By Morriah Kaplan
Another Pesach Torah portion coming at ya! The Torah portion we are reading this week is Deuteronomy 14:22 - 16:17 and Numbers 28:19 – 25. For the spark notes version: these specific verses catalog the annual cycle of festivals, their special observances, and the offerings brought on these occasions to the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.
Rather than focusing on these specific verses, I would like to focus on the Haftorah for the eighth day of Passover – Isaiah 10:32-12:6 (here’s the full text). This is a pretty special Haftorah because it describes the Redemption. It is from these verses that we get the famed lines “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid,” and “the suckling child shall play on the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the viper's nest.” The idea is that when the Redemption comes, as Isaiah prophesizes, things that were once opposite will reside together in peace and harmony.
Something I wondered a lot about while reading this was – why is there so much attention placed on bringing together different kinds of animals, while not a single mention of uniting different peoples in harmony? In fact, there seems to be a particular intention against this, as it also says that during the Redemption, God “shall assemble the outcasts of Israel; and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.” While animals will be united together – the wolf and the lamb, the leopard and the kid, etc – people will be separated.
First let me say that I don’t wish to ignore the context of when this was written. Multiculturalism was surely not in vogue in the time of Isaiah, and the text reflects this. But I think it’s not enough to dismiss this simply as a difference in social context.
In trying to come up with some sort of answer for this, I started to think that maybe this
isn’t about tribalism and multiculturalism at all. Maybe the important thing here isn’t that the Redemption will create a mix of animals, as it were, but rather it is an allegory about a denunciation of violence. The powerful will no longer prey upon the weak, though they are, in a sense, “natural” enemies. The animals that are violent by nature will deny their predatory urges and instead seek a kind of harmony. Looking closely, it is not only a denunciation of violence, but also of genetics. And if a wolf can dwell with a lamb, though the wolf is a predator by birth, what could that mean for us?
This may not have been Isaiah’s angle when he proclaimed these words, but I think there’s a strong commentary here about nature vs. nurture. Isaiah is saying something about who we are and who we choose to be, not just by genetics but by intention. Redemption, it seems to suggest, will only come once we deny what we might consider natural urges, and do things that make us deeply uncomfortable in the name of a more just world.
Before I end, I want to return briefly to the verse about gathering the Jews “from the four corners of the earth.” Maybe we can find a deeper implication for this as well, rather than simply reading it as a gathering of the Jews from the Diaspora. The line explicitly refers to the gathering of “the outcasts of Israel.” Who are these outcasts? If we think of the world we currently live in, the outcasts of Israel might be disenfranchised and uninvolved Jews, those who experience racism and discrimination in Israel, maybe even the Palestinians. I think it might even be reasonably expanded to include all those without community. So this line is perhaps a lot more complex