The Personal Is Not The Political: Haftarat Shabbat Hazon, Isaiah 1:1-27

Last year, the House Agriculture Committee debated the farm bill, and particularly Republicans’ efforts to decimate the Food Stamp program. “>talk show host Glenn Beck, whom no one would call a bleeding-heart liberal, has decided to travel to the border to provide food and toys for thousands of these children. That is the call of compassion, and whatever else one might think of Beck, the gesture deserves high praise.

But Isaiah’s call for justice demands us to consider, and perhaps do, much more. It requires us to ask: what are these kids doing at the border in the first place? What conditions in their home countries have caused them to flee, and if they have been brutalized, it might demand a policy response from the US government to attempt to stop that brutalization. 

The inquiry goes deeper. Perhaps American support enables the childrens’ home governments to brutalize them, or perhaps the outrageous system of US agricultural subsidies – for corn, for example — decimates their rural economies and pushes them into desperation. Or maybe the children have been brutalized not by their government, but by drug gangs in their home countries; and maybe those drug gangs have been empowered by the ravenous American appetite for narcotics, and counterproductive US drug policies.

I say “maybe” and “perhaps” in all of these scenarios because I honestly do not know which frame or collection of frames to put on the issue.  That is my failing: the Haftarah requires me to have both the intellectual virtue of studying these matters, and the moral virtue of pursuing justice, not simply feeling compassionate.  These are very harsh mandates. But God demands nothing less.

Haftarat Shabbat Hazon concludes the three “Haftarot of admonition,” which prepare us for Tisha B’Av. And they have prepared us well, teaching us: 1) “>reserve time to deepen your spiritual practice; and 3) fight for justice on a public, structural level after scrupulous study.  We could not ask for a more inspiring — and more rigorous – command.