We are gathered together on this Shabbat morning to hear the words of the Torah and the voice of the prophets, as we are bidden to do each Shabbat. What a Shabbat this is. For it is Shabbat Yitro. It takes its name, as all our parshiyot do, from the first verse which tells of Yitro coming to greet Moses in the wilderness and reunite him with his two small sons and his wife Tziporah. Yitro advises Moses to establish justice by setting up a system of courts. Moses takes that advice. Next, we approach Sinai, the smoking mountain on which God has descended to speak to Moses and the people Israel, to give them laws by which to live to establish justice in the land that God has promised them, assure peace within their families, and remain faithful to the God that has brought them out of the land of Mitzrayim, Egypt "to be their God." Those, after all, are the purposes and intended effects of the Ten Commandments that God spoke to the assembled multitude. Divinity, in all its grandeur and all its thrilling promise, emanates from the great theophany that we and our daughter religions, Islam and Christianity, revere.
And then we come to the Haftorah. If you were not attentive to the magnificent, visionary rhetoric compressed into the few lines that Hanna beautifully chanted in her classic modern Hebrew diction, here's your chance, to recoup. This is Isaiah, speaking half a millennium after the bright flower of Sinai had withered and describing his own personal revelation. Instead of listening with your ears imagine with your eyes the scene that Isaiah depicts. [Plaut 710] 1:4 "In the year that King Uzziah died, I beheld my Lord seated on a high and lofty throne: and the skirts of His robe filled the Temple. Seraphim stood in attendance on Him, Each [with six wings} And one would call to the other [Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, Adonai Tzevaot] "Holy, Holy, Holy Holy, The Lord of Hosts! His presence fills all the earth." (You recall this famous line that we sing during the Amidah twice a day. The Christians revere it to: "Sanctus, sanctus, Dominus Deus Sabbaoth".) "I And Isaiah cried woe is me. Oy, li. "For I am a man of [uncircumicised] lips; Yet my own eyes have beheld The King Lord of Hosts."
"Then one of the seraphim flew over to me with a live coal which he had taken from the alr with a pair of tongs. He touched it to my lips and declared, "Now that this has touched your lips Your guild shall depart and your sins shall be purged away." Then Isaiah heard the voice of the Lord sayin "Whom Shall I send? Who will go for us?" "And I said Here am I; send me." And God told commanded Isaiah to deliver His message to the people.
And what is the message that Isaiah is told to convey? "Dull the people's mind, stop its ears, and seal its eyes, lest seeing with its eyes and hearing with its ears, it also grasp with its mind and repent and save itself." What kind of message is that for God to have his prophet deliver? It is a message of anger, of passionate rejection, because the people that God carried on eagle's wings through the desert and upon whom God had lavished His gift of Torah, of the law of lovingindness and justice, had forsaken Him to whore after wealth and power and Lord knows what else "Woe unto ye, ye kine of Bashan," Isaiah says elsewhere. And God pronounces His sentence.
When Isaiah asks "How long, my Lord?" the answer comes swiftly: 'til towns lie waste without inhabitants, and houses without people, and the ground lies waste and desolate."
What precisely has the people done to merit such anger and destruction? Our parshah does not say, but Isaiah does.>
alas, she the faithful city that was filled with justice has become a harlot,
your hands drip with blood
where righteousness dwelt now murderers live
your rulers are rogues, and cronies of thieves
every one avid for presents
and greedy for gifts
they do not judge the case of the orphan,
and the widow's cause never reaches them
your silver has become dross (dross=impurities that result from smelting metal; the scum that forms when you do that)
your wine is diluted
your princes are companions of thieves
everyone loves bribes and runs after payments
Do you think Isaiah was speaking only to his generation. His words are timeless. He could have been speaking to us. Our rulers take bribes. They have established a system that funnels gold into their greedy hands in exchange for favors of all kinds that benefit the rich and successful. Look at the tax code. Its thousands of pages smell to high heaven with the stench of corruption. Look at the public lands. Much of what remains is in parks and preserves that far seeing patriots like Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir put in trust for future generations, that means you [point] and your children's children. To benefit their cronies, as Isaiah called the rich and powerful of his day, our rulers now allow your inheritance to be pillaged and scraped away, ransacked supposedly to feed our insatiable lusts for fuel and great mansions but really to slake the insatiable thirst of corporate monsters for profits, a thirst that leads them to massacre our fellow creatures, the birds, bears, the wolves, the owls, the cairbou and cut down the great forests that we may have been the last generation to gaze upon. Can you imagine....the Congress is poised to enact yet another subsidy for energy companies, allowing them to extract our----yours and my----oil wealth and to pay nothing, that's right, nothing for it. At a time when the price of oil is double, triple, and quadruple the prices that prevailed in the 1990s our princes are giving away our-the people's----oil reserves. And the princes of our day so disrespect our legacy that they have decimated the National Park Service. In many places we and our children learn about the wonders of nature by watching videos rather than by walking in the wild with the highly trained forest rangers of old. Our parks are laid open to poachers, thieves, and hucksters.
God told Isaiah the land would be wasted, but you need not wait for God to act to see what is happening here. Just walk along the C&O canal and look across the Potomac to the Virginia bluffs. From time immemorial the breathtaking view across the Potomac had been preserved by a combination of landowner responsibility and to a much lesser extent government land acquisition. But in recent years the appetite of the rich and the well connected to flaunt their wealth and of developers to acquire it has enabled avarice to trump pristine beauty, so the trees, the rabbits, and the trails are gone and in their stead are McMansions and a large multi-story building, with more to come. And closer to home, in Montgomery County? So much for the "rocks and rills, the woods and templed hills," that we salute in song and obliterate in action, grinding them away beneath the bulldozer and the bank loan.
And what of the widow and the orphan, whose cry to God Isaiah heard but princes and rulers of his day did not. You know the modern equivalent. You saw them in New Orleans when Katrina unmasked the awful truth that the city hid, some defamed throughout the world as rapists and murderers, others swept away, abandoned to the flood waters that they could not escape while our rulers, tardily awakening from their slumbers, fecklessly preened before the cameras and spoke importantly into their cell phones. New Orleans may never rise again because decades old warning went unheeded.
The race for bribes and favors among our princes goes on. Just this past week our rulers traded away the health of indigent children, their families, and their grandparents yet again to "give back" to the rich and the super-rich money that the worthy amongst them had spurned lest, as has now happened, those dollars be taken from the pain racked bodies and the disease ravaged minds of the poor ill and injured and from others long unable to find work. And have we not become one of the bloodiest nations in the civilized world? Not only for the murders that we fail to prevent at home----you know we have just about the highest murder rate in the wealthy world---- but also for the terrible suffering we, in our blindness and fear, inflict beyond our shores. Like the Israelites of old, whom the prophet condemned, we have learned to call dross "silver" and diluted wine "ambrosia," to label heroes "cowards and psychophants," and those who raise their voices against our sins "angry women."
For sins like these, the prophets taught, God allowed His chosen people to be slaughtered and the survivors exiled at the hands of their jealous and unbelieving enemies who were then as they are now, ever prepared to execute God's judgement on those who spurned His commandments and His gifts. Do you believe that this society, hell bent on stopping up its own ears and closing its own eyes in the name of God, will escape from the snares of its own devising? Prisoners of deliberate "spin," deception, outright lies, and indifference, have we thus become like Shakespeare's groundlings, "for the most part capable of nothing but inexplicable dumbshows and noise?"
Do you doubt that for its sins our society will suffer? Then you have not attended closely enough to the true Prophet.
"How long, O Lord.?" the Isaiah asked, will you punish this people suffer for the witting and unwitting sins of which it is guilty? I have the same question, seeing our sins as red as scarlet. Not forever, Isaiah prophesies in our haftorah, "for a child has been given us, And authority has been settled on his shoulders. He, the Mighty God planning grace, the Eternal father, has named him "the prince of peace." He will rule in justice and in equity now and evermore. The zeal of the Lord of Hosts shall bring this to pass."
A few perakim previously, Isaiah had described redemption in different terms. You all know the catch phrase in the magnificent vision that I am about to remind you of, for we sing it every Shabbat when we take out the Torah. "Ki mitziyon teytze torah, u'dvar adonai mi-yrushalayim." "Out of Zion shall come forth the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem."
Listen (Isaiah 2:2, et seq):
In the days to come many peoples shall go and say: "Come, let us go up to the Mount of the Lord, To the House of the God of Jacob; That He may instruct us in his ways, And that we may walk in the His paths. For instruction shall come forth from Zion, The word of the Lord from Jerusalem. Thus he will judge among the nations And arbitrate for many peoples, And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, And their spears into pruning hooks: Nation shall not lift up Sword against nation: neither shall they learn war any more."
I believe in Isaiah's great vision, though I know that humankind will have to struggle more mightily and more wisely than it has so far to make Isaiah's dream a reality. It is from Isaiah's clarion call that I draw strength to go on despite my conviction that you and I are again living in the midst of another sinful Israel. In encountering Isaiah again I asked myself why he quickens my faith. Partly, no doubt, because I first came upon Isaiah as a teenager under the remarkable tutelage of Ira Eisenstein, zichrono l'vrachah. Partly, perhaps, because my faith was formed during the second World War when a monster far more malevolent omnipresent than Osama, Adolf Hitler, and saw how his arrogance and the great courage and goodness of many peoples combined to destroy him and his allies. Partly because I know from immersing myself in antiquity and in science how far, though fitfully, humankind has come. Whatever its grounds, Isaiah's vision conjures up my faith in a millennial future that, I hope, awaits our descendants, though they be too remote ever to have heard of you and me. May you, too, draw strength from the prophet's vision and may that strength bring you peace on this glorious Sabbath when we recall God's twin revelations, at Sinai and in Jerusalem.