Haftarah Yitro - Seeing God

Haftarah Yitro – Better Late than Never

Sorry for the delay this week. I would love to say that I was so taken by the imagery of this passage from Isaiah (6:1-7:6; 9:5-6) that I simply couldn’t write anything, but that is not the case.

This week we witnessed the awe that is Sinai. The earth rolled, the horns blew, the lightning struck. Isaiah’s image in this haftarah is a complete inversion of this. Instead of God on Earth, Isaiah becomes man in heaven. Man who enters God’s chamber and witnesses the angels shouting.

“Holy! Holy! Holy! Is the God of Heaven’s Hosts, who presence fills all the earth!” (6:3)

There is a paradox in this statement that was not clear to me until just now. The God of Heaven fills all the Earth. God is everywhere. Isaiah, apparently, didn’t need to go to Heaven to see God. (But then, we don’t need to go to France to eat a croissant, but it does seem to taste better there, non?) Isaiah goes to God’s house to see God and learn the message to relay to the people. It is this message that I want to focus on.

“Go and tell this to the people:
Hear again and again – but without understanding.
Look again and again – but without perceiving.
Dull this people’s mind,
Stop its ears and cloud its eyes!
Lest seeing with its eyes,
And hearing with its ears
It understand with its mind and repent and save itself.” (6:8-10)

Is God really telling Isaiah to make it so that the people can’t return to God? Is Isaiah supposed to deliver an undecipherable message? Maybe the message is meant to be difficult, but really, is it supposed to be purposely hard to gain God’s good graces?

Fishbane, citing a slew of commentators, uses the verb forms in the Hebrew to show that it is not God who causes this to happen, rather it is the people who have closed their ears to God and clouded their eyes to the divine that will not be open to redemption.

How often have we closed ourselves to the divine that is around us? How certain are we that there is no God present in the things that we see daily? Does God have to cause the ground to shake to wake us up? Do we need to hear a ram’s horn blow or witness lightning without cloud and thunder without rain in order to say to ourselves: yep, that was God?

Perhaps, in these lines, God, through Isaiah, is trying to remind us that there are small elements of God visible all around us every day, if only we open our eyes and stop to listen for a moment.