The Prophetic Reading for the Fast of Yom Kippur
Isaiah 57:14-58:14
[Slightly midrashic translation, with commentary below, after the text]
Translated by Rabbi Arthur O. Waskow
And God said:
Open up, open up, Clear a path!
Clear away all obstacles
From the path of My People!
For so says the One
Who high aloft forever dwells,
Whose Name is Holy:
I dwell on high, in holiness,
And therefore with the lowly and humiliated,
To breathe new breath into the humble,
To give new heart to the broken-hearted.
For your sin of greed
I grew angry and smashed you,
I even hid My face.
Yet I will not do battle against you forever,
I will not be angry with you forever.
For from Me comes the breath that floats out to make all worlds.
I will not be angry with you forever.
For from Me comes the breath that floats out to make all worlds.
I breathe the breath of life, I am the Breath of Life.
Still you wander off the path as your own heart,
wayward, takes you.
I see the path you need ---- and I will heal you.
I will guide you and comfort you
With words of courage and of comfort
For those who mourn among you.
Peace, peace ... shalom, shalom!... to those who are far and near,
Says the Breath-of-Life ---
And I will heal you.
But the wicked are like a troubled sea
Which cannot rest,
Whose waters toss up mire and mud.
There is no peace, said my God,
For the wicked.
Cry out aloud, don't hold back,
Lift up your voice like the shofar!
Tell My people what they are doing wrong,
Tell those who call themselves the "House of Jacob" their misdeeds.
For day after day they go out searching for Me,
They take some kind of pleasure in getting to know My ways ---
As if they were a people that actually did righteous deeds
And never ignored the just rulings of their God.
They keep asking Me for the rules of justice
As if they would take delight in being close to God.
They say: "Why is it that we have fasted, and You don't see our suffering?
We press down our egos --- but You don't pay attention!"
Look! On the very day you fast you keep scrabbling for wealth;
On the very day you fast you keep oppressing all your workers.
Look! You fast in strife and contention.
You strike with a wicked fist.
You are not fasting today in such a way
As to make your voices heard on high.
Is that the kind of fast that I desire?
Is that really a day for people to "press down their egos"?
Am I commanding you to droop your heads like bulrushes
And lie around in sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call a fast day,
The kind of day that the God of the Burning Bush would wish?
No!
This is the kind of fast that I desire:
Unlock the hand-cuffs put on by wicked power!
Untie the ropes of the yoke!
Let the oppressed go free,
And break off every yoke!
Share your bread with the hungry.
Bring the poor, the outcasts, to your house.
When you see them naked, clothe them;
They are your flesh and blood;
Don't hide yourself from them!
Then your light will burst through like the dawn;
Then when you need healing it will spring up quickly;
Then your own righteousness will march ahead to guard you.
And a radiance from YHWH will reach out behind to guard you.
Then, when you cry out, YHWH will answer;
Then, when you call, God will say: "Here I am!"
If you banish the yoke from your midst,
If you rid yourself of scornful finger-pointing
And words of contempt;
If you open up your life-experience to the hungry
And soothe the life that has been trampled under foot,
Then even in darkness your light will shine out
And your moments of gloom turn bright as noonday.
Then the Breath of Life will always be your guide,
Will soothe your own life in your own times of dryness
And strengthen your bones when they are weary.
Then you shall be like a garden given water,
Like a wellspring whose waters never fail.
Those who spring from you shall rebuild the ancient ruins
And you shall lay foundations for the coming generation.
You shall be called "Those who mend torn places,"
You shall be called "Those who build lanes to live in."
If you refrain from trampling my Renewal-time*
And from being busy-busy on My holy day;
If you will not only call Renewal-time* delightful
But also turn far from your usual way
And set aside your business and your chatter
To be yourselves the rays by which God's Holiness
Can turn this world into a radiant joy ---
Then indeed you will find delight in YHWH.
For then --- when you have joined the lowly ---
I will set you all with Me,
Astride the heights of earth.
Then --- when you feed others --- I will let you eat your fill
From what is truly due you as the heirs of Jacob.
Now!
For this word come from the Mouth that
Breathes all life.
^^^^^^^^^^
*I have translated “shabbat” here more broadly as “Renewal-time” because when we look at the content of what Isaiah is calling for and his imploring, “Lift up your voice like a shofar,” it may be he is calling for the Jubilee itself -- which was to begin with the blowing of the shofar on Yom Kippur.
As we move not just toward a new “year” (shanah) but toward a moment when repetition (sheni) becomes transformation (shinui), I hope we will remember --
the roots of havurot, Feminist Judaism, Jewish renewal in the upheavals of the 1960s as well as the upheavals of the 1760s,
the roots of Judaism in the great "political" speeches of the Prophets,
and the teachings of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who said that in a great civil rights march his legs were praying, and who argued again and again that "spirituality" and "politics" cannot be severed.
As Heschel also said, "Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive." (See p. 262 ff. of MORAL GRANDEUR AND SPIRITUAL AUDACITY, ed. by Susannah Heschel.)
I often introduce the Isaiah haftarah with a great short-short story by Franz Kafka. (See his wonderful and troubling book of midrash, PARABLES AND PARADOXES.) More or less, the story goes:
"One day a leopard stalked into the synagogue, roaring and lashing its tail. Three weeks later, it had become part of the liturgy."
What can we do to un-tame the leopard -- let God off the leash of the liturgy?
What, for example, can we do for Yom Kippur -- and for all those other times when the religiously or spiritually committed begin to think they can get high on God without gittin' down with the lowest of the low?
On Yom Kippur morning, we read a prophetic passage of Isaiah, describing what happened when he interrupted the prayers and fasting of a crowd that thought it was fulfilling its religious obligations.
Isaiah seems to be saying that he actually walked into the crowd of some large Yom Kippur assemblage.
He faced people who were feeling good because they were feeling bad (having fasted for 18 hours or so). He shouted at them that it was all beside the point. He sneered at their "drooping their heads like bullrushes." He demanded that they pay attention to the poor, to those in prison, and also to their own scrabbling for wealth.
He notes that on the holy day itself, as they heard his words, they shook their fists at him. (They were probably angry because he was interrupting the beautiful songs the Levites were singing.)
He insists that the "high" they were feeling when he arrived was a fake: they can have a real high, real ecstasy, only by lifting the lowest of their community along with them. By actual material acts of feeding, clothing, liberating.
He shattered the traditional liturgy, he shattered the equanimity of those spiritual folks, he denied the authenticity of their experience. He did not have a civil debate with them.
And this is the text the rabbis set before us to read on the very day when the community is most likely to be feeling exactly as Isaiah's crowd did.
But in many many synagogues, this passage itself has become just a set piece for recitation, just another part of the liturgy. So I have tried over and over to invent ways to read it in such a fashion, with "interruptions" from the real world, that it can shake people as it is supposed to.
I have interrupted the verses of Isaiah with headlines about homeless people freezing to death on Philadelphia streets. About 300 jobless people applying for work when only ten jobs were advertised. About mothers having to choose between food and medicine for their children. About the torture of prisoners in Iraq, in Israel, in America. ("Strike off the handcuffs!" says Isaiah.)
Are these "politics"? Are they God crying out to us, as the homeless, the imprisoned, the tortured, cry out to God?
I urge and invite us to begin NOW to imagine how to let God's leopard loose on Yom Kippur. Or at any other time, to let the subversiveness of prayer leap from the letters in the prayerbook. --AW
wayward, takes you.
I see the path you need ---- and I will heal you.
I will guide you and comfort you
With words of courage and of comfort
For those who mourn among you.
Peace, peace ... shalom, shalom!... to those who are far and near,
Says the Breath-of-Life ---
And I will heal you.
But the wicked are like a troubled sea
Which cannot rest,
Whose waters toss up mire and mud.
There is no peace, said my God,
For the wicked.
Cry out aloud, don't hold back,
Lift up your voice like the shofar!
Tell My people what they are doing wrong,
Tell those who call themselves the "House of Jacob" their misdeeds.
For day after day they go out searching for Me,
They take some kind of pleasure in getting to know My ways ---
As if they were a people that actually did righteous deeds
And never ignored the just rulings of their God.
They keep asking Me for the rules of justice
As if they would take delight in being close to God.
They say: "Why is it that we have fasted, and You don't see our suffering?
We press down our egos --- but You don't pay attention!"
Look! On the very day you fast you keep scrabbling for wealth;
On the very day you fast you keep oppressing all your workers.
Look! You fast in strife and contention.
You strike with a wicked fist.
You are not fasting today in such a way
As to make your voices heard on high.
Is that the kind of fast that I desire?
Is that really a day for people to "press down their egos"?
Am I commanding you to droop your heads like bulrushes
And lie around in sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call a fast day,
The kind of day that the God of the Burning Bush would wish?
No!
This is the kind of fast that I desire:
Unlock the hand-cuffs put on by wicked power!
Untie the ropes of the yoke!
Let the oppressed go free,
And break off every yoke!
Share your bread with the hungry.
Bring the poor, the outcasts, to your house.
When you see them naked, clothe them;
They are your flesh and blood;
Don't hide yourself from them!
Then your light will burst through like the dawn;
Then when you need healing it will spring up quickly;
Then your own righteousness will march ahead to guard you.
And a radiance from YHWH will reach out behind to guard you.
Then, when you cry out, YHWH will answer;
Then, when you call, God will say: "Here I am!"
If you banish the yoke from your midst,
If you rid yourself of scornful finger-pointing
And words of contempt;
If you open up your life-experience to the hungry
And soothe the life that has been trampled under foot,
Then even in darkness your light will shine out
And your moments of gloom turn bright as noonday.
Then the Breath of Life will always be your guide,
Will soothe your own life in your own times of dryness
And strengthen your bones when they are weary.
Then you shall be like a garden given water,
Like a wellspring whose waters never fail.
Those who spring from you shall rebuild the ancient ruins
And you shall lay foundations for the coming generation.
You shall be called "Those who mend torn places,"
You shall be called "Those who build lanes to live in."
If you refrain from trampling my Renewal-time*
And from being busy-busy on My holy day;
If you will not only call Renewal-time* delightful
But also turn far from your usual way
And set aside your business and your chatter
To be yourselves the rays by which God's Holiness
Can turn this world into a radiant joy ---
Then indeed you will find delight in YHWH.
For then --- when you have joined the lowly ---
I will set you all with Me,
Astride the heights of earth.
Then --- when you feed others --- I will let you eat your fill
From what is truly due you as the heirs of Jacob.
Now!
For this word come from the Mouth that
Breathes all life.
^^^^^^^^^^
*I have translated “shabbat” here more broadly as “Renewal-time” because when we look at the content of what Isaiah is calling for and his imploring, “Lift up your voice like a shofar,” it may be he is calling for the Jubilee itself -- which was to begin with the blowing of the shofar on Yom Kippur.
As we move not just toward a new “year” (shanah) but toward a moment when repetition (sheni) becomes transformation (shinui), I hope we will remember --
the roots of havurot, Feminist Judaism, Jewish renewal in the upheavals of the 1960s as well as the upheavals of the 1760s,
the roots of Judaism in the great "political" speeches of the Prophets,
and the teachings of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who said that in a great civil rights march his legs were praying, and who argued again and again that "spirituality" and "politics" cannot be severed.
As Heschel also said, "Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive." (See p. 262 ff. of MORAL GRANDEUR AND SPIRITUAL AUDACITY, ed. by Susannah Heschel.)
I often introduce the Isaiah haftarah with a great short-short story by Franz Kafka. (See his wonderful and troubling book of midrash, PARABLES AND PARADOXES.) More or less, the story goes:
"One day a leopard stalked into the synagogue, roaring and lashing its tail. Three weeks later, it had become part of the liturgy."
What can we do to un-tame the leopard -- let God off the leash of the liturgy?
What, for example, can we do for Yom Kippur -- and for all those other times when the religiously or spiritually committed begin to think they can get high on God without gittin' down with the lowest of the low?
On Yom Kippur morning, we read a prophetic passage of Isaiah, describing what happened when he interrupted the prayers and fasting of a crowd that thought it was fulfilling its religious obligations.
Isaiah seems to be saying that he actually walked into the crowd of some large Yom Kippur assemblage.
He faced people who were feeling good because they were feeling bad (having fasted for 18 hours or so). He shouted at them that it was all beside the point. He sneered at their "drooping their heads like bullrushes." He demanded that they pay attention to the poor, to those in prison, and also to their own scrabbling for wealth.
He notes that on the holy day itself, as they heard his words, they shook their fists at him. (They were probably angry because he was interrupting the beautiful songs the Levites were singing.)
He insists that the "high" they were feeling when he arrived was a fake: they can have a real high, real ecstasy, only by lifting the lowest of their community along with them. By actual material acts of feeding, clothing, liberating.
He shattered the traditional liturgy, he shattered the equanimity of those spiritual folks, he denied the authenticity of their experience. He did not have a civil debate with them.
And this is the text the rabbis set before us to read on the very day when the community is most likely to be feeling exactly as Isaiah's crowd did.
But in many many synagogues, this passage itself has become just a set piece for recitation, just another part of the liturgy. So I have tried over and over to invent ways to read it in such a fashion, with "interruptions" from the real world, that it can shake people as it is supposed to.
I have interrupted the verses of Isaiah with headlines about homeless people freezing to death on Philadelphia streets. About 300 jobless people applying for work when only ten jobs were advertised. About mothers having to choose between food and medicine for their children. About the torture of prisoners in Iraq, in Israel, in America. ("Strike off the handcuffs!" says Isaiah.)
Are these "politics"? Are they God crying out to us, as the homeless, the imprisoned, the tortured, cry out to God?
I urge and invite us to begin NOW to imagine how to let God's leopard loose on Yom Kippur. Or at any other time, to let the subversiveness of prayer leap from the letters in the prayerbook. --AW
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