Mitzvah Day 2024 is less than a month away and we are hoping that our community, across all ages, will join us for our morning of service. There are projects to benefit local causes like the unhoused, our hospitals, and Wise Readers to Leaders. In addition, we’ll be supporting a range of vital Israeli beneficiaries, both those to respond to the crisis of the Gaza war as well as our usual partner organization. Join us! Bring your kids, grandkids, teens! Support our causes! You can do it all here.
To get you in the Mitzvah Day Spirit I’ll be sharing some of my favorite Tikkun Olam texts from the Jewish tradition along with my interpretations.
אָז יִבָּקַע כשַּׁחַר אוֹרֶךָ וַאֲרֻכָתְךָ מְהֵרָה תִצְמָח
I’ve owned many tallitot over my years as a rabbi—it’s sort of a uniform of the profession. My most recent two have had the Hebrew passage above written in beautiful calligraphy on the atarah or collar area of the garment. It’s taken from the passage in Isaiah that we read during the morning of Yom Kippur. (Isaiah 58) The Biblical prophets were revolutionaries. They sought nothing less than the transformation of their nation. From their vantage points as societal critics informed by values they believed were planted by God in their minds, they preached revolutionary ideas that often found them at odds with kings and priests, warriors and commoners. The world was filled with corruption, both the false piety of religious functionaries and the vain pursuits of the powerful. It was their mandate, their very reason for being, to call out the depravity and demand change.
Here are Isaiah’s words:
A day for people to starve their bodies?
Is it bowing the head like a bulrush
And lying in sackcloth and ashes?
Do you call that a fast,
A day when יְהוָה is favorable?
No, this is the fast I desire:
To unlock fetters of wickedness,
And untie the cords of the yoke
To let the oppressed go free;
To break off every yoke.
It is to share your bread with the hungry,
And to take the wretched poor into your home;
When you see the naked, to clothe them,
And not to ignore your own kin.
This passage mocks the fantasy that religious piety compensates for ethical breaches. Isaiah faces the people and mocks them for their empty rituals that mask lives of selfishness and neglect of the weakest and neediest in their land. He shocks them by providing a controversial and jarring interpretation of what a fast must truly mean. Fasting, by Isaiah’s definition, means living a life of compassion and generosity. It is a call to seek justice for the oppressed and extend kindness to one’s fellow. Imagine how these words must have been heard by the priests and politicians of his time. They were likely as jarring then as they are today. Their power is eternal.
The phrase on my two tallitot is Isaiah’s promise to the people that should they observe the fast as he now defines it, “Then shall your light burst through like the dawn, and your healing spring up quickly.” In my reading, Isaiah’s words promise the people that when they live as he commands, the light of hope and redemption will shine on them, and through their actions they will heal the wounds in their world. It is not merely a (re)turning to God, it is an affirmation of the belief that humanity can truly change the world.
— Rabbi Ron Stern