|
The Weekly Prophet
We don’t know much about the origin of the practice to read the Haftarah. The Haftarah is the portion we read from Prophets each Shabbat following the Torah reading. Mostly it is known for being that long thing that kids have to read at their Bar or Bat Mitzvah. And believe it or not: it is not, in fact, half of a Torah (my mind was blown when I learned this in graduate school). The word Haftarah is spelled in Hebrew like this: הפטרה. Whereas Torah is spelled like this: תורה. Entirely different root words!
We don’t know much about the origin of this practice because it just, kind of, happened. There are a few theories though:
- After the Torah reading, someone would expound on the parsha using words from the Prophets and the habit of reading from prophets after reading Torah stuck
- During the reign of the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes (of Chanukah fame) Torah study was banned, but since this only applied to the first five books, a corresponding section of Prophets was read instead. After the decree was repealed, the custom remained.
- The most widely accepted theory is that since there was great debate amongst different groups of Jews who didn’t believe that the Books of the Prophets were holy, only the first five books of the Bible, reading the Prophets was instituted by the Pharisees in order to declare the authority of the Prophets and to exclude those sects that disagreed.
The Prophets were brought in to teach us something and we see examples of this as early as Mishnaic times (in a story about Jesus no less!) Professor Michael Fishbane teaches in the introduction to his commentary on Haftarot that the three public readings that the Torah, which is our ultimate source of law teaches us the mitzvot and the Haftarah, the words of the prophets, provides moral instruction and uplift.
Beginning this Shabbat, in place of Gutsy Torah, we will be studying the weekly Haftorah, find its connections to the Torah reading, learn about the Prophet and the timeframe they came from. It should be a different type of learning and I’m looking forward to digging into a piece of our sacred text that we haven’t spent much time with here in the last few years. This program will be called “The Weekly Prophet”.
The Weekly Prophet takes place each Shabbat morning at 8:30am both in the Chapel and via zoom. Join us tomorrow morning for Parshat Bereishit (and to hear the story about Jesus reading Haftarah!)
Shabbat Shalom!
Rabbi Blatt
| 
