The following meditation
was written by Doug Hood’s son,
Nathanael Hood, MA,
New York University
“Isn’t this the fast
I choose – releasing wicked restraints, untying the ropes of a yoke,
setting
free the mistreated, and breaking every yoke?
Isn’t it sharing your bread with the hungry and bringing the homeless
poor into your house,
covering the naked when you see them, and not hiding from
your own family?”
(Isaiah 58:6,7 Common English Bible)
Their bonds broken and shackles shattered, the ancient
Judeans returned from their Babylonian captivity to find Jerusalem a wasted
ruin. The city of the Davidic kings,
Solomon’s Temple, and the Ark of the Covenant, the refugees found this former
center of Jewish religious, political, and social life a shell of its former
self, destroyed, depopulated, profaned.
The Holiest of the Holies violated, the treasuries looted, the buildings
smashed, life could never go back to normal for the Jewish people. And indeed the exile permanently changed the
face of their religion. Once a faith
that acknowledged the existence of other gods, this new Judaism was doggedly
monotheistic. Once a people ruled by
kings, now they were led by scribes, sages, and priests. And where once the thought of a religion
without a central temple was unthinkable, now they praised a God who faithfully
followed his children throughout the world.
As prominent Israeli scholar Yehezkel Kaufmann once wrote: “With the
exile, the religion of Israel comes to an end and Judaism begins.”
The fifty-eighth chapter of Isaiah offers us a glimpse into
the metamorphosis of post-exilic Judaism.
While the entire book is traditionally attributed to the 8th-century BCE prophet, the last ten chapters are now believed by scholars to be a collection
of anonymous oracles recorded three hundred years later during the reconstruction
of Jerusalem. The portrait they paint is
not always comforting. Much like the
Pharisees of Jesus’ time who competed to see who could pray the loudest in
public, this chapter depicts the wealthy ostentatiously mourning and praying
for restoration while ignoring the poor and needy among them. Specifically, the wealthy are shown to brag
about their extravagant ritualistic fasting where they starve themselves in
sackcloth and ashes. To which the
oracles respond with a simple and direct how dare you? Isn’t the fast that God demands the salvation
of the helpless among them? The literal
feeding of the hungry, the literal housing of the homeless, the literal
clothing of the naked? The God of this
new Judaism cared not for their theatrics.
Instead, this new god who was God demanded concrete, literal solutions
to economic and social injustice among his children. Only then could Jerusalem truly be rebuilt.
Almost two and half thousand years have passed since the
time of Isaiah, and the world finds itself again in a time of devastating
crisis. As the Coronavirus pandemic
forces the international community into a global quarantine, it feels like
things will never be the same again. The
wealth and prosperity we assumed would protect us have proved worthless as even
the richest countries with the best medical resources have been
devastated. The stories we hear in the
news are horrific: farmers forced to let food rot in their fields; doctors and
nurses forced to care for the diseased without Personal Protective Equipment
(PPE); millions – including this writer – being forced into unemployment with
no lasting economic safety net. We hear
of the homeless in Las Vegas being made to sleep in parking spaces in parking
lots so they won’t infect each other. We
hear of the government wasting millions on Blue Angels flyovers to honor the
very healthcare workers they refuse to properly fund. And we hear of people like Leilani Jordan, a
27-year-old grocery store clerk in Maryland who died after being forced to work
without gloves or hand sanitizer. When
her family received their daughter’s last paycheck – literal blood money – they
found that they’d lost their little girl for only $20.64.
Much like the post-exile Judeans, we find ourselves on the
threshold of total societal transformation.
Things won’t go back to normal because things can’t go back to
normal. Too many systems have been
proven ineffective, too many laws have been proven useless, too many people
have been proven expendable. Not only
can’t things go back to normal, things shouldn’t go back to
normal. Not, at least, if we want to
honor God, the God who demanded the end of useless fasting and the
implementation of social and economic reforms in the fifty-eighth chapter of
Isaiah. How do we rebuild after the
quarantine ends? By working to ensure
there are no homeless to stuff into parking lots, by fighting to properly equip
healthcare professionals and first responders, by tearing down the systems of
old to make sure nobody dies for a $20.64 paycheck ever again.
Joy,
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