Aton Holzer
Of the many pleasures of Orthodox Jewish life, surely among the more obscure of them is being tapped for reading haftarah portions from the shivah de-nehemta. The ‘seven of comfort,’ selections from the latter third of the book of Isaiah, are read on the seven weeks which follow Tishah Be-Av, the day of Jewish national mourning for the two destroyed Temples and all the lachrymose parts of our trimillennia-long history.
R. Yoel Bin-Nun notes that many of the key themes of Isaiah 40-66 – including making the desert bloom (41:18-19; all unspecified citations are from Isaiah) and ingathering of the exiles (43:5-6) – did not materialize in any of those times, but only in our time.[1] Since my aliyah eight years ago, I have had numerous occasions to bear personal witness to this observation.
For example: as a family, we try to visit Jerusalem at least once on the major holidays. The poetic caption for the picture of throngs of Jews from the world over, bedecked in their finery, filling the old city and the new, was inscribed more than two millennia prior.
Look up all around you and see:
They are all assembled, are come to you!
As I live, declares the LORD
You shall don them all like jewels,
Deck yourself with them like a bride. (49:18)[2]
For the last two years, work has situated me in hutz la-aretz for the second week in the sequence, and I was asked to read the haftarah at the hashkamah (early) minyan that my father attends. The munah zarka/munah segol cluster of cantillation marks are relatively rare in the prophetic trope, and it typically serves to allow the reader to linger on a particularly dramatic verse. In this haftarah, there is one:
Why, when I came, was no one there,
Why, when I called, would none respond? (50:2)
When I linger on these words among my coreligionists in New York, I remember the resonance these words had for me when I sat among them, and feel gratitude that God has permitted us to be among those who did respond.
Riding back from the airport after my monthly trips abroad gives me a chance to meditate on the lush, verdant, rolling Judean hills, dotted with ancient ruins – I am usually too tired to do much else, but also overwhelmed to be Home. When the sun is out, which it usually is, the landscape seems strangely jubilant. As though it is singing:
How welcome on the mountai
Are the footsteps of the herald
Announcing happiness,
Heralding good fortune,
Announcing victory,
Telling Zion, “Your God is King!”
Hark!
Your watchmen raise their voices,
As one they shout for joy;
For every eye shall behold
The Lord’s return to Zion.
Raise a shout together,
O ruins of Jerusalem!
For the Lord will comfort His people,
Will redeem Jerusalem. (52:7-9)
But the raw power of the verses reaches its zenith in their deployment for the Jewish national experience: their arrangement in the shivah de-nehemta.
The fourteenth century Spanish liturgical commentator R. David Abudraham[3] noted that the selections for the seven weeks are consciously arranged such that the opening passages form a dialogue between God and His beloved. The first passage (40:1-26) opens with “Comfort, oh comfort My people, says your God.” The second (49:14-51:3) begins “Zion says, ‘The Lord has forsaken me, My Lord has forgotten me.” The third (54:11-55:5) leads with the prophet’s report to God: “Unhappy, storm-tossed one, uncomforted!” The fourth (51:12-52:12) follows with God’s response “I, I am He who comforts you!” The fifth (54:1-10) continues with “Shout [for joy], O barren one, you who bore no child!” The sixth and seventh represent the climax, turning from the recovery of Jerusalem from exile (‘deutero-Isaiah’ in modern scholarship) to its ascent to the moral and even material center of humankind (‘trito-Isaiah’): (60:1-22) “Arise, shine, for your light has dawned,” and finally (61:10-63:9), Zion accepts God’s comfort, “I greatly rejoice in the Lord, my whole being exults in my God,” in a passage replete with wedding imagery. Tosafot (Megillah 31b s.v. Rosh Hodesh) notes that each portion builds upon the last in degree of consolation, and the additional themes introduced in each ensuing haftarah are explored recently in great depth by Har Etzion’s R. Mosheh Lichtenstein in his 2015 Netivei Nevuah.[4]
In all of religious literature, there are few passages which provide a sense of a God’s love for a people more than these chapters. From the very opening (40:1-2),
Comfort, oh comfort My people,
Says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
And declare to her
That her term of service is over,
That her iniquity is expiated;
For she has received at the hand of the LORD
Double for all her sins.
God, the loving suitor of the Jewish people, has returned to be with them. And, as it turns out, He is not merely the God of Israel, but creator of the universe, all-powerful, who can bend nature itself to His will (40:3-5).
A voice rings out:
“Clear in the desert
A road for the Lord!
Level in the wilderness
A highway for our God!
Let every valley be raised,
Every hill and mount made low.
Let the rugged ground become level
And the ridges become a plain.
The Presence of the LORD shall appear,
And all flesh, as one, shall behold
For the Lord Himself has spoken.”
And what of the mighty hegemons that set the geopolitical agenda? As impressive as they might appear, they are ephemeral: Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, the Ptolemies, the Seleucids, and even Rome, not to mention the ever-warring Islamic caliphates that carved up the fertile crescent in their wake. When all have withered as grass, when the sun finally sets on the British Empire, only God remains standing – and His beloved, the eternal Jewish people.
A voice rings out: “Proclaim!”
Another asks, “What shall I proclaim?”
“All flesh is grass,
All its goodness like flowers of the field:
Grass withers, flowers fade
When the breath of the LORD blows on them.
Indeed, man is but grass:
Grass withers, flowers fade
But the word of our God is always fulfilled!”
The incomparably mighty creator God returns to history in full force, and yet, He is loving and tender to His beloved people.
Like a shepherd He pastures His flock:
He gathers the lambs in His arms
And carries them in His bosom;
Gently He drives the mother sheep.
The last verse of the seventh passage is nothing short of breathtaking, and a fitting coda to the haftarah-year: God suffers when we suffer, He looks upon us with love and empathy, and He personally intervenes on our behalf.
In all their troubles He was troubled,
And the angel of His Presence delivered them:
In His love and pity
He Himself redeemed them,
Raised them, and exalted them
All the days of old.
The custom of reading the seven selections from Isaiah appears to have originated in the land of Israel, and is first attested in the sixth-century Midrash, Pesikta de-Rav Kahana, and the contemporaneous liturgical poetry of Yannai.[5] It was begun precisely during the agonizingly long reign of the micromanaging theocratic autocrat Justinian, whose codex tightened the vise on the Jews of the Holy Land. When the Jews of Christianized Byzantine Palestine had every reason to believe that their future was grim, when Mishnah (deuterosis) was outlawed, and perhaps even public Torah reading in Hebrew[6] – at what was figuratively and literally the darkest time for the Jews and the entire world[7] – it was then that the shivah de-nehemta were collated.
Aside from the dialogic arrangement, the selections seem to consciously surround, close in upon, and then ultimately evade, a particular passage: Isaiah chapter 53. The last third of Isaiah contains two threads: that of the feminine Zion, and that of the servant of God, typically the people of Israel, merged at points with the figure of Cyrus but maintaining a sense of ambiguity. The travails that had befallen the servant in exile, detailed in chapter 53, had been read as early as the gospels (Acts 8:32-35, Luke 22:37) as referring to the Passion and Crucifixion of Jesus. By the time of the Byzantines, Christians took this identification to be dispositive.
Rabbinic midrash is strikingly sparse on this chapter, likely a result of self-censorship in the face of an aggressive regime that would not permit alternative interpretations.[8] The best that could be done was to recite the very next passage, whose coda gave lie to the entire premise of the supersessionist claim.
For the mountains may move
And the hills be shaken,
But My loyalty shall never move from you,
Nor My covenant of friendship be shaken
Said the Lord, who takes you back in love. (54:10)
But what, indeed, is chapter 53 – describing the despised servant of God, chastised, tortured and led to slaughter – doing in ‘deutero-Isaiah’, amid the halcyon prophecies of shivah de-nehemta? To me, this was never quite clear.
At least not until the seventh of October, 2023.
Amid all of the latter-day unfolding of the promise of deutero-Isaiah came, like a terrifying bolt from the blue, the spectacle of peaceable Jewish civilians and soldiers tortured, raped, slaughtered, and kidnapped. In this orgy of barbarity, armed terrorists, civilians young and old, aid workers, teachers, and professional journalists took part. At the very same time, around the globe, Jews were shamed and calumniated by vicious demonstrators as authors of their own suffering. Protest signs featured Jewish stars in the trash, posters tarnished Israel as a sick regime of an apartheid that never existed, and a (not-quite)[9]-illegal ‘occupation’ which it had tried desperately, repeatedly, and at great risk and cost, to end. Jews stood accused as colonizers by descendants of colonizers living, in those colonies, off exploited largesse; of genocide by peoples that built their own civilizations on the ruins of those whom they exterminated and expelled, among them those of Jews in their native land and the world over. All this before the blood of the murdered had dried, before the smoke of the burned had dissipated, before much of any military response had even begun. Colonialism, genocide, apartheid – whatever it is that the West sought desperately to atone for, was pinned upon us. We were abused, tortured, crushed for their iniquities. The perfect poetic caption for this Kafkaesque hellscape is to be found in that same section of Isaiah.
Indeed, My servant shall prosper,
Be exalted and raised to great heights.
Just as the many were appalled at him…|
He was despised, shunned by men,
A man of suffering, familiar with disease.
As one who hid his face from us,
He was despised, we held him of no account.
Yet it was our sickness that he was bearing,
Our suffering that he endured.
We accounted him plagued,
Smitten and afflicted by God;
But he was wounded because of our sins,
Crushed because of our iniquities.
He bore the chastisement that made us whole,
And by his bruises we were healed.
We all went astray like sheep,
Each going his own way;
And the LORD visited upon him
The guilt of all of us.
He was maltreated, yet he was submissive,
He did not open his mouth;
Like a sheep being led to slaughter,
Like a ewe, dumb before those who shear her,
He did not open his mouth.
By oppressive judgment he was taken away
Who could describe his abode?
For he was cut off from the land of the living
Through the sin of my people, who deserved the punishment.
And his grave was set among the wicked,
And with the rich, in his death
Though he had done no injustice
And had spoken no falsehood.
But the LORD chose to crush him by disease,
That, if he made himself an offering for guilt,
He might see offspring and have long life,
And that through him the LORD’s purpose might prosper.
Out of his anguish he shall see it,
He shall enjoy it to the full through his devotion.
“My righteous servant makes the many righteous,
It is their punishment that he bears;
Assuredly, I will give him the many as his portion,
He shall receive the multitude as his spoil.
For he exposed himself to death
And was numbered among the sinners,
Whereas he bore the guilt of the many
And made intercession for sinners.” (52:13-53:12)
Isaiah 53 played an outsized role in the thought of French intellectual René Girard (1923-2015). In his La Violence et le Sacré (1972; Violence and the Sacred, 1977) and his magnum opus, Des Choses Cachées Depuis la Fondation du Monde (1978; Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, 1987), Girard came upon the seminal insight that human desire arises mimetically – people want what others want – and violence is unavoidably generated when different individuals’ desires inevitably converge on objects that cannot be shared. Paroxysmal violence – sudden and recurrent outbursts of aggression – is also subject to mimesis, and the feedback loop triggered by one original act of brutality quickly escalates to “all-against-all,” to a melee or interminable blood feuds. The theory of mimesis appears to have been validated in a real-life ‘laboratory’: Girard’s student Peter Thiel credits his application of the theory to start-up ventures – including Facebook – to having propelled him to billionaire status.
From early times, human communities found a solution: the scapegoat. One member of the group would be selected for blame for the social disorder, or for any disruption, even illnesses or natural disasters. This individual would absorb all of the violence, and thereby allow for the continued existence of the community – which would now turn from competition for the same object to collaboration toward destroying the same enemy. The recognition of the power of this individual to harm the community, and to reconcile it, led the scapegoated individual – deemed a monster in life – to be “divinized,” literally or figuratively, in her death or banishment.
To be a suitable scapegoat, the individual needs to attract the crowd’s gaze by being similar enough to the group to be part of the social system, but different in some way – possessed of some unusual physical attribute or disability, illness, or mark of outsider status – and thus someone whose death would not be avenged. The individual is then targeted for blame and elimination. On a (usually) nonlethal, lesser scale, scapegoat dynamics can be seen in nearly every social setting, from dysfunctional families to classroom bullying to workplace gossip.
The rites and taboos of religion, and the dynamics of politics and culture, are all traced by Girard to these phenomena. Every community has, at its foundation, a scapegoat story. Since the eruption of mimetic violence constantly threatens the community, the primordial victim needs to be recalled by sacrificial re-enactment rituals which preserve and restore order, and desire needs to be controlled by legislation – by prohibitions. The paradigmatic ritual is the cathartic Greek pharmakos rite practiced in the city-states of Abdera, Athens, and Leukas, in which, at certain festivals and in response to certain crises, a low-class individual was chased out of the city with stones, and – at least as it was understood in Girard’s time[10] – killed.
For European anthropology, myths are the narrative corollaries of ritual, and so Girard unpacks ancient Greek mythology. He demonstrates that in the myths, one finds, relatively consistently, the pattern of mimetic crises resolved through the killing of a victim. Moreover, in all of them, the perspective taken is that of the scapegoaters: the victim is always accused of something awful, cast as the reason for social chaos, deserving of punishment.
The Bible departs from ancient mythology by narrating many of its stories from the perspective of the scapegoat, conveying that the victims are innocent – or, at least, more innocent than they are made out to be by the lynch mobs. By demonstrating the scapegoat concept’s bankruptcy, the Hebrew Bible subverts the mechanism of scapegoating, the very foundation of archaic religion, politics and culture, entirely.
From 1961, Girard had become a committed Catholic. He argued that “throughout the Old Testament, a work of exegesis is in progress, operating in precisely the opposite direction to the usual dynamics of mythology and culture. And yet it is impossible to say that this work is completed.”[11] The (literal) apotheosis of the process begun in the Hebrew Bible comes only with the story of the Passion of the Christ. Isaiah 53, for him, is a crux.
All the traits attributed to the Servant predispose him to the role of a veritable human scapegoat… This event therefore has the character not of a ritual but of the type of event from which, according to my hypothesis, rituals and all aspects of religion are derived. The most striking aspect here, the trait which is certainly unique, is the innocence of the Servant, the fact that he has no connection with violence and no affinity for it. A whole number of passages lay upon men the principal responsibility for his saving death. One of these even appears to attribute to men the exclusive responsibility for that death. ‘Yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted’ (Isaiah 53, 4). In other words, this was not so. It was not God who smote him; God’s responsibility is implicitly denied.[12]
For Girard, the absolute innocence of the scapegoated victim, Jesus – by dint of his virgin birth and even his mother’s immaculate conception, exempted from original sin – and his total divestment from violence, turning the other cheek, radiating love, totally repudiating even animal sacrifice and legalism, both aimed at keeping violence in check – exposes the bankruptcy of scapegoating in the most extreme way. Going forward, Girard argues for the implementation of Jesus’ message by means of the unilateral renunciation of violence by humanity. But he acknowledges the improbability of this, and due to the nullification of effective scapegoating mechanisms by Christianity, predicts an apocalypse by our own making, an all-against-all of mimetic violence.
Needless to say, these last steps in Girard’s thinking are most controversial.
In a brilliant Ph.D thesis, Vanessa Avery endeavors to put forth a Jewish Girardianism.[13] She demonstrates, by means of several examples, that Girard’s theory does indeed come to full expression already in the Hebrew Bible and does not require the Passion and Crucifixion. Further, the bases upon which the latter becomes a crux are problematic for Jews. For one, Girard’s belief in Jesus’ unique existential innocence rests upon layers of Catholic dogma. Also, the Girardian image of a God ‘above the fray’ of violence, an unchanging ideal of pure love and peace – which, incidentally, is not necessarily even supported by the New Testament narrative – is far from the multi-dimensional Jewish God who messily engages with human beings where they are at.
Finally, and most problematically, Girard attempts to read the Gospels as pristine documents, untainted by even the politically and polemically charged contexts in which they emerged – not to mention their long, bloody afterlives. Girard himself does recognize, though, that the new religion constructed out of the Gospels, which replicated the ritual and political structures that came before them, more than missed the point entirely.
This kind of restrictive interpretation is indeed the only way out for a type of thought that is in principle made over to ‘Christianity’ but is firmly resolved to divest itself of any form of violence, and so inevitably brings with it a new form of violence, directed against a new scapegoat – the Jew. In brief, what happens again is what Jesus reproached the Pharisees for doing, and since Jesus has been accepted, it can no longer be done directly to him. Once again, the truth and universality of the process revealed by the text is demonstrated as it is displaced toward the latest available victims. Now it is the Christians who say: If we had lived in the days of our Jewish fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of Jesus. If the people whom Jesus addresses and who do not listen to him fulfil the measure of their fathers, then the Christians who believe themselves justified in denouncing these same people in order to exculpate themselves are fulfilling a measure that is already full to overflowing. They claim to be governed by the text that reveals the process of misunderstanding, and yet they repeat that misunderstanding. With their eyes fixed on the text, they do once again what the text condemns.[14]
From a Jewish perspective, one might say that the greatest irony in all of this is that a decontextualized reading of Isaiah 53 is precisely what brought about the contextualized fulfillment of Isaiah 53. In the exegetic replacement of the Jewish people as Isaianic scapegoat with Jesus, they actually emplaced the Jewish people as paradigmatic scapegoat – for two millennia.
Deutero-Isaiah as a unit gives voice to the most unambiguous expressions of monotheism in the Hebrew Bible,[15] ridicules the absurdity of the worship of a material deity, and repeatedly reaffirms God’s eternal commitment to the Jewish people. It leaves no possible argument for supersession of God’s Chosen People by a group that accepts Divine incarnation, the divinity of a flesh and blood. Only a reading completely against the grain – one that beggars belief – could give rise to an interpretation which made the Jews of that age, and all ages, into deicidal villains. And yet that belief entranced the minds of billions, rendering Jews pharmakoi for a Christendom which, having jettisoned sacrifice and legalistic ritual, ultimately substituted Crusade, Inquisition, pogrom and Holocaust. In the earliest years of Christian empire, the shivah de-nehemta – seven weeks of meditating upon this ignored context – was a most fitting act of spiritual resistance.
Nostra Aetate, the 1965 declaration of the Catholic Church regarding its relations with non-Christian religions under the Vatican II ecumenical council, was a watershed for Jewish-Christian relations. No longer would the Jews be accused of deicide, and antisemitism was formally repudiated.
But structural antisemitism remains a blind spot for Western societies.
The idea – the monstrous Jew who needs to be destroyed as the pharmakos for a riven society – still animates the dark recesses of many (formerly) Christian minds, just as much as it is spoken aloud in Arabic.
It seems to surprise no one that accusations never directed at any other Western democracy are hurled at the State of the Jews. In its current conflict, Israel is an angry, vengeful, war-criminal entity, prosecuting a war that the Irish Prime Minister described early on as “something approaching revenge,”[16] and an American President later intoned about Israel’s actions being “over the top,”[17] with “indiscriminate bombing” – contradicting his spokesperson[18] and military experts regarding Israel’s deliberate, careful, at times even surgical, approach ,[19] and unprecedentedly low civilian to militant ratios, given the nature of this sort of combat. This seems nothing other than the stereotype of the Old Testament Jew, the Shylock who will settle for nothing but his pound of flesh, applied so readily to the Jewish scapegoat of medieval times – a relatively innocent pharmakos bearing the cross of those societies, which, like the Sinn Féin of the twentieth century, was actually always mired in revenge and reciprocal violence?
Unusual expectations are applied to the scapegoat. The authors of the siege of Mariupol fault Jews for not feeding their enemy. And we do feed them! – and yet it is still said that the Jews are intentionally starving civilian populations, never mind the masked, armed militants clearly photographed diverting aid to their lairs. And red lines exist that are absent from any other conflict: Israel’s closest ally insists that the Jews’ sworn enemies cannot be displaced from combat areas; their territory must not be diminished with buffer zones, because the conflict must continue. It is best that we give up, “ceasefire now,” but if our children must proceed to try to rescue our hostages, it ought to be with two hands, and both feet, tied behind their backs.
States and politicians masquerade behind masks of morality and cloak of concern, the facts be damned, in the pursuit of naked economic interests and electoral ambitions. When violence embroils their base or consumes their campuses, they reach for the ready scapegoat, whose appeal crosses continents and cultures. Less self-aware cultures abuse the scapegoat explicitly, while more sophisticated ones cast shade and reach for dog whistles.
Jews cannot be vindicated in any court of international opinion, because a just war cannot be just if it is fought by Jews. Because in troubled times, the cohesion of Western civilization depends upon Jews being made to stand in the dock. It needs the Jews to suffer, as projections of its own ambivalences, and recipients of its own aggressions.
Rashi, commenting upon Isaiah 53 in the eleventh century, seems to have understood this.[20]
“It was our sickness that he was bearing” (v. 4): . . . He was afflicted by suffering so that all the nations should achieve atonement through the afflictions of Israel. He bore the sickness that should have come upon us. . . “The chastisement of our peace was upon him” (v. 5): The afflictions for the peace that we experienced came upon him; that is, he was subjected to suffering so that peace should prevail for the entire world.
The logic of scapegoat transcends not merely space, but also time; and so some of today’s accusations demonstrate atavistic continuity with age-old tropes. Under the logic of Carl Schmitt’s 1922 Political Theology, “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”[21] The heinous Christian libel of Jewish ritual murder of children, a restatement of the deicide canard, is detransubstantiated into the charge of Israeli pedicide. A United Nations Secretary-General is quick to accept figures invented[22] by a terrorist group and declare that Gaza is becoming a “graveyard for children.”
Why would one accept the presumption that Israel, uniquely, seeks to kill children? The answer starts with Acts’ read of Isaiah 53, with the charge of the murder of the most innocent – and winds through twelfth-century England, around seventeen Jewish skeletons at the bottom of a well in Norwich,[23] among them a toddler, a child, and three sisters – scapegoats all to the first instantiation of the virulent mutation that would claim thousands more such pharmakoi. By means of this invented blood ritual replacing the abolished sacrifices, Christian Europe would redirect its mounting aggression for eight more centuries, ever more frenetically, until even six million sacrifices could not keep the continent from descending entirely into the abyss.
The next stage, “deification” of the sacrificed scapegoat, is best epitomized in the very title of Dara Horn’s penetrating recent book, People Love Dead Jews,[24] which dilates on the dreadful state of affairs in which non-Jews remain averse and unempathetic to actual living Jews and their culture, but are at the same time enthusiastic about marking Jewish sorrow, suffering, and tragedy, which serve to reinforce their societies’ own shallow values.
I have come to understand that Isaiah 53 was always going to need to be a part of the prophecies of redemption, because redemption is not only about the repatriation of the Jewish people; it is about solving the deep violence that is at the root of human societies, large and small. It is the Jews, the suffering servants of God who became a nation of scapegoats – who feel the searing pain of unwarranted violence, shame and betrayal – who are best suited to heal humankind’s rotten core and transition from deutero-Isaiah to trito-Isaiah, to “Arise, shine” and “I greatly rejoice in the Lord.”
Hope will come to all of humankind from within that fortress of solitude that we hadn’t hoped for, but is inevitable for, a people chosen always to be ‘abnormal’ – to resist mimetic moralities, mob psychology and the wisdom of the crowd. In the obloquy of ‘Israel alone’ lies a great bounty: the possibility of real exceptionalism.
Human history is littered with failed political orders, from Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic to Weimar Germany and Communist Russia – noble systems that for some time could forestall, but were ultimately unable to prevent, descent into political violence. The contemporary menu of democratic experiments will also find, sooner or later, that scapegoating is a poisoned chalice.
Judaism doesn’t prescribe a particular political system,[25] perhaps because it knows that they are all doomed to failure. Isaiah suggests a way out of the violence that inevitably claims all societies: for individuals to avoid the traps of mimetic associativity, to eschew going along to get along, to interrogate the ways in which mimesis and scapegoat logic colors our behavior and corrupts our values, to find our selves so as to be able to see others. This is the essence of virtue. It cannot be legislated, but religion can recommend it.
It features sharing bread with the hungry and clothing the naked, alongside the voluntary restraint and submission to God associated with economic abstention on the Sabbath (chapter 58). The coda to the decalogue is the entirely unenforceable ‘thou shalt not covet,’ the root of that mimesis which leads down the path to ruin.
It is difficult to know how redemption might look. But it will surely come with the return of that which was maligned by the bullies, by the distorted theology that ordered that Jews learn shame for their most treasured traditions. It will retain or restore, in some form, ritual – the human “release valve” of sacrifice – thus averting Girard’s apocalypse, but will not permit it to be contaminated with hypocrisy, with murder and idolatry, (66:3) with the creating of human scapegoats, which would render animal, vegetable, and mineral sacrifice pointless. For His part, God will press a new vintage from those who continue to insist upon making pharmakoi of His (or any) people (63:1-6). And, at some point, the awful, wonderful chosenness of God’s once-suffering servant will be extended to any among the nations who wish to embrace their commitments, who will retrieve God’s suffering scapegoats from the wilderness and let them shepherd them to the city of God.
[The time] has come to gather all the nations and tongues; they shall come and behold My glory. I will set a sign among them, and send from them survivors to the nations: to Tarshish, Pul, and Lud – that draw the bow to Tubal, Javan, and the distant coasts, that have never heard My fame nor beheld My glory. They shall declare My glory among these nations. And out of all the nations, said the Lord, they shall bring all your brothers on horses, in chariots and drays, on mules and dromedaries, to Jerusalem My holy mountain as an offering to the Lord – just as the Israelites bring an offering in a pure vessel to the House of the Lord. And from them likewise I will take some to be Levitical priests, said the Lord.
For as the new heaven and the new earth
Which I will make
Shall endure by My will
declares the Lord.
So shall your seed and your name endure.
And new moon after new moon,
And [S]abbath after [S]abbath,
All flesh shall come to worship Me
said the Lord. (66:19-23)
[1] Yoel Bin-Nun, “Part Four: The Days of Manasseh,” in Yoel Bin-Nun and Binyamin Lau, Isaiah: Prophet of Righteousness and Justice (Maggid, 2019), 218-219.
[2] Translation of biblical passages are from the 1985 Jewish Publication Society (JPS) edition.
[3] Seder ha-Ibbur, Seder ha-Parashiyot ve-haHaftarot, 59.
[4] I am indebted to R. Jonathan Ziring for this reference.
[5] Binyamin Elizur, “Mi-Puranut le-Nehamah: Minhagei ha-Keri’ah ve-haHaftarah ha-Kedumim be-Shabatot ha-Puranut ve-haNehamah u-beTishah be-Av” (Heb.), Derech Agada 12 (2013): 267-282.
[6] Giuseppe Veltri, “The Septuagint in disgrace: Some notes on the stories on Ptolemy in Rabbinic and Medieval Judaism,” Jewish Reception of Greek Bible Versions (Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 142-154.
[7] Ann Gibbons, “Eruption made 536 ‘the worst year to be alive’,” Science 362 (2018): 733-734.
[8] Joel E. Rembaum, “The development of a Jewish exegetical tradition regarding Isaiah 53,” Harvard Theological Review 75:3 (1982), 289-311, n. 5.
[9] Eugene Kontorovich, “Unsettled: A global study of settlements in occupied territories,” Journal of Legal Analysis 9:2 (2017): 285-350.
[10] Esther Eidinow, “The Ancient Greek Pharmakos Rituals: A Study in Mistrust,” Numen 69:5-6 (2022): 489-516.
[11] René Girard, Jean-Michel Oughourlian, and Guy Lefort, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Michael Metteer (Stanford University Press, 1987), 157.
[12] Ibid., 156-157.
[13] Vanessa Jane Avery, Jewish Vaccines against Mimetic Desire: René Girard and Jewish Ritual, Ph.D Diss., (University of Exeter, 2013).
[14] Girard, Things Hidden, 175.
[15] Hermann Vorländer, Is God Just? Theodicy and Monotheism in the Old Testament with Special Regard to the Theology of Deutero-Isaiah (Peter Lang, 2022), especially 123-131.
[16]https://www.reuters.com/world/irish-pm-says-israel-actions-gaza-resemble-something-approaching-revenge-2023-11-03/.
[17] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/08/biden-israel-gaza-speech-netanyahu/.
[18]https://edition.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news-12-13-23/h_4675fdc6dc4b2f3a8c9b2532c3a0272c.
[19]https://www.newsweek.com/israel-implemented-more-measures-prevent-civilian-casualties-any-other-nation-history-opinion-1865613 ; https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/24/opinion/gaza-israel-war.html.
[20] Translation from David Berger, “Rashi on Isaiah 53: Exegetical Judgement or Response to the Crusade?,” Polemical and Exegetical Polarities in Medieval Jewish Cultures: Studies in Honour of Daniel J. Lasker (De Gruyter, 2021): 301.
[21] Carl Schmitt, Political theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, Trans. George Schwab. (University of Chicago Press, 2005), 36.
[22] Abraham Wyner, “How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers,” Tablet (March 6, 2024) archived at https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-gaza-health-ministry-fakes-casualty-numbers and accessed on March 11, 2024. These findings were challenged in two studies, summarized at https://time.com/6909636/gaza-death-toll/ and accessed April 15, 2024, but the latter studies presume a fully functional Gaza health system, which has not been obtained since November 2023. See, for example, https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2024/04/09/hamas-run-gaza-health-ministry-admits-to-flaws-in-casualty-data/.
[23] Selina Brace, et al., “Genomes from a medieval mass burial show Ashkenazi-associated hereditary diseases pre-date the 12th century,” Current Biology 32:20 (2022): 4350-4359.
[24] Dara Horn, People love dead Jews: Reports from a haunted present (W.W. Norton & Company, 2021).
[25] Michael Walzer, In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible (Yale University Press, 2012). While Deuteronomy 17:15 appears to endorse a monarchy, narratives from the books of Judges and Samuel condemn it, and rabbinic voices – most stridently Don Isaac Abravanel, but from the Talmud to Abravanel and Netziv – see monarchy as optional at best, and improper at worst. See Haim Navon, “Monarchy,” https://www.etzion.org.il/en/halakha/studies-halakha/philosophy-halakha/monarchy, accessed April 15, 2024.
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