The Haftarah Project: Shabbat HaGadol—Great Deeds in Unsettled Times

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The Shabbat before Pesah is called Shabbat HaGadol, the great Sabbath. Only a few Shabbatot have special names. Why is this one, “HaGadol,” arguably the most important of them all? One explanation is that in the year of the exodus from Egypt, the 10th of Nisan – the day the Israelites were commanded to sacrifice the paschal lamb (the korban pesah), setting them apart from their Egyptian neighbors – fell on Shabbat. Another, more practical explanation is that “gadol” refers to the length of the rabbi’s sermon explicating, in great detail, all of the laws of Pesah!

Of course, since Pesah celebrates the founding story of the Jewish people, the Shabbat just before the holiday is significant simply because it heralds Pesah’s arrival. Depending on how you read it, the message of the Haftarah, from the book of Malakhi, is either optimistic and uplifting or dark but realistic given the Jewish people’s fallibility. Malakhi is said to be the last of the 12 minor prophets, but since his name means “messenger of God,” some commentators have argued that “Malakhi” was not the name of a particular prophet but rather a title, making his message even more important.

The Haftarah was written in the period after completion of the second Temple in 516–15 BCE. Given the return from Babylonian exile, the rebuilding of the Temple, and Malakhi’s announcement that sacrificial offerings will again be favorably received by God, we might expect that the Jewish people would have felt a great sense of power, purpose, and gratitude and, most importantly, would have recommitted to observing God’s commandments and following an ethical path. But we do not expect a prophet to tell us that everything is OK, so it seems that with some significant portion of the people, things were in fact not OK.

The prophet denounces the people’s lip service to God. The Jewish people’s list of sins is long and painfully familiar. They commit adultery, lie, give insufficient charity, cheat workers, and ignore widows, orphans, and the stranger. Perhaps worst of all, they say it is useless to serve God. “What have we gained by keeping [God’s] charge?…we account the arrogant happy: they have indeed done evil and endured; they have indeed dared God and escaped.”

How does God respond to those who lack faith and ignore the mitzvot? God first offers a little encouragement and positive reinforcement: If you act as you should, “I will surely open the floodgates of the sky for you and pour down blessings on you” and “I will be tender toward [those who revere God] as a man is tender toward a son who ministers to him.” But then God can’t resist an outburst, like an angry, out-of-control parent at the end of their wits. “[The day that I am preparing] is at hand, burning like an oven. All the arrogant and all the doers of evil shall be straw, and the day that is coming…shall burn them to ashes and leave of them neither stock nor boughs.”

In 21st-century liberal Judaism, this is definitely not how we think about God and how we expect God to act. We’re about questioning, nuance, change, growth, het in the sense of missing the mark, and partnership with God. Malakhi’s God is about obedience, reward, and punishment, het in the sense of sin, and strict submission to God. We – or at least I – feel profoundly uncomfortable with this earlier God.

In the last verse of the Haftarah (Malakhi 3:24), God pulls back and gets in control, promising to “reconcile parents [God?] with children and children with their parents” so that God does not have to “strike the whole land with utter destruction.” Because we do not want to end on a negative note like “utter destruction,” which insinuates the messenger of God is not fully convinced the Jewish people will heed the call, the Haftarah repeats the penultimate verse in which God promises to first send Elijah, the traditional herald of redemption.

This year Pesah arrives at a deeply unsettling time with no clear view of what the coming days hold. We see so many who are powerful but not righteous, who sound like the angry God of Malakhi but lack the moral grounding. There is good reason to be cynical and to despair. The prophets’ call tells us that redemption is waiting but will come only when we bring it ourselves. Like our ancestors, we need to do more to help those who are most in need. May we heed Malakhi’s and Elijah’s calls and work toward our own redemption through deeds that are indeed gadol.

Editor’s Note: The reflections from the Haftarah Project represent the thoughts and opinions of the author.