PROPHETIC VOICES

A group of prominent American rabbis reimagine the haftarah’s place in the Jewish liturgy in this collection edited by Symons.

Derived from the Hebrew word meaning conclusion, the haftarah is the final word of sacred text read or chanted before the Torah scroll is returned to the ark during Sabbaths and festivals. Its passages typically come from the Old Testament’s second half, such as Isaiah 58, in which the ancient prophet calls out the hypocrisy of Israelites for not practicing the virtues they preach. The haftarah was originally designed to be “liturgically radical,” urging listeners to “disrupt society’s oppressive hypocrisy and call attention to the plight of all those who suffer,” as Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner says in this book’s foreword; however, many rabbis are familiar with looking out into their congregations as “eyes glaze over during the haftarah reading, which should be summoning us to action.” The idea of this volume, which features roughly 150 contributors, was born during a national conference in 2018 among Reform Jews who sought to direct the moral impulses of their religion to contemporary issues, including racial justice, voting rights, gun violence, reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights, and mass incarceration. It begins with introductory essays about prophetic readings and the origins of the haftarah; the second part provides contemporary interpretations of standard Reform haftarah texts, and the third and fourth parts offer alternative voices to address issues that correspond to the traditional Jewish calendar and American Jewish calendar. The latter includes “Brown v. Board of Education in International Context,” by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for International Women’s Day and “Invisibility in Academe” by Adrienne Rich for the Transgender Day of Visibility. Vetted by an editorial advisory committee of more than a dozen rabbis and Jewish scholars, this is a well-researched work that boasts over 500 endnotes. Under the experienced eye of Symons, the editorial board’s chair, it offers scholarly bona fides and an accessible writing style that’s sensitive to contemporary liturgical needs.

A rare work on Jewish liturgy that offers as much to rabbis and cantors as it does their lay congregations.