The Haftarah Project: Mas’ei—Who Gets the Blame?
Image generated by Dall-E.
Jeremiah chapter two, the Haftorah for Mas’ei, is one of a series of haftarot–and part of a much larger corpus of prophetic writings–that uses the metaphor of marriage to describe the relationship between God and Israel (see Nancy Flam’s piece on Bemidbar.) Picturing the bond between the two in terms of a committed, lifelong connection allows the prophets to explore a wide range of emotional expression and relational states: passion, seeking and being sought, sweetness, pain, jealousy, anger, reconciliation, and so on. When the metaphor is used positively, the prophets evoke the unbreakable bond between God and Israel, beginning with their early halcyon days in the wilderness. When it is used negatively, the prophet’s words are often ugly and violent, filled with images of sexual unfaithfulness and jealous rage.
What is striking about the negative sexual imagery, in the present haftarah as well as more generally, is that the disobedience of Israel is depicted as adultery and whoredom on the part of women. “What wrong did your fathers find in me that they abandoned me and went after delusion and were deluded?” asks God. “On every high hill and under every verdant tree, you recline as a whore….Like a lustful she-camel, restlessly running about, or like a wild ass used to the desert, snuffing the wind in her eagerness, whose passion none can restrain….” Although it is presumably the men in the Israelite community that the prophets were addressing, it was not male infidelity that was the object of their invective. Women’s bodies were the ones made to bear the stigma of perversity and wantonness.
Metaphors work by comparing something that is familiar with something unfamiliar in order to open up new ways of perceiving the world. In this case, the prophets use an experience that their hearers knew well and took for granted–their dominance in marriage, their right to obedience on the part of their wives, the potential of women to sully male honor and undermine the purity of the family–to build a case that God is equally angry and disgraced by Israel’s behavior in worshipping other gods. This is an incredibly powerful charge that no doubt got listeners’ attention. And when God does not divorce his wife but takes her back in love–“If you remove your abominations from my presence and do not waver, nations shall bless themselves by you,” says our haftorah–how amazing, what an unexpected ending! What an incredible illustration of divine mercy!
This imagery becomes less compelling, however, when the social context changes and the audience, instead of taking patriarchal marriage for granted, is sensitized to its profound inequalities. In our own time, the prophetic rhetoric is as likely to engender disgust with the underlying assumptions of a deeply patriarchal tradition as to encourage self-examination. And perhaps this is an important function that the haftarah can serve: to lead readers to question the attitudes toward women and women’s sexuality that these words foster and to reflect on how they continue to shape our culture.
But while the haftarah represents a dominant voice in Jewish tradition, it is not the only understanding of sexuality and the divine/human relationship. One clear alternative is the Song of Songs, which stands out like a healthy thumb from most of the other images of sexuality in the Tanakh. It depicts a full-bodied, sensuous, loving relationship between partners whose gender is often ambiguous, and it has repeatedly been read as an allegory of the love between God and Israel. But in a narrower and more pointed vein, there is a passage in the Talmud that challenges the prophetic habit of casting sexual blame on women. Yohanan ben Zakkai taught–and Rabbi Elizer concurred–that the biblical test of the bitter waters for a woman suspected of adultery was suspended in their own time because of an increase in (male) adultery. The test was effective, the rabbis suggest, only if the husband was himself faithful. This text seems to call out male hypocrisy and to hold men to the same standard that the Torah imposes on women. It is one of the intriguing counter-texts in the canon that should interest those wanting to talk back to a patriarchal tradition.
Editor’s Note: The reflections from the Haftarah Project represent the thoughts and opinions of the author.