Pre-Election Prophecies

Dear friends,

“Afflicted city, lashed by storms and not comforted,
I will rebuild you with stones of turquoise,
your foundations with lapis lazuli.
I will make your battlements of rubies,
your gates of sparkling jewels,
and all your walls of precious stones.
All your children will be learned in the ways of The Presence
and great will be their peace.
In righteousness you will be established:
Tyranny will be far from you;
you will have nothing to fear.”

Some weeks the Haftarah reads like the very promise we need. Isaiah still speaks our language:

“For a brief moment I abandoned you,
but with deep compassion I will bring you back.
In a surge of anger
I hid my face from you for a moment,
but with everlasting kindness
I will have compassion on you,”

The Talmud asks how long this moment of abandonment of mercy lasts.
“God’s anger lasts a moment. And how long is a moment? One fifty-eight thousand, eight hundred and eighty-eighth of an hour, that is a moment.”
What feels like years to us is pretty short in the divine clock.

The prophetic promise continues:

“Do not be afraid; you will not be put to shame.
Do not fear disgrace; you will not be humiliated.”

The Kabbalist poet Shlomo Halevi Alkabetz, who wrote Lekha Dodi, which we will sing this evening, took Isaiah’s words and reconstructed them as a reason why we shouldn’t be afraid:

Don't be ashamed! Don't be abashed!
Why be depressed? Why be upset?
In you my poor people will be sheltered
And she shall be rebuilt - the city on her hill!

Though we feel small, weak, helpless in the face of the scary world around us, we actually have the capacity to be the shelter of the oppressed, and that in turn will revive the city as a whole.
Like most of his fellow prophets, Isaiah did not sit around waiting for redemption to happen on its own. What appears to us like a horror could in fact be a calling to the gate of a new time of reconciliation. When the BLM protests began in the spring I found myself at an interfaith vigil. An African American pastor spoke some simple words that have stayed in my heart:
How mighty is God!
It’s a sentence spoken not in New Shul language. We might say: The way this time unfolded - with the terrible death and sickness, the isolation and sadness, the sirens booming, and then suddenly the protests, the renewed call for justice, the ability of the country and ourselves to listen and to act - the way it all went down, as if by design is crazy. We don’t really know what is going on.
Maybe Isaiah does when he sings:

“Though the mountains be shaken
and the hills be removed,
yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken
nor will my covenant of peace falter.”

I look forward to bringing in Shabbat with you all this evening at 6:30.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha