The Haftarah Project
Jump to the essays exploring mysogyny, idolatry, and violence in the haftarot ↓
Explore the Haftarah Project writings
Let’s face it: the haftarah often feels like the forgotten child of Shabbat services. After two hours of heartfelt prayer and a Torah reading filled with lessons and drama, the haftarah can sometimes feel like an afterthought.
There is no doubt that the righteous voices of the prophets rings in our ears in powerful ways, like the famous words of Isaiah on Yom Kippur, “Is this the fast I have chosen for you?” or the vision of Micah, “That every person shall sit under their vine and fig tree and no one shall be afraid” or the words of Malakhi that, “God will reconcile the hearts of parents with children and the hearts of children with their parents,” and so many other prophetic passages that inspire us and elevate us.
And yet, many of us tune out at the time of the haftarah, and even B-Mitzvah students who spend weeks mastering the trope often barely scratch the surface of what they’re chanting. If we’re honest, we have to ask: why are we still reading these texts? And what do we do when they confront us with ideas that feel ethically troubling or deeply problematic?
This is the challenge we’re setting out to solve.
The haftarah holds a special place in Jewish tradition, but too often it’s left unexamined. The texts come to us from a world far removed from our own, written in a context where values and language differ starkly from today. This gap leaves us grappling with passages that sometimes include violent imagery, misogyny, or tribal triumphalism. These aren’t just abstract problems—they shape how we view the sacred and ourselves. When we chant these words without interpretation, we risk normalizing what might otherwise deeply unsettle us.
Here’s an example previously shared during services: In 2022, BJ member and professor emerita of religious studies at Manhattan College, Judith Plaskow, raised this very issue in a d’var Torah, focusing on a passage from Matot/Masei (Jeremiah) filled with painful misogynistic and sexual imagery. She asked: should we simply stop reading these texts? Should we replace them with something more relevant, more meaningful? And most importantly, what role should the haftarah play in our services today?
BJ’s spiritual leadership took these questions seriously. Inspired by Judith’s reflections, Rabbi Felicia Sol began exploring the haftarah cycle through a weekly hevruta with Judith and Martha Ackelsberg, professor emerita of government and the study of women and gender at Smith College. Felicia’s premise was there is a far richer and deeper tradition of commentary on the Torah than there is on the haftarot.
Their goal wasn’t just to critique but to deeply engage: to understand these texts in their complexity, to surface their challenges, and to reflect on their place in our tradition. During the past year they read and discussed each week’s haftarah, discovering that while some were stirring and inspiring, others were deeply disturbing.
Over the course of this year, we’re going to be able to learn from them specifically on the more challenging haftarot, with their reflections shared in the related Toward Shabbat.
What did they learn? (Dive deeper with three short essays on the challenging themes below)
Perhaps the most important thing they discovered is that it’s impossible to generalize about the haftarot.
Some are deeply connected to the Torah portion—as in the pairing of the last words of David with Jacob’s blessings of his sons—while others are linked by a single phrase or image—as in a long passage from Isaiah for parashat Noah that mentions “the waters of Noah” in one verse. Many haftarot are prophecies in verse that combine chastisement of Israel for its sins with images of restoration and redemption, while others are narratives, largely from Samuel and Kings. Some we experienced as ugly and painful while others felt more neutral, historically interesting, or deeply stirring.
Going Outside the Comfort Zone
There were several themes that emerged repeatedly throughout the haftarah cycle that they found particularly repugnant.
Probably, the most difficult was the amount of raging, seemingly out-of-control, divine violence in many readings. Another was the use of misogynist sexual imagery describing Israel’s unfaithfulness to God in terms of women’s whoring and adultery. A third was the excoriation of idolatry in terms that mocked and seriously misrepresented the indigenous religion of Canaan. A fourth was Jewish—Israelite—triumphalism: texts that combined vivid descriptions of the violent destruction of Israel’s enemies with passages on the vindication of Israel.
These are not easy topics, but they demand our attention. Why? Because ignoring them doesn’t erase their impact. It leaves us complicit in their perpetuation.
It’s uncomfortable, but confronting these texts gives us the chance to wrestle with our tradition, to question, and to grow. If we leave the haftarah out of our discussions and teachings, we miss an opportunity for meaningful engagement with our sacred texts and with one another.
The BJ Haftarah Project
The BJ Haftarah Project was born from this wrestling. They began by writing about the most troubling haftarot and identifying alternative texts—“tikkun” texts—that could offer a fresh perspective or counterbalance the original readings. The goal isn’t to dismiss the haftarah but to make it a living part of our tradition: to engage with it, interpret it, and shape it to resonate with our values today.
We invite you to join Felicia, Judith, and Martha in this exploration. The haftarah shouldn’t be a passive experience. It should provoke questions, spark conversations, and deepen our connection to Judaism. Through this project, we hope to expand how we interact with these texts, offering tools and models for thoughtful engagement with the most difficult parts of our tradition.
Let’s transform the haftarah from a ritual add-on to a vibrant, challenging, and healing part of our Shabbat practice. Together, we can embrace the discomfort and find deeper meaning—not by looking away, but by diving in.
Dive deeper on the challenging themes:
Misogyny in the Haftarot by Rabbi Felicia Sol
There is no grand unity to the haftarot from week to week, and neither is there uniformity in how women are characterized in them. On the one hand, there are the stories of the prophet Deborah (the haftarah for parashat Beshallah and the Song of the Sea) a story that honors her wisdom, her power and her leadership; and the story of the Shunammite woman (from the haftarah for parashat Vayera) the nameless woman and fierce mother who is the epitome of hospitality and being happy with her lot. But these images are not the only ones. Whether metaphoric language comparing the unfaithful and sinful people of Israel to a whore or actual stories in which women are literally sacrificed, an encounter with the prophets is often an encounter with some deeply disturbing texts that call into question the holiness endowed to them. Of course, one cannot overlay the values of today on texts thousands of years old, yet having such texts read in a pleasant chant in the context of a prayer service without pause or perhaps horror also begs the question: what are we actually sanctifying or sanctioning?
The graphic words of chapter 2 of Hosea (the haftarah for parshat Bamidbar) compare the people of Israel to a whoring, unfaithful wife who is deserving of abuse and ultimately death.
רִיבוּ בְאִמְּכֶם רִיבוּ כִּי־הִיא לֹא אִשְׁתִּי וְאָנֹכִי לֹא אִישָׁהּ וְתָסֵר זְנוּנֶיהָ מִפָּנֶיהָ וְנַאֲפוּפֶיהָ מִבֵּין שָׁדֶיהָ׃
Rebuke your mother, rebuke her—
For she is not My wife
And I am not her husband—
And let her put away her harlotry from her face
And her adultery from between her breasts.
פֶּן־אַפְשִׁיטֶנָּה עֲרֻמָּה וְהִצַּגְתִּיהָ כְּיוֹם הִוָּלְדָהּ וְשַׂמְתִּיהָ כַמִּדְבָּר וְשַׁתִּהָ כְּאֶרֶץ צִיָּה וַהֲמִתִּיהָ בַּצָּמָא׃
Else will I strip her naked
And leave her as on the day she was born:
And I will make her like a wilderness,
Render her like desert land,
And let her die of thirst.
One the one hand, Hosea’s metaphor is meant to guide the people of Israel to do teshuvah (repentance) and restore the marriage with God—in some ways an extremely powerful expression of the relationship between God and the Jewish people. However, the marriage metaphor, enacting violence on the wife, makes its theological point at the expense of women and their children. Such acts of abuse and degradation are all too familiar in our time even if the contexts are profoundly different. In “The Women’s Bible Commentary,” Carol Newsom and Sharon Ringe write, “Certainly the male violence embedded in the text of Hosea as it stands should make readers, both male and female, wary of an uncritical acceptance of its marriage metaphor. Moreover, the imaging of God as male/husband becomes difficult when one forgets the metaphor God is like a husband and insists that God is a husband and therefore always male.” So rather than reading such texts without a critical eye, it behooves us to pay attention to the implicit and explicit assumptions the texts hold and give voice to the cries that are unheard or suppressed while also committing to not remaining numb to their brutality.
In the book of Judges (the haftarah for Hukkat), Yiftah vows that, should he win the battle, “whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me on my safe return from the Ammonites shall be GOD’s and shall be offered by me as a burnt offering.” (Judges 11:31). While the haftarah concludes at verse 33 and does not include the fulfillment of the vow, we know that Yiftah prevails in the battle and that his unnamed daughter is the first to meet him. He refuses to retract his vow and sacrifices his daughter. Both the Torah reading and the haftarah deal with how the Israelites negotiate with other people’s territories while in the wilderness and the competing claims and battles that ensue. But the battle and subsequent victory of Yiftah comes at the expense of his unnamed daughter, who is merely a pawn in both the human and Divine battlefields. Perhaps even more painful is the cry of his daughter (again, not included in the haftarah) who pleads to have 2 months to bewail her fate before accepting it. Unlike in the case of Avraham, whom God saves from sacrificing Yitzhak, in Yiftah’s case, no angel of God saves Yiftah’s daughter.
On one extreme, these prophetic texts are willing to offer up a nameless young woman as inconsequential in the grander story of ownership of land and triumph on the battlefield. On the other extreme, a woman is the epitome of betrayal and the object of abuse. Throughout these texts, we could be tempted to dismiss our discomfort and be forgiving of them given the context in which they were written. Yet our recitation of them in the context of prayer and ritual asks us to be accountable for their pain and to not let the horrors go unnoticed or the harm go unspoken. What might help heal them?
Idolatry in the Haftarot by Judith Plaskow
Prophetic invective against idolatry is an important theme in a number of haftarot. Isaiah chapter 44 (the haftarah for Vayikra) is typical in its contempt both for physical images and the people who fashion them: “The makers of idols/ All work to no purpose;/ And the things they treasure can do no good,/As they themselves can testify,/ They neither look nor think/ And so they shall be shamed…..They lack the wit and judgment to say:/ ‘”Part of it I burned in a fire;/ I also baked bread on the coals,/ I roasted meat and ate it—/ Should I make the rest an abhorrence?/ Should I bow down to a block of wood?” (vv. 9, and 19).
This caricature of indigenous Canaanite worship and the Israelites who imitate it is of a piece with the famous midrash about Abraham destroying the idols in his father’s shop and then confronting him with the folly of praying to things made by human hands. Both have played important roles in shaping Jewish suspicion of the use of images in worship and the idea that there are people who cannot tell the difference between things of wood and stone and the living God. As Jews encounter the critique of idolatry from Hebrew school on, we often imbibe a sense of superiority to religions that center physical images, assuming that their adherents lack a sophisticated understanding of the sacred. I remember the first time I brought my son to the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum, he exclaimed, “These are the idols that Abraham smashed.” I did not know whether to be proud that he knew the midrash or appalled that, at age six, he had already learned to see the magnificent sculptures of Egyptian deities through a dismissive lens.
As victims of New Testament propaganda vilifying the Pharisees, we Jews should know better than to take at face value the portrait of the competing religion offered by the Tanakh. Its depiction of Canaanite worship has precisely the same function as the New Testament defamation of the Pharisees. Both are trying to warn followers away from the attractive older tradition and to prove that the new one is far better. And both pursue their aim by choosing polemic above accuracy. The Pharisees were not the defenders of a moribund Judaism, as the Gospels portray them, but the creative interpreters of a living tradition. And religions that center physical images in worship do not identify these images with the essence and totality of the sacred. Images perform many functions: they may,serve as manifestations of the sacred, represent certain of its qualities, or provide a focus for prayer or meditation. But they are not the sacred itself.
Accepting prophetic depictions of idolatry not only defames another religious tradition and inculcates a false sense of superiority; it prevents us from appreciating the power of concrete objects in our own. The practice of kissing the Torah as it is carried in procession around the sanctuary potentially offers some insight into the attraction of physical images. Why are many BJ members so eager to participate in this ritual? None would say they worship the Torah. A lot of people in the congregation likely have difficulty with at least some of the things it contains. And yet there is obviously something about experiencing the idea of Torah embodied in an actual, physical Torah that people find deeply meaningful. It isn’t all that distant from Spaniards lining up to kiss the feet of a baby Jesus figure on Christmas morning, as I witnessed when I lived in Cordoba. For all the iconoclasm of Jewish tradition, it seems that Jews, like Catholics—and Hindus, Canaanites, and others—enjoy and value bodily connection with sacred objects. Perhaps our pleasure in such contact with the Torah can help us understand why prophetic tirades against Israelites copying the practices of the people of the land were ineffective for hundreds of years. It may also help us to think more deeply about the role of objects in religious ritual and to read prophetic denunciations of idols and idolatry with a more critical eye.
Violence in the Haftarot by Martha Ackelsberg
There is so much divinely-inspired violence in the Tanakh, in both Torah and Prophets, whether inflicted by God against Israel or against other peoples, that we may well barely notice it. Alternatively, we might come to believe that violence is either synonymous with conflict or the only way that conflict can be addressed. Given how important the Bible is both to our Jewish communal story and to the American national story, it is critically important to attend to the violence we find and to think about how we might respond to it.
While we can find many instances of God’s violence in the haftarot, I want to distinguish among types. First, there is the violence God inflicts on the Israelites when they fail to follow God’s directives, or fall short of fulfilling their part of the covenant. Second, there is the violence of the dispossession of the Canaanites, Jebusites, etc. from the Promised Land. And third, there is the violence directed against nations who oppress the Israelites. In each of these cases, we are told that the violence God inflicts (or that Israelite warriors inflict at God’s behest) is part of God’s larger plan, and is the only acceptable response to the situation.
In a number of haftarot, the prophet’s description of the violence God will inflict (or has inflicted) on a disobedient Israel is quite graphic. So, for example, in Malakhi, ch. 2, the prophet excoriates the priests and says, in the name of God, “I will send a curse and turn your blessings into curses…I will put your seed under a ban, and I will strew dung upon your faces, the dung of your festal sacrifices, and you shall be carried out to its heap.” Or, as Jeremiah warns (in Chapter 7, the haftarah for Tzav) the people of Judah who have disobeyed God, “The carcasses of this people shall be food for the birds of the sky and the beasts of the earth, with none to frighten them off…the whole land shall fall to ruin.” God’s response to the people’s disobedience is devastating violence.
The second type of violence—that involved in the dispossession of the peoples of Canaan—is both central to the promise of the land and, to an extent, effaced by it. We are meant to focus on the promise, not the dispossession. We’re told, of course, that the Land is given to us conditionally—if we obey God, we and our children will prosper on it; if not, we will lose it. Virtually all of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings are focused on the conquest (and dispossession) and the attendant violence.
The third type is, perhaps, the most complicated. Although many passages in the later prophets acknowledge that Israel has been or will be exiled because of its sins, they are usually accompanied by a promise that Israel will be reinstated in the land through God’s future destruction of the peoples who have exiled them. Indeed, that triumphalist imagery contains some of the most beautiful and (if we think about it) disturbing language in the Tanakh: it seems almost to deny the horror of the violence by focusing us on the beauty of the ultimate redemption. So, for example, in describing God’s love for Israel, the prophet Malakhi states:
“How has [God] shown us love?…After all—declares God—Esau is Jacob’s brother; yet I have accepted Jacob and have rejected Esau. I have made his hills a desolation, his territory a home for beasts of the desert…They may build, but I will tear down…Your eyes shall behold it, and you shall declare, ‘Great is the Lord beyond the borders of Israel” (Malakhi 1: 2-5)
The contrasts are particularly sharp in Jeremiah (46), in the haftarah for Parashat Bo: “Equip yourself for exile, Fair Egypt, you who dwell secure! For Noph shall become a waste, desolate without inhabitants…But you have no fear, My servant Jacob, be not dismayed O Israel: I will deliver you from far away…and Jacob again shall have calm and quiet, with none to trouble him…I will make an end of all the nations among which I have banished you, but I will not make an end of you.”
That our national story is based on such violence is not just a religious/theological/ theoretical problem; we experience its legacy and consequences in the news every day. How can we continue to read these stories as sacred texts? If we do not believe that conflicts should be settled through force and violence, what do we do with texts that seem to teach precisely the opposite? Perhaps a first step might be to hold these readings up as mirrors, so that we can try to learn from the problems they make manifest, rather than either ignoring them or treating them as guides for action. What have we learned—or might we learn—about alternatives to violence?
