers such as GFW Hegel, who developed a comprehensive (if impenetrable) philosophy of history and Auguste Comte, the father of sociology, who believed that he had invented a science of society in which the actions of humans could be predicted with the same precision as that of bodies in motion.
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the champions of society’s scientific predictability were not continental philosophers but rather economists. “Freshwater” economists – so-called because they taught at universities far from the coasts — believed that they could explain and predict the workings of markets perfectly – so much so that they argued that a stock market bubble could never occur because the market would immediately determine whether assets were overpriced. The Great Recession has not disabused them of this ideology. I recall having dinner with one of them in the fall of 2008. He said to me, “People say that economists think that we have everything figured out. But we do!” Lehman Brothers had collapsed the previous day. The facts did not conform to his theory, so they were disposed of.
The dry bones laugh at such hubris, whether from Marxists or free-market economists, or indeed anyone who believes that human history is predictable or fully knowable. Ezekiel knows better: “[God] said to me, ‘O mortal, can these bones live again?’ I replied, ‘O Lord God, only You know.’” (37:3)
This epistemic humility does not mean just giving up on understanding the world, or rejecting either natural or social science. Proverbs holds that “the awe of God is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10), but that hardly implies that awe of God is the end of wisdom. It simply means understanding both the powers and the limits of the human intellect.
Such an understanding thus makes the valley of the dry bones appropriate for Pesach, for it provides a firm grounding for a free social order. If our knowledge is limited, then we cannot justify coercing others simply because they disagree with us. Knowledge is always provisional, which means that other voices and interests must be heard. Learned Hand, one of the 20th Century’s greatest jurists, put it brilliantly and succinctly in 1944. “The spirit of liberty,” he wrote,
is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interest alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten – that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side-by-side with the greatest.
Jews can surely forgive Hand’s citation of Jesus, for the Nazarene’s Jewish heritage had taught him the same thing. History moves not predictably, where (in Thucydides’ words) “the strong do what they may and the weak do what they must.” Instead, as Hamlet tells his friend Horatio, “there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy.” If Horatio doesn’t believe it, he should go on a day trip with Ezekiel.
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