The Almighty’s Own Purposes: Haftarat Ki Tavo, Isaiah 60:1-22

Ki Tavo is the barbiturate of parshiot. Midway through it, God threatens Israel with a list of curses if they violate the law: this list is so lengthy and so brutal that it is traditionally read sotto voce.  After such a painful and violent Torah reading, it’s little wonder that the Haftarah for Ki Tavo is one of the Haftarot of consolation, read to comfort the people.

Haftarat Ki Tavo certainly does its best, promising the people a glorious future, where God’s light will shine, illumine Zion, and attract all nations to her. Yet at the core of this supposed Haftarah of consolation lies a malignant heart:

The nation or the kingdom
That does not serve you shall perish
Such nations shall be destroyed…
Bowing before you, shall come
The children of those who tormented you;
Prostrate at the soles of your feet
Shall be all those who reviled you.

If this is redemption, I’ll take exile. Judaism’s true fulfillment will occur not when others prostrate themselves at our feet, but when they come to recognize the imperative of living divine and thus universal values. As Jews, we seek not our victory, but God’s. And God’s victory does not occur when oppressors grovel, but rather when they recognize their injustice and embrace compassion and holiness. 

Explaining the Haftarah’s crass triumphalism requires a bit of history. Scholars now believe that Isaiah Chapter 60, from which Haftarat Ki Tavo comes, was not written or spoken by Isaiah of Jerusalem, who preached in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE. Instead, Chapters 56 through 66 are best described as a collection of prophecies from the period after the Jews returned from Babylonian exile and slavery, and not the work of any one person.

After enduring the pain of exile, you would think that this return to Zion would have made the community happy.  You would be wrong. The post-exilic Judean community was divided and weak, a small and relatively insignificant outpost in a great empire. When Isaiah chapter 60 was written, the Second Temple had probably not yet been rebuilt, but even when it was constructed, it was a small and modest structure, a far cry from the vision of Solomon’s Temple, or even the Temple that King Herod built shortly before the turn of the era. Expecting a grand reconstruction of an Age of Glory, these Jews found themselves alone in a provincial backwater.

Resentment spawned triumphalism. The Jews of the post-exilic world had developed enormous expectations, and when these did not pan out, they quickly became curdled in bitterness. Everyone else was wrong; Israel was right. “Darkness shall cover the earth, and thick clouds its peoples; But upon you the Lord will shine…/And nations shall walk by your light, Kings by your radiance.” No wonder they expected that other kings would bow and scrape before them.

“Isaiah’s” response to the experiences of destruction and exile as well as the disappointments of the return to Zion bears clear and disturbing relevance to the shattering conflicts around the world. When attempting to assist societies wracked by the ruin of civil war, one point is absolutely crucial: instead of seeking to punish and dominate their enemies, warring sides must seek to understand the other side’s narrative on its own terms. They do not have to agree, but they must attempt to comprehend. Such savage wars never have a wholly good guy and a wholly bad guy, for truth is always partial. Truth may not be equal – one side often has a better claim for justice than the other – but in these conflicts, it is virtually never absolute. Similarly, the Jewish people might seek to be a light to the nations, but that hardly implies that no other light exists or that our own heart is free from darkness.

Whether it be Hutu and Tutsis in Rwanda, Seleka and government supporters in the Central African Republic, Muslims and Hindus on the Indian subcontinent, or – yes – Jews and Arabs in Israel/Palestine, groups must understand that their adversaries do not resemble some sort of primordial villain, but are rather human beings, in the image of God, with hopes of a good life. Such recognition will not end the conflicts. But it will be the beginning of the end.

We Americans are hardly immune from this type of tunnel vision. If anything, Americans tend to see life in moral absolutes, from Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to “make the world safe for democracy” to more recent declarations that in modern world politics “you are either with us or with the terrorists.” A more humble tradition would be salutary. Abraham Lincoln had just led the nation through a war that actually did pit good versus evil as much as any war could. And yet, in his