Shabbat Hazon: Seeing

The human capacity for avoiding uncomfortable truths is so very well-developed. Consider the time-tested, familiar, absolutely transparently false ways we get around what we don’t want to face: it’s someone else’s fault. I was busy and must have missed it. That can’t possibly be true. I was unavoidably detained. Circumstances conspired against me. You don’t understand; it’s more complicated than that. I can’t, I physically/mentally/emotionally can’t be blamed. I didn’t see it; I don’t want to see it, I never saw it. This Shabbat is about seeing, including what we don’t want to see; it is called Shabbat Hazon, “vision”, from the Haftarah.

Jewish tradition at its best is possessed of a fearless honesty, and these Three Weeks are the most difficult time of all to engage with its wisdom if one is not ready to face one’s own truth. We can seek to blame what’s wrong with ourselves and with our world on our own current society or on historical trends; but our sages know that it’s part of our very make up. The first humans in the Garden were already using the techniques of avoiding truth and blame:

וַיֹּ֖אמֶר הָֽאָדָ֑ם הָֽאִשָּׁה֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר נָתַ֣תָּה עִמָּדִ֔י הִ֛וא נָֽתְנָה־לִּ֥י מִן־הָעֵ֖ץ וָאֹכֵֽל׃ וַיֹּ֨אמֶר ה’ אֱלֹקים לָאִשָּׁ֖ה מַה־זֹּ֣את עָשִׂ֑ית וַתֹּ֙אמֶר֙ הָֽאִשָּׁ֔ה הַנָּחָ֥שׁ הִשִּׁיאַ֖נִי וָאֹכֵֽל׃ 

The human said, “The woman You put at my side—she gave me of the tree, and I ate.” G!d ‘ה said to the woman, “What is this you have done!” The woman replied, “The serpent duped me, and I ate.” (Genesis 3.12-13)

Rather than face what we feel is unbearable about ourselves, we go shopping; we lose ourselves in exercise or other practices; we distract ourselves with anything that we can manage to grasp and put between ourselves and the pain of facing what’s wrong. 

The culmination of these Three Weeks of dread and apprehension, Tisha B’Av, will be upon us on Saturday evening, at the close of Shabbat. For three weeks the assigned readings from our sacred texts have become more and more difficult to encounter. This week’s haftarah says it outright, and we feel its truth.

שָׂרַ֣יִךְ סוֹרְרִ֗ים וְחַבְרֵי֙ גַּנָּבִ֔ים כֻּלּוֹ֙ אֹהֵ֣ב שֹׁ֔חַד וְרֹדֵ֖ף שַׁלְמֹנִ֑ים יָתוֹם֙ לֹ֣א יִשְׁפֹּ֔טוּ וְרִ֥יב אַלְמָנָ֖ה לֹא־יָב֥וֹא אֲלֵיהֶֽם׃         

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. 

(Isaiah 1.23)

It is said that if Yom Kippur is the day of reckoning for the individual Jew, Tisha B’Av is that same day of truth for the Jewish people. In our difficult days, to confront our communal truth is to reflect upon disappointments so great that they are hard to face: we Jews are like any other people. We, too, can be cruel. We, too, can do evil. We, too, can cause the same kind of misery that has been wreaked upon us. The faces of Gaza look exactly like our faces not so long ago in Auschwitz.

In his book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, Peter Beinart offers us a chance to face all the uncomfortable truths. He does so as a committed Jew and a Zionist. His willingness to speak regarding what we would rather not see has made him a hero to some and a pariah to others in the Jewish world. But no prophet is appreciated in their own time.

He writes that not that long ago, the Third Wave of Democracy (the Arab Spring, the fall of the USSR and the Berlin Wall, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the velvet revolutions of Czechoslovakia and Ukraine, and more) seemed to herald a new world of hope. It is terribly disheartening to realize that all around us, that hope has been savagely destroyed. From Putin to Trump to Netanyahu, cruelty and greed are ascendant, and the Jewish people is not separate from it, not a light to the nations, not shining forth a prophetic light; “in its unchecked cruelty and unbearable pain, the destruction of Gaza is a symbol of our age.”

Yet Yom Kippur is meant to end with the real transformation atonement effects, and so an honest Tisha B’Av reckoning must also harbor the hope of healing. This is exactly what our haftarah for this Shabbat urges us, in all simplicity:

לִמְד֥וּ הֵיטֵ֛ב דִּרְשׁ֥וּ מִשְׁפָּ֖ט אַשְּׁר֣וּ חָמ֑וֹץ שִׁפְט֣וּ יָת֔וֹם רִ֖יבוּ אַלְמָנָֽה׃

Learn to do good.

Devote yourselves to justice; aid the wronged. 

Uphold the rights of the orphan; defend the cause of the widow. 

(Isaiah 1.17)

Our tradition does not support cancel culture, except that we do believe in the power of good to cancel evil. We believe that we can not only break things, but that we can also repair them, and ourselves, and do better. Evil does exist in us; it is part of human nature. Good does, as well – but only if we are willing to look.