Creative Destruction: Haftarat Eikev, Isaiah 49:14-51:3

Isaiah may have been a great prophet, but in this week’s Haftarah, he seems ambivalent about his own profession. At first, he proclaims:

The Lord God gave me a skilled tongue;
To know how to speak timely words to the weary.
Morning by morning. He rouses,
He rouses my ear
To give heed like disciples.

So we should learn from Isaiah, right? Not so fast. Only two verses after boasting of his rhetorical prowess, the prophet concedes:

I offered my back to the floggers,
And my cheeks to those who tore out my hair.
I did not hide my face
From insult and spittle.

Maybe he was less successful than he originally thought. And this was quite a good thing, for the contrast between the two passages reveals an important aspect of Jewish spirituality: a deep ambivalence about rhetoric and oratory.

It starts, of course, with Moshe, who explicitly lacked oratorical power (Exodus 4:10), but became Israel’s greatest prophet nonetheless. He was such a terrible speaker that his great oration at the edge of the Promised Land – otherwise known as the Book of Deuteronomy – was completely forgotten until it was “discovered” several hundred years later in the Temple – in the form of a scroll (2 Kings 22:8-20).

The focus on the printed word remained in the development of the Jewish liturgy: we read the Torah and the Haftarah in shul, with gabbaim taking care that the reader is getting the text right. Contrast this with Muslim practice, where children memorize the Qu’ran, in part so that they can recite it dramatically.   In the Qu’ran, the arch-angel Gabriel appears to the prophet Muhammad and commands him to “recite!” (Qu’ran 53:4-9). Indeed, “>Yale Divinity School, there are several named professorships in “homiletics and preaching.” And Yale represents relatively subdued mainline Protestantism. Evangelical Christianity fairly specializes in preaching, with some churches unabashedly referring to themselves as “charismatic.” That’s the whole point: go out, and preach, and get souls.

Compare this view with the Jewish Theological Seminary, where the lion’s share of “>Eric McKitrick, when discussing President Andrew Johnson’s attempt to sell the public on his vision of Reconstruction, “>has referred to this phrase as an almost-perfect example of judicial rhetoric. But look how misleading it is: Cardozo’s law enforcement officer is a bumbling “constable” rather than, say, the essentially military force of Ferguson, Missouri. Do the police commit injustice and brutalize people based on their race? No, says Cardozo, they merely “blunder.” The defendant is a “criminal”, not even a potentially innocent citizen; he is completely “otherized” and lawbreaking is inherent in his nature, unredeemable.

This hardly means that exclusionary rule is preferable; rather, it simply points to how language elegantly packed into a few words does not so much “persuade” us as arrest our reasoning powers.

If rhetoric causes so much political danger, it presents even greater spiritual dangers. Spirituality is more subtle than politics, for it requires deep listening to the still, small voice of God, sustained concentration on practice, and for Jews, long hours of study. Rhetoric offers a seductive distraction from all that.  And that is perilous.

Rhetoric’s danger, then, should actually make us happy that the Israelites rejected Isaiah’s “skilled tongue” even if they did so for the worst of reasons, and that the rabbis closed prophecy. But it also presents contemporary Jews with a challenge.