Asher Brook
This week’s Torah portion is Nitzavim-Vayelech, and the haftarah comes from the Book of Yeshayahu, or in English, Isaiah.
In this week’s haftarah portion, Yeshayahu talks about praising the Lord, for all that He has done for the Israelites. It states multiple times that God would give something to us or do something for us, using a part of God’s body.
For example, the haftarah reads “And you shall be a crown of glory in the hand of the Lord, and a kingly diadem in the hand of your God” and “The Lord swore by His right hand, and by the arm of His strength.”
I find the way that God is being described as strange. We usually don’t picture God with an arm or physical attributes, so why does Yeshayahu keep mentioning God’s body in the haftarah? The Rambam teaches that when the Torah says that a person spoke, heard, saw, or came near to God, it does not mean that person physically interacted with God. Instead, it means that the prophet, or whoever God was “speaking” to, had a deeper understanding of what God wanted them to do, without physically hearing God’s voice. The Rambam’s big idea is that even the prophets can’t hear or see God, but this language is used to show that people can feel His presence.
The Rambam also teaches that you can never describe God by what He is; rather, you must describe Him as what He is not. God is so powerful that people should not try to give Him human characteristics. For example, it is possible to say that “God is not evil,” but you cannot say that “God is good,” because when we say that God is “good,” it limits God to the human understanding of what it means to be good. If we say that He is “good,” then we are confining God to a singular word to describe Him, when He is infinitely more.
Just as God can’t be summarized by certain adjectives, people have many layers and can’t be summarized or characterized by another’s words. No person is just a single adjective, and you can never completely understand another person. Sure, you may be able to figure out someone’s height, features and attributes, but that is not everything about them.
So, before we judge someone on something they did or said, we need to remember that we will never fully understand them as a whole. If someone does something that you feel is wrong, it may not feel the same to them, since we all interpret things differently. No two people’s ideas are the same, and we may never fully understand why someone interprets something the way they do, just as we can never fully understand God.
The lesson we can take from this is that since we may not be able to comprehend everything about where the other person is coming from, we should always keep an open mind and be receptive to other people’s ideas.
Asher Brook is a seventh grade student at Krieger Schechter Day School.
