The other morning in our Haftarah, we heard the words of Jeremiah. I wanted to come back to that for a moment.
This reading is taken from what the scholars call The Book of Comfort. The rabbis who chose these words assumed you would know the rest of Jeremiah to put it in context.
Here’s the thing. Do any of you the first part of this story? Most of Jeremiah is NOT comforting. It’s about the anticipation of God’s deliberate destruction of Jerusalem by the hand of the Babylonians in 587 BCE. It’s full of places like the Valley of Slaughter where the bodies of the Jews will pile up and be food for birds and beasts. The people have sinned, followed idols, broken the covenant and many will die by the sword, some by famine. The original prophecy is that not one person will be left alive.
Jeremiah is told over and over again not to try and intercede for these people. They seem doomed, but in Chapters 30 and 31 there is a pivot to restoration and hope for the exiles. The pathos, the sympathetic pity and compassion of the Lord, continues despite everything we have done. We move to an articulation of hope.
There is an eternal covenant—the prophet understands this will replace the limited Temple ideology which led to death and exile. A new faithful community will be created. We will be summoned home to Jerusalem laughing and rejoicing, and how? Through the power of Rachel. But how? What is she doing here?
Rachel, the wife of Jacob, the one he loved and worked fourteen years to wed, shows up in this haftarah as a Mother of Exiles. She died in childbirth in Genesis giving birth to Benjamin. Have any of you been to her grave outside Bethlehem? I have yet to get there but it’s on my list.
She was buried on the way, she is in liminal space, and she is the last thing the exiles will see as they leave the land on a forced march to Babylon. In the Midrash for the Book of Lamentations, we encounter an amazing story that explains the true power of Rachel. She is the only patriarch or matriarch to whom God listens.
“A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping, Rachel is weeping for her children. She cannot be comforted because her children are no more.”
Her cry encapsulates the tragedy of separation and loss. Professor Hagith Sivan calls her, “the embodiment of the sorrow of dispossessed motherhood.”
The text of the midrash imagines that the Assembly of Israel is pleading their case before God. They remind God of His promises and His people. God seems to regret the destruction of the Temple because He may now be mocked by the nations of the earth. So God sets out with some angels, including Metatron, to see the destruction of Jerusalem himself.
But then suddenly, he calls on Jeremiah to convene Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses because, “they know how to weep.” Abraham asks, “Why did you exile my children?” To this God replies, “Your descendents transgressed every rule of Torah and each letter.” Issac, Jacob and Moses also plead for them. But they cannot turn God’s heart.
Suddenly, Rachel jumps in front of God and reminds him of her sacrifice. Do you remember what that was? With full awareness, she let Leah take her place in the marital bed. This is known as the “bedtrick” and in the midrash, she is an active participant.
So Rachel argues to God, “If I was able to overcome my envy, why should you, the merciful King, be jealous of idolatry that has no substance and exile my children to be put to death by the sword and become prey for their enemies!” At last, God relents.
“The mercy of the Lord was stirred and he said, For you, Rachel, I will restore Israel to her place. For it was said, “A voice is heard in Ramah…”
Rachel’s self-sacrifice enabled her to challenge God. Pathos leads to healing. Tears lead to turning. Hers was the only voice capable of getting through to the divine. Rachel’s story here is a celebration of empathy. She used her own story to remind God to be empathetic.
Rachel brings about what theologian Walter Brueggeman calls a “resilient reality.” She allows her suffering to create change. This is the message of the haftarah. This is what the rabbis want us to know. We can be faithful in exile. We can find power in tears. Don’t hide hard emotions. We can find power in self-sacrifice. When we feel abandoned, when courage seems absent we can keep going. Together.
The other morning, I spoke of positivity—which is a good thing—and the problem of “positivity at all costs,” what is called “toxic positivity,” of ignoring reality and shutting out the unpleasant, the sorrowful, the suffering. Rachel shows us that we need that awareness sometimes, we need to be in communication with reality even when it’s sad, even when it’s difficult, even when we want it all to go away, because that may be what saves us. When a hand reaches out, we need to see it in order to take it. We need to lift one another up not metaphorically but in actuality. We need to do more than say pretty words, we need to follow through.
God guarantees us newness, a home when we are in exile. In the face of death, there is life. When nothing seems possible, when we march to Babylon, there is something new on the horizon—God’s promise continues from generation to generation to this very day. We need this message more than ever at the beginning of the year.
Sometimes it can seem that God’s promise has disappeared. We’ve been conditioned to think what is possible has to be humanly available. But God refuses to be banished from the text. God is not bound by what is humanly possible.
Where we are now is not the last word. Jeremiah tells us that where you are in your life today is not the last word on where you will be. When they say it’s impossible, God says, watch me. When they say Israel can’t be restored, look where we are. This haftarah says, don’t trust what the world says is possible, that leads to anxiety and despair.
The question you need to ask is: are you in Jerusalem, or are you in Babylon? We all need a homecoming—and that doesn’t happen without reaching our hands to one another like the Talmudic rabbis and lifting each other up. Life can begin again, but with real hope, effort, and follow through, not merely empty platitudes.
The last will become first. The desert will run with water and in the end, with the power of Rachel’s tears, not one exile will be lost.