Shabbat Chazon חֲזוֹן֙
One of the most difficult jobs in the ancient near east was that of a Biblical prophet. Called upon to rebuke the people with a litany of their sins, announce their impending punishments, and then follow all that with promises of hope, the prophets were often ridiculed and persecuted. Kings imprisoned them, commoners pelted them with stones, and all the while, they wrestled with their own doubts about the veracity of their warnings and promises. Despite the great personal risks, they spoke their truth. Most importantly, their words—as controversial as they might have been at the time—were preserved for thousands of years so that we might read them.
Though intended for their own generation and only offering predictions within their temporal horizon, subsequent generations continued to value the prophets’ timeless morality and revered their visions as predictive for all time. Thus, Christianity seized on Isaiah 53 and fashioned the memory of the life of Jesus (more than 500 years later) to fulfill its words. Judaism continues to revere the ancient words, sometimes seeing them as predictive of a distant future, sometimes considering them reflective of our own times.
Chapter 1 of Isaiah is read on the Shabbat before Tisha B’Av. It begins: “חֲזוֹן יְשַׁעְיָהוּ”—“The vision (chazon) of Isaiah …” It is at once a stinging rebuke and a call to action. Speaking to the people before the destruction of Solomon’s Temple, Isaiah calls them to account for their sacrilege. They have profaned their most sacred place with their immorality. Even these eons later we can “hear” his mighty reproach in his words.
Chazon/vision is a fitting first word for this work. Beyond the rebuke, there are words of comfort, both of God’s eternal commitment to the Jewish people and of the path to redemption. How to restore our fortunes, he asks? Learn to do good. Devote yourselves to justice. Aid the wronged. Uphold the rights of the orphan. Defend the cause of the widow. (v. 17) And then, the rewards will come, a result of your pursuit of justice.
There are those who question the centrality of social justice (tikkun olam) in the Jewish tradition. I wonder, have they read Isaiah? There is no more powerful vision of Judaism than this ancient-yet-timeless command and, most importantly, the sweep is broad: Isaiah doesn’t say to give one orphan a home; Isaiah says uphold their collective rights. He doesn’t say to find one widow a new spouse or a home; he says to defend the cause of all widows.
Isaiah’s ancient vision of a just world, powerful in its universality and repeated throughout the book, has not fallen on deaf ears. Rather, it is at the very core of Reform Judaism.
—Rabbi Ron Stern