Parshah Commentary

On the Day of Atonement, we break from the regular parshah cycle to return to selections from Parshat Acharei Mot (reading one part in the morning and another in the afternoon). But each year, I find myself compelled less by these passages than by another biblical text traditionally read in its entirety on Yom Kippur. The book of Jonah—the afternoon haftarah, or selection from the Prophets portion of the Bible—is one of the most elusive stories in classical Hebrew literature. The overarching narrative is familiar, but the text itself is considerably darker than the family-friendly fable of Jonah and the whale. God orders the prophet to travel to the city of Nineveh to persuade its inhabitants to repent of their wickedness. Instead, Jonah boards a ship heading in the opposite direction. When a storm threatens to wreck the boat, everyone on board pleads with their gods and throws their possessions overboard—except for Jonah, who bafflingly falls asleep. Later, after he begrudgingly accepts his mission and succeeds in leading the Ninevites to repentance and divine absolution, Jonah is so angry at God’s compassion that he begs for death: “Please, Eternal One, take my life, for I would rather die than live.”

According to some classical commentaries, this desire to flee from life itself is exhibited not only in Jonah’s suicidal plea but throughout the story. One midrash teaches that “Jonah went on that voyage only to cast himself into the sea.” Jonah’s denial of life also extends to those around him—illustrated, for instance, by his choice to run away from God and thus abandon the Ninevites to their destruction, and then to endanger his fellow passengers by napping rather than taking responsibility for his actions, which brought forth God’s wrath upon the seas. But why is Jonah so callous toward his own life and the lives of those around him? One midrashic tradition, which offers an unexpected origin story for Jonah, suggests a possible explanation. In the book of Kings, the prophet Elijah miraculously resurrects a recently deceased, unnamed boy. Several commentators, following a rabbinic tendency to link unidentified minor characters in the Bible with other more central characters, interpret this boy as a young Jonah. Viewed through the lens of this midrash, Jonah’s seeming indifference to life can be understood as a response to his death and resurrection—an absolute, unassimilable rupture in experience that would surely cause severe and abiding trauma.

Read on Yom Kippur, a time of reflection on our mistakes, the book of Jonah invites us to recognize ourselves in the prophet, and to see the ways that our own trauma numbs us—both to our lives and to the suffering that surrounds us. Just as Jonah falls asleep while the ship threatens to capsize, so do we ignore the catastrophes that threaten to engulf us and our communities; just as Jonah bitterly wishes that God would destroy the vast city of Nineveh, so do we cruelly wish for the total destruction of those we consider our enemies.

It might also prompt us to hear God’s rebuke of Jonah as rebuke directed toward us. “Should I not care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons?” God asks Jonah, insisting that all life is sacred, that the fact of life makes moral claims on us. Jonah does not respond; this question, left unanswered, concludes the book. This Yom Kippur, as we consider how we have acted over the past year, we stand like Jonah before the divine insistence that we not evade responsibility for our own lives and for the lives of all who share this planet. Our pain and trauma, the text reminds us, do not justify us falling into apathy or cruelty. Jonah is silent—but how will we respond?

Daniel Kraft is a writer, translator, and educator living in Richmond, Virginia.

We’re sending this week’s parshah commentary early, for readers who will be offline for Rosh Hashanah. There will be no Shabbat Reading List this Friday, in recognition of the holiday.

This week’s parshah, Haazinu, is composed almost entirely of a poem delivered by Moses. It begins with a stirring assertion of divine perfection and justice; Moses praises God for guarding the people and leading them through “the wasted howling wilderness.” But the poem quickly takes a much darker turn, rebuking the people for descending into decadence, for “forsaking the God who made them” and “despising the Rock of their salvation.” Castigating verse then follows castigating verse. Other nations visit destruction, anger, vengeance, and slaughter upon the Jewish people, whom God has “sold” and “delivered” into the hands of their enemies. Devastatingly, God claims responsibility for all of this tragedy, declaring, “See now that it is I! I am the One, and there is no god like me. I kill, and I grant life; I wound, and I heal; and no one can deliver from my hand.”

So unrelenting is our parshah’s admonishment that its reading necessitates an exception to an otherwise unbroken custom: Throughout the year, Maimonides writes, “whoever is called to read from the Torah begins [the section] with a positive matter and concludes with a positive matter.” But, he continues, in the case of Haazinu, this is not so, since “these are verses of rebuke, intended to motivate the people toward repentance [teshuvah].” As later authorities note, this exception is especially apt given that this parshah is always read in the weeks surrounding Yom Kippur—most often, as it is this year, on the Shabbat between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

The poem concludes as abruptly as it begins, with a return to the Torah’s narrative mode: “And Moses came and spoke all the words of this song in the ears of the people.” But perhaps more jarring than this sudden genre shift is the fact that the text itself refers to the poem as a song (“shirah”)—a neutral or even positive term—rather than as a lament (“kinah”). Indeed, according to the Talmud, it was actually sung by the Levite musicians as part of the Shabbat liturgy in the Jerusalem Temple, suggesting that this grim dirge harbors a message that is ultimately joyous.

Where, then, is this joy to be found? The Lubavitcher Rebbe suggests that it lies in Haazinu’s paradoxical framing of all tragedy as divine, and therefore somehow part of something meaningful. “The deeds of the Rock are perfect,” we read at the outset of the poem, “for all His ways are justice, a steadfast God without wrong, true and equitable is He.” At this moment of catastrophic violence and terror, this might seem cold comfort. Indeed, joy may appear unattainable or even irresponsible. But it is precisely at such times that we must take up this verse’s invitation to shun nihilism—to trust in the enduring promise of redemption, and thereby keep the flame of joy alive amid the darkness.

The personal work of teshuvah depends on a similar tension. To reorient toward virtue depends first and foremost on a bitter recognition of our own failings. Yet, the Hasidic masters warned, acknowledging this pain should not lead us to self-flagellation, nor to despair, but rather to a joyful return to God. The complexity of teshuvah, so aptly reflected in Haazinu’s poem, is also eloquently expressed in a powerful Zoharic aphorism: “Weeping is affixed in one side of my heart, and joy is affixed in the other.”

Eli Rubin is a contributing editor at Chabad.org and the author of Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism, forthcoming from Stanford University Press.

This week’s double parshah, Nitzavim-Vayelech, continues a multi-week thread of divine warnings about the dangers the Israelites will face once they cross into the Land of Israel. These admonitions focus on the existential danger of coming into contact with the tribes already living in the land; according to the text, this encounter is liable to lead the Israelites to adopt idolatry and immorality, and thus to endure God’s unrelenting punishment. The Israelites, God explains, “will go astray after the alien gods in their midst, in the land that they are about to enter; they will forsake Me and break My covenant that I made with them. Then My anger will flare up against them, and I will abandon them and hide My countenance from them. They shall be ready prey; and many evils and troubles shall befall them.” The Torah is clear: Adopting the ways of the surrounding peoples will lead to our certain demise.

Rabbi Aharon Shmuel Tamares (1869–1931)—an underappreciated Polish rabbi and philosopher who has recently gained more attention following the publication of a translated collection of his writing—makes a direct connection between the Israelites’ penchant for adopting their neighbors’ practices and the rise of Jewish political nationalism, which he traces back to the Israelites’ entrance into the Land of Israel and their decision to appoint kings as rulers. “The Holy Spirit,” he writes, “began to be driven away and separated from [the Jewish People] by the gross spirit of ‘political nationalism’ which took their hearts. And as the Holy Spirit fled from the people, the imprint of the Torah also faded.” Thus, the “Jewish People fulfilled its intention to be ‘like all the nations,’ and performed its part: it saddled itself with kings. And the kings performed their part: they involved the nation in cruel wars, and thus the people [became both] killed and killers, slaughtered and slaughterers . . . All of it, the whole business, exactly as carried [out] in the surrounding nations.” Rabbi Tamares links this ancient politicization to the Jewish embrace of 20th-century nationalism in the development of political Zionism. In his view, “Zionism understood in this way should be spurned and discarded,” for it represented the most recent fulfillment of our parshah’s grim warning: Inspired by the nations around us, who saw nationalism as the highest embodiment of collectivity, we, too, took on a nationalist ethos, despite God’s disapproval.

Often, Jewish commitment to separatism is seen as a root cause of Jewish supremacy, especially as enshrined in Israeli apartheid’s legal subjugation of Palestinians. And indeed, verses like the ones in our parshah that prohibit adopting the practices of the people around us can lead us to believe that we are fundamentally different from and superior to others—chosen for a higher and more sacred purpose, unlike them. But as Rabbi Tamares explains it, Jewish supremacy is not the result of our attempts to be distinct, but rather the manifestation of our sameness. It is what emerges when we, despite the Torah’s many warnings, embrace the practices of rulers and kings, seek protection and safety in idolatrous ideologies and states. This reading suggests that to counteract and uproot Jewish supremacy, we need not shy away from the particularity of what it means to be Jewish, but should instead interrogate the places where we—individually and collectively—have internalized and replicated the ways of oppressive nations and empires.

Laynie Soloman is a teacher and associate rosh yeshiva at SVARA.

This week’s parshah, Ki Tavo, opens with instructions to Israelite yeoman farmers, enjoining them to bring the first portion of their harvest to the Temple as a sacred donation. Upon arrival, the farmers recite a formula that summarizes the Israelite narrative: We were oppressed as slaves in Egypt, but when we cried out, God rescued us with miraculous power and delivered us to this rich land, whose fruits are now brought as tribute.

While this rite has not been performed for two millennia, since the destruction of the Temple, today many extremist religious Zionists see the rebuilding of the Temple—and the revival of rituals like this one—as a tangible political possibility, even though this project callously disregards the site’s holy status in Islam. With a growing segment of the Israeli polity adhering to far-right religious Zionism, what once seemed like a fanciful dream now has the backing of government ministers. Initiatives like the Temple Institute, which used to exude the twee enthusiasm of a re-enactment club, have assumed a malevolent plausibility.

However, even if they were to accomplish their aims, could these ultranationalist Temple restorationists perform the ritual of this week’s parshah with integrity? The farmer’s liturgy, after all, is rooted in respect for the land as the source of wealth and prosperity, thanking God for “bringing us to this place and giving us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” While religious Zionists focus obsessively on the land, advancing a goal of territorial acquisition, this enterprise prioritizes military might and dispossession over the health of the land itself. Indeed, Israel’s production of military technology, a core pillar of the state’s permanent war economy, depletes non-renewable resources, and its use is devastating to the environment. For instance, the toxic metals in Israeli-produced armed drones contaminate water sources and contribute to soil acidification. Of course, religious Zionists’ violent project of territorial expansion is also inimical to Palestinian life and flourishing. This puts it in direct opposition to the second liturgy featured in our parshah—a formula the farmer must recite when tithing produce, which speaks of generosity and care for the marginalized: “I have cleared out the consecrated portion from the house; I have given it to the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, just as you commanded me.”

Our parshah has harsh words for those who neglect this care: “Cursed be he who subverts the rights of the stranger.” This ominous line appears in the darker second half of this week’s reading; after the description of agricultural liturgy, we get a torrential litany of punishments that will be the fate of anyone who violates God’s commandments. The curses paint a picture of a debased and defeated people, abandoned by their God and rejected by the land. The land of milk and honey will turn to dust and leave the Israelites impoverished, desperate, and vulnerable to exploitation by the very stranger they were meant to care for. These curses, described in vivid detail and at magisterial length, are meant to awaken the listeners, prosperous and comfortable Israelites who do not expect their fortunes to change. Having lived in exile for countless generations, today’s Jewish people should remember the contingency of territorial control in the Holy Land and heed the warning given to us by our parshah: “Because you would not serve the Lord your God in joy and gladness over the abundance of everything, you shall serve your enemies whom the Lord will send against you in hunger and in thirst and in nakedness and in lack of all things.”

Avi Garelick is a researcher and organizer based in Washington Heights, New York.