Living in History: Haftarat Nachamu, Isaiah 40: 1-26

The Haftarah cycle now begins the “six Hafatarot of consolation” in the wake of Tisha B’Av. And sure enough, Isaiah starts out:

Comfort My people, comfort them, says your God;

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
Say to her
That she has served her term,
That her sin is pardoned
For she has received from the hand of the Eternal
More  than enough punishment for her sins.

Well, that’s nice enough. Finally! But then we get an idea of what this “comfort” is:

All flesh is grass,
And all its grace like a flower in the field;
Grass withers and flowers fade
When God’s breath blows on them.
Yes, the people are grass:
Grass withers and flowers fade;
But our God’s word holds good forever….

Why, the nations are but a drop in the bucket,
No more than dust on a scale;
To God, whole islands are but fine dust!

This isn’t really what people expected when they are told that they are to be “comforted”: “you are nothing but dust and ashes!”  (Note to Isaiah: don’t give up the day job.).

The Haftarah’s notion of “comfort”, then, diverges sharply from our current understanding. In doing so, it reveals something profound about the prophet’s understanding of the meaning of our lives – and how that understanding deeply challenges our own.

Why would people be comforted by the notion that all flesh is grass but God’s word holds forever? That would seem to make our own lives insignificant. Isaiah, however, turns the implication on its head.

Much modern literature on happiness focuses on the idea of having life projects, things that will make one’s life meaningful. This literature also argues that the process of achieving these projects must be edifying: it cannot all be about deferred gratification. Thus, “> Tal Ben-Shahar, “when we derive pleasure and meaning while spending time with our loved ones, or learning something new, or engaging in a project at work. The more our days are filled with these experiences, the happier we become. That is all there is to it.” Ben-Shahar explicitly rejects the notion that these experiences have objective meaning: he spends a good bit of his book Happier helping the reader figure out what would be these experiences for her or him.

Isaiah demurs: if my focus is on what I find worthwhile, he suggests, then that is just grass that will wither and fade. We might be happy, but this happiness will be false because it will carry no lasting meaning. It thus sharply challenges the contemporary notion of individual self-actualization as the purpose of life.  Rather, if we focus on God’s word, Isaiah argues, our projects will transcend our own lives and our own time.

Should we care about transcending our own time? We already do. People have children because they want some part of themselves to live on after them, to create a legacy for the future. (This also creates problems because people too often attempt to live vicariously through their children). Talk to anyone who fundraises for charity: “naming opportunities” matter because people want to live after they are gone.

This natural human desire makes Isaiah’s argument particularly powerful.  We could conceivably create a work of individual world-historical genius. But in the overwhelming majority of cases, we play our roles in history by being part of a broader trend, movement, or organization. We participate in campaigns such as the Civil Rights movement, or build community institutions. The human psyche seeks to acquire meaning by engaging in something bigger than itself.

This presents Jews with an extraordinary opportunity: simply by participating in the collective life of the Jewish people, we are engaging in a historically meaningful process. The Jews are a tiny people, but in terms of our civilizational, cultural and spiritual influence we punch vastly above our weight. The story of the Jews is the story of large swathes of human civilization, and contributing to that story means playing a key role in that civilization. And because our community is relatively small, that means that each of us actually can contribute to that story.

This hardly means simply continuing the Jewish past or submerging oneself in stultifying consensus: anything but. Instead, it suggests transforming it in creative ways. The legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin came up with an arresting analogy concerning judicial decision-making. Imagine, Dworkin wrote, that when confronted with the precedents of the past, you are writing a chain novel, much like a chain letter but in literary form.  You must make sense of the previous materials so that the novel has coherence, but you are free to write your own chapter.

Writing our own chapter of Jewish history – and thus world history – takes much the same form. We must use the materials of the Jewish past to tell a coherent story, and then tell our own tale. Dworkin was a legal theorist, but contemporary Jews can and must tell our stories in our way, whether it be through political activism, spiritual practice, innovative parenting, creative writing, music, art, or any one of a variety of cultural and social activities. The key is to relate these activities to our past and thus build another chain link, which will then be built by the next generation.

A good example might be