A view of Jerusalem: Haftarah Devarim

Isaiah 1:1-27

Leave it to Isaiah to know exactly what to say on a week like this. Not just because we are only days away from Tisha B’Av, and not just because the Palestinian conflict rages, but because Jerusalem, I feel has been lost in some way to me this week.

Alas, She Has become a harlot,
The faithful city
That was filled with justice,
Where righteousness dwelt…”(verse 21)

…Where I dwelt for a year because my love for my people and my love of my homeland, the land of my birth and of my people drew me to a profession staked and steeped in its preservation. The city whose problems I knew going in, and whose tenuous relationship to modernity I embraced and came to appreciate, has left me weeping remembering her.

The news from Jerusalem this week, both the arrest of Anat Hoffman for carrying a Torah scroll at the Western Wall, and the preliminary passage of a bill ceding control of conversion to the Haredi Rabbinate in Israel, caused me two very distinct reactions. One, a cringe that the version of Israel that I had in my mind was not really there. A version of Israel that was truly a homeland to all Jews. There was apparently now, a Jerusalem of the heavens, a Jerusalem of the earth and a Jerusalem of my mind. Unfortunately, never the three shall meet, it appears.

The second reaction was a form of resolve. It became important to sign a petition and write a letter, and pass the word along. And I have a sense that I was not the only one with this reaction, judging by the Facebook status updates and postings to articles about either or both of these tragic events.

The similarity between these events is not just that it is a question of Tradition vs. Modernity. It is not simply Reform vs. Ultra-Orthodox. The conversion bill was introduced by a Nationalist Party MK. It is a question of who belongs. It is a question of identity and who has the right and authority to tell anyone else what they can do, where they can do it, who they can do it with, and how they should be doing it. It is the assumption that there is a right way based on a notion of tradition that understands only rigidity and the narrowest conception of what God wants.

That you come to appear before Me —
Who asked that of you?
Trample My courts
no more;
Bringing oblations is futile,
Incense is offensive to Me.
New moon and sabbath,
Proclaiming of solemnities,
Assemblies with iniquity,
I cannot abide. (12-13)

What good is all this religion, if it is accompanied by behavior devoid of ethics?

Alas, Jerusalem, this week, mourns her destruction. Will we open our ears to her cry? Will we allow her to pray? I weep with her this week, yet I hope. I hope that the resolve and the response elicited by this week’s events causes her to be renewed. That the notion that Jerusalem and all it stands for is not only for one idea and one way. That Judaism rightly exists in more than one iteration. That through respect, mutual and truthful, acceptance, fully of differences and similarities, and openness, to what is known and what is unknown we can turn back to what Jerusalem is supposed to be: the city of wholeness for the whole of the Jewish people, the city of peace. Then we will be on the right track, and Isaiah will have been right again:

Zion [will have been] saved in the judgment;
Her repentant ones, in the retribution. (27)

Shabbat Shalom.