Haftarah for Ki Teitzei

This Haftarah comes from the book of Yeshayahu, the prophet who spoke in Yerushalayim in the generations when the Assyrian empire pressed upon the kingdom of Yehudah, the southern kingdom centered on Yerushalayim and the Beit HaMikdash. In the later chapters of his book, Yeshayahu speaks past the destruction and exile that lay ahead, addressing the city itself in her desolation and telling her what is coming.

The image that governs these ten verses is a marriage. Yerushalayim in exile is a woman whose husband has gone from her — not a widow, for her Husband lives, but a wife left alone, abandoned and childless. Everything the prophet says here unfolds from that picture: the barren woman who will be surrounded by children, the tent too small for the family it must hold, the Husband who returns and swears never to depart again.

"Shout, O infertile one, you who bore no child!" The prophet turns to a woman who never knew the pangs of pregnancy, who longs for children and cannot conceive — and this is Yerushalayim during the exile, emptied of her inhabitants. Yet the city that was devastated will have more children than the nations around her, more than a woman securely settled with her husband. She had been like an abandoned wife whose husband is nonetheless still alive; now she is told to sing.

Because the children will be many, the tent must grow: "Enlarge the site of your tent, extend the size of your dwelling, do not stint! Lengthen the ropes, and drive the pegs firm." Make the curtains long and wide, stretch the cords, hammer the stakes fast — and not Yerushalayim alone, but the other cities of the land with her. "For you shall spread out to the right and the left" means she will grow strong to the south and the north and on every other side; her children will inherit many nations, and the towns left desolate will be settled by Yisrael once more.

"Fear not, you shall not be shamed." Do not be afraid of the hardships of leaving exile, for you will never again be put to shame. So great will the good be that the reproaches suffered in exile will simply be forgotten, and the disgrace of having lived like a widow will not even be remembered. The reason follows: "For the One who made you — whose name is GOD of Hosts — will espouse you." Your Master is your Maker and He is your Husband; in the exile it was the nations who ruled over you as a husband rules. Now the Holy One of Yisrael, who is God of the whole earth, is your Redeemer.

"GOD has called you back as a wife forlorn and forsaken." You are not a wife whose husband has died, but a wife whose husband was angry for a time and then returned. And should you fear that the forsaking is permanent — that He has simply found you undesirable, the way a man's affection can cool toward a wife grown old — the prophet answers: "Can one cast off the wife of his youth?" A man who married a young woman remembers, even when she has aged, that she is the very one who came to him in her youth. It is only a wife taken already old whom a man may come to despise. Yisrael is the wife of His youth.

"For a little while I forsook you, but with vast love I will bring you back." So abundant will the good of the days of Mashiach be that the whole exile will seem no longer than the blink of an eye. "In slight anger, for a moment, I hid My face from you" — a moment only; the compassion is forever. And the promise is sealed with an oath: as He swore after the mabul, the flood in the days of Noach, that its waters would never again cover the earth, so He swears that His anger and rebuke are finished. Mountains may be uprooted and hills shaken loose in time, but the oath will not depart.

"But my loyalty shall never move from you, nor My covenant of friendship be shaken — said GOD, who takes you back in love."

The comfort of this Haftarah rests on a distinction that is easy to miss and impossible to forget once seen: exile is not widowhood. A widow has no one to wait for; an abandoned wife does. The whole difference between despair and hope lies there, and the prophet spends ten verses making sure Yerushalayim knows which of the two she is.

The Gemara in Sanhedrin draws out the tenderness in the image. Rabbi Yehudah taught his son Rabbi Yitzchak that a man's heart is truly glad only with his first wife, and Rav taught that a woman is wholeheartedly happy only with the man who married her as a virgin — and it is precisely this that stands behind "For the One who made you will espouse you." The bond formed at the beginning is the bond that holds. Yisrael was betrothed in her youth, and no lapse of years and no interval of anger dissolves what was made then.