New (Prophetic!) Haftarah, This Shabbat

by Rabbi Arthur Waskow

Dear friends,

As we were preparing to send out this new Haftarah shaped from thoughts of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel — a Haftarah against racism — there were several mass murders in just a few days. Some of the frequent American mass murders have been explicitly motivated by racism. These may not have been. But they are added evidence that racism — the unique legacy of slavery and genocide — has festered so long in America that it has poisoned many people with willingness to use lethal violence against others. These mass gun killings are also unique among prosperous nations. Violence and oppression against racial minorities, against women and the LGBTQ communities, against religious minorities like Muslims, Sikhs, and Jews, against Earth and many more-than-human species, is a contagion, a virus that has escaped the territory where it began. We dedicate this Haftarah based on Rabbi Heschel’s teachings to keeping alive the loving — though blood-soaked — memories of the dead, precisely to ensure that this Prophetic message help stir us to stop the bloodshed. –- Arthur

This Shabbat, the Torah reading is about the ancient Israelites, caught between the “normalcy” of Pharaoh’s Army with a return to enslavement and the Unknown — crossing the Red Sea into Wilderness. Would they choose Freedom, which is always the Unknown?

The Shalom Center for this Shabbat is offering a new Haftarah shaped from an essay by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, written in 1964. Heschel uses the Torah text as a framework to face the everyday oppressions that racism poses to Black Americans.

His words are like the Prophetic flame of the Burning Bush — destroying nothing, not even the Bush in which it burned, but birthing commitment to make a new world of love and justice — and are just as Truth-filled today as in his own generation. We believe that reawakening them in the awe-filled melody of Haftarah is what the Prophetic readings should be.

So we are sending out (see below) a trope-marked text and the YouTube link for a chanted expression of the new Haftarah. They have just now been shaped by Hazzan Jack Kessler and Rabbi Marcia Prager from Heschel’s essay.

There were two transformative moments that came together in the last two months to stir us to this transformative action.

First, a Bar Mtzvah gathering in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia became the moment for a critique of the Haftarah’s content. The Shalom Center is raising the question whether it is time for a full review of our present long-ago selected Haftarot, and a clean-out of Haftarot that do not speak to or for our generation. In several Mount Airy synagogues, there have been efforts to develop new forms of Haftaror, with most perseverance by Kohenet Shoshana Bricklin.

The Shalom Center proposed creating a Commission on New Haftarot, and there rose a swift rush of excitement. Martha Ackelsberg, a feminist and activist scholar, and Rabbi Tamara Cohen, also a feminist who has brought new life to the Book of Lamentations (as the model for her Eicha for the Earth), the Pesach Seder (as a model for resistance to patriarchal domination) and other Jewish texts, volunteered to co-chair the Commission. It will meet for the first time this week.

The second spark for a transformative flame was that the 50th yahrzeit of Rabbi Heschel comes this month. The Shalom Center is renewing a long tradition of its weaving creative celebratory learning during that yahrzeit. Heschel’s essay about the Prophets’ constant concern for justice and love in everyday life felt suddenly like a burning leaf from the ancient Bush, blown by the Breath of Life, the Wind of Change, ruach ha’olam into our century.

The new Haftarah began as “The White Man on Trial,” in an early collection of Rabbi Heschel’s more “political” essays entitled The Insecurity of Freedom (Schocken, 1972). Original Copyright © 1964 was by Abraham Joshua Heschel. Copyright is now held by Susannah Heschel, who welcomed the Haftarah thus: “Many thanks to Marcia and Jack for your fantastic, incredible, wonderful, beautiful Haftarah based on my father’s articles on racism. You are amazing!!!”

Its content is Prophetic, and indeed speaks to our own generation of the struggle to end and transcend American racism as powerfully as it spoke to Rabbi Heschel’s own generation. Its rebirth as an Haftorah is a response to the growing feeling among many Jews that many of our present treasury of haftarot — presumably the most public Prophetic treasury of the Jewish people — may be ethically outdated and emotionally or spiritually unsuited to our generation.

We welcome you to this effort, among others that have emerged in the last several years. The flowering of such efforts is a sign, a signal, that the time has come from a new treasury of Haftarot.

With blessings of Truth, Justice, and Shalom — three Prophetic pillars to lift up the universe,

— Arthur