Should faith change?
One might well say no. After all, God is the Eternal. So what is there to change? This is particularly true in Judaism, because we rightfully revere the generations who went before us, and see ourselves as part a chain of tradition, which we are bound to honor.
But neither God nor religious experience can be so easily cabined. If, as the Chassidim argued, everything is God, then human practice cannot limit it. As the Kabbalists observed, God is the Ein Sof, That which is without end, so why should the human encounter with it stop in one place? From generation to generation new experiences will emerge as we approach the Eternal.
What’s a sincere, committed Jew to do? If Haftarat Shabbat Rosh Chodesh is any indication, she uses the tradition to revise previously-unassailable understandings and create new meanings. If that involves sleight of hand, selective memory, new hermeneutics, and even outright fiction, well, so be it. If these practices are accomplished sensitively, elegantly, and deftly, then the community will accept them and pretend that it was never any different.
And Isaiah 66 certainly accomplishes it brilliantly, right at the beginning of this week’s haftarah:
This is what the LORD says:
“Heaven is my throne,
and the earth is my footstool.
Where is the house you will build for me?
Where will my resting place be?
Has not my hand made all these things,
and so they came into being?”
declares the LORD.
The Haftarah is often seen as focusing on the rebuilding of the Temple. And this makes sense historically: most scholars see Isaiah chapters 56 to 66 as deriving from the post-exilic community that returned to Jerusalem from the Babylonian captivity. So it stands to reason that they would concern themselves with the Temple’s rebuilding.
But wait a minute. God is not literally asking where the Temple should go, but rather questioning whether any place on Earth makes sense to have as the divine home. And that questions the entire point of a Temple in the first place. Much of the Haftarah questions the ability of sacrifices to achieve anything; instead, the point is inner spirit and sincere piety:
These are the ones I look on with favor:
he who is poor and contrite in spirit,
and who trembles at my word.
But whoever sacrifices a bull
is like one who kills a person,
and whoever offers a lamb
is like one who breaks a dog’s neck;
whoever makes a grain offering
is like one who presents pig’s blood,
and whoever burns memorial incense
is like one who worships an idol.
To be sure, at the end of the Haftarah, God does refer to renewing Temple sacrifices, but it is an entirely different context. All nations will come to worship God, and so attentive will these other nations be in their reverence that many of their members will actually become Levitical priests. For actual Temple priests, this was sacrilege.
And that was the whole point.
The post-exilic community lived in a time of religious ferment, when traditional authority structures had disappeared and new ones had to be created. Those who returned to Jerusalem had never participated in sacrifices. They had little reason to be cowed by the priestly caste that insisted on deference.
More importantly, their religious experiences diverged from the sacrificial cult. Those who received the message memorialized in our Haftarah had an awfully good argument: why does God need a physical home on earth? Their encounter with the Eternal rested not on the Temple cult, but on more mystical experience: “when the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.” (Psalm 126:1). Some began to realize that one’s connection with God can be more intimate than slaughtering an animal. When God tells Moses, “let them build Me a sanctuary, that I might dwell among them” (Exodus 25:8), it might be better read to say that sanctified space allows God to dwell within people.
It is surely no accident that this post-exilic period saw the emergence of the Pharisees, who argued that the Oral Law supplemented the written Torah. Unlike sacrifice, which only priests could perform, studying the Oral Law was available to the “poor and contrite in spirit, who tremble[] at My word.” Such study was not merely an intellectual experience; it was a spiritual one that could generate deep emotions and yearning for God. “Said Raba: a novice of the rabbis who gets agitated—it is the Torah that agitates him, as it is said, ‘Is not my word like fire? says the Lord’ (Jer. 23:29).” (Taanit 4a).
It certainly would buttress the Oral Law to diminish the authority of sacrifice, and that is precisely what Haftarat Shabbat Rosh Chodesh does. One might even suggest that it is a proto-Pharisaic document, for the Haftarah’s injunction that God cannot be restricted to a physical space opens the door for the rabbinic tradition that eventually emerged out of Pharisaism.
But the beauty of the Haftarah is the way in which it gently opens up the varieties of Jewish religious experience: in best lawyerly fashion, it uses powerful precedents and unquestioned principles to demonstrate that the people’s encounter with God must move forward. Surely you don’t deny that the whole world is God’s footstool, right? Surely you accept that Yahweh is the one God, right? Surely God loves inner piety, right? Well, if that is the case, then sacrifice cannot be – it must not be — the primary mode of Jewish religious experience.
Nineteenth century biblical scholars argued that Judaism contained contrasting “prophetic” and “legalistic” strains. Their Christocentric assumption was that the former was legitimate and the latter was a useless relic. Haftarat Shabbat Rosh Chodesh shows just how wrong they were. It uses the prophetic voice to make a lawyerly, passionate argument that the tradition itself is bigger and grander than traditionally thought, for God rules the entire universe.
And that, in turn, presents us with the challenge of our current age of religious ferment. How can we use the tradition to generate new forms of religious experience? In what ways can we read ancient texts to approach God in ways never before considered? And what current authority structures must be challenged in order for us to do so?
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