6 Cheshvan 5780 | November 4, 2019
929
Rabba Aliza Libman Baronofsky
Class of 2022
Reading Isaiah 6 for the first time was a revelation for me: Isaiah has a vision of God sitting on a majestic throne, surrounded by seraphim calling out a refrain that was familiar from the daily prayers: “And one would call to the other, “Holy, holy, holy! The LORD of Hosts! His presence fills all the earth!””
Isaiah, apparently having his first vision of God despite it being the sixth chapter of the book, has a fearful reaction: “I cried, ‘Woe is me; I am lost! For I am a man of unclean lips And I live among a people Of unclean lips; Yet my own eyes have beheld The King LORD of Hosts.’ Then one of the seraphim flew over to me with a live coal… He touched it to my lips and declared, ‘Now that this has touched your lips, Your guilt shall depart And your sin be purged away.’”
I knew this story – I’d learned it as a small child. In the story I’d learned, Moses was the protagonist. In a story told in Exodus Rabbah 1:26, his loyalty to Pharaoh is tested with a bowl of jewels and a bowl of coals. Moses chooses the coals, touches one to his lips and gains the speech impediment the Torah tells us about. The question I always ask about these midrashic texts is ‘what motivates the rabbis to write them?’ What does this story add to our understanding of the words of the Bible?
In his book, The God of Old, Professor James Kugel writes that Moses and Isaiah are two of the many prophets who have a significant initial experience with God he calls a ‘prophetic call narrative.’ This experience includes the reluctance of the prophet to serve as God’s spokesman – Moses’ difficulty with speech is one of his many reasons not to go (see Exodus 3-4, especially 4:10) and Isaiah initially because of his impure lips.
The author of the midrash is making explicit the connection between Moses and Isaiah, by writing Moses into Isaiah’s seminal experience. Why? Perhaps to shed a greater spotlight on Isaiah, whose life and teachings feature in our Haftarot, but are otherwise studied less.
Another similar motif between the two is fire: the burning bush in Exodus and the fiery seraphs with flaming coals in Isaiah hint even more at a connection between these two characters. Fundamentally, Isaiah’s story is much simpler. He is touched with the coal and immediately consents to represent God, despite his initial reluctance.
Isaiah 6 begins in a fantastical manner but ends much like many other chapters, with a prophet on a mission. Isaiah is going to tell the people to repent or die, and he is purified with a simple tap of coal to the lips. Modern Jewish life is not only about flashy burning bushes and splittings of the sea. Maybe repentance (or self-improvement) is really as simple as one small action (and then another, and then another).
