≈30 min · introductory episode · October 5–11, 2026
A conversation introducing the week. All voices — hosts and guest — are AI-written study personas, not real people.
Weekly introductory episode — Come Follow Me, October 5–11, 2026: Isaiah 50–57
NATHAN: Eli, quick question. Where's the bill of divorce?
ELI: I'm sorry?
NATHAN: Isaiah 50, verse 1. God asks it: "Where is the bill of your mother's divorcement, whom I have put away?" Under Deuteronomy 24, a husband who sends his wife away has to write her a document. So God says, show me the paperwork.
ELI: And?
NATHAN: There isn't any. It was never written. Israel was sent out for its sins, but the marriage was never dissolved.
ELI: (laughing) That's the most lawyerly comfort I've ever heard.
NATHAN: It's the opening line of the week, and it decides how the other eight chapters read.
ELI: Welcome in. This is the introduction to the week of October 5th through 11th: Isaiah 50 through 57. The lesson is called "He Hath Borne Our Griefs, and Carried Our Sorrows." One thing up front: this episode is not one of the five study sessions. It's the front door. Context, then content, then real time on the controversies, and this week has more of them than most.
NATHAN: Because this week is Isaiah 53. The chapter Christians have quoted more than almost any other in the Hebrew Bible, and, as our honest questioner puts it, the chapter Jews have had quoted at them more than any other. So we asked the panel's rabbi to join us, the panelist whose essay this week is titled "Where Is the Bill of Divorce?" Welcome.
THE RABBI: Thank you both. I'll try to repay the invitation by being frank. Most of what your listeners read this week, Jews hear in synagogue every summer. Not all of it, and the parts we don't read matter. But I'd like to begin somewhere other than the argument over chapter 53. I'd like to begin with the calendar.
ELI: Then start there. What does a Jewish reader hear first?
THE RABBI: Comfort, after grief. There's a fast called Tishʻah be-Av, when we mourn the destruction of both Temples. After it come seven Sabbaths, and on each the synagogue reads a prophetic portion, a haftarah, from the second half of Isaiah. We call them the shivʻah de-nechemta, the seven of consolation. Four of them sit in your block or start just before it: 49:14 through 51:3, which holds all of chapter 50. Then 54:11 through 55:5, "O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest." Then 51:12 through 52:12, "I, even I, am he that comforteth you." Then 54:1 through 10, "Sing, O barren."
NATHAN: Which is out of order.
THE RABBI: It is. Rav Yehuda Shaviv points that out. And the Machzor Vitry, a medieval prayer book, explains why the portions rise by stages: you comfort a mourner slowly. You don't walk into a house of mourning and announce that everything is fine. Comfort isn't announced. It's administered.
ELI: That's going on my fridge.
THE RABBI: And on the morning of Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, the prophetic reading begins at 57:14: "Cast ye up, cast ye up, prepare the way." So for us the associations are fasting, repentance, and a slow climb out of grief. These chapters are sung before they are argued.
ELI: Nathan, put us on the map.
NATHAN: Two maps, honestly. The critical map goes back to Bernhard Duhm in 1892. Chapters 1 through 39 are mostly tied to the eighth-century prophet in Jerusalem. Chapters 40 through 55, "Second Isaiah," are addressed to exiles in Babylon. They treat Jerusalem's fall as past and name the Persian king Cyrus, who took Babylon in 539 BC. Chapters 56 through 66, "Third Isaiah," are set back in Judah after the return.
ELI: And this week crosses the line.
NATHAN: Yes. The panel's academic scholar has 50 through 55 as the last movement of Second Isaiah. Then 56 opens with "Keep ye judgment, and do justice," and suddenly the arguments are about the temple, the Sabbath, and who counts as a member. The line is contested. Shalom Paul argues for one author across 40 through 66. Most scholars still hear a new voice at 56.
ELI: And the other map?
NATHAN: The one in your scriptures. The panel's LDS scholar points out that these chapters are worked over heavily in the Book of Mormon. Jacob reads 50 and 51 aloud from the brass plates in 2 Nephi 7 and 8. Abinadi recites 53 as Mosiah 14. The risen Jesus quotes 52 and recites 54 at Bountiful.
ELI: So the two maps collide.
NATHAN: Right on top of the chapters the Book of Mormon uses most. We'll take that on at full strength in the back half.
ELI: The lesson frames the week pastorally. The exiles in Babylon would have wanted a mighty conqueror, someone to tear down Babylon's walls. Instead Isaiah describes someone "despised and rejected of men." The line I keep underlining: "Where some expected a lion, He sent a lamb."
NATHAN: Rabbi, back to that bill of divorce. Why does it matter so much to you?
THE RABBI: Because the Talmud built a scene around it. In Sanhedrin 105a, ten men come to the prophet Ezekiel with a legal argument. If a master sells his slave, or a husband divorces his wife, does either still have a claim on the other? In other words: we're in exile, the covenant is over, let us be like the nations. And the answer is Isaiah 50:1. There is no bill of divorce. There was no sale. You were sent out for your sins, but the marriage stands.
NATHAN: And chapter 54 pays it off.
THE RABBI: "Thy Maker is thine husband." "For a small moment have I forsaken thee." "My kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed." And I want to say something to Christian listeners plainly, with no hostility in it. For most of Christian history, the dominant theology taught that God had divorced Israel and taken a new bride. Isaiah 50:1 is the text where God says, in his own voice, that no such document exists. Jews have read it that way for millennia. We survived on it.
ELI: I think Latter-day Saints might hear that easily, because the Book of Mormon's version actually sharpens your point.
NATHAN: It does. Second Nephi 7:1 opens with a line the King James doesn't have: "Have I put thee away, or have I cast thee off forever?" And our doctrinal connector notes Jacob is reading this to a small band of exiles stranded across an ocean. A question about paperwork becomes a question about permanence.
THE RABBI: "Cast thee off forever." That's the right question, and the answer is no.
ELI: From the doorstep side: I've sat with people who believe God has divorced them. They don't say it that way. They say, "I think I used up my chances." This verse says, go find the paperwork. There isn't any.
NATHAN: Then the voice changes. 50:4 is the third of the so-called servant songs. Duhm picked out four: in chapters 42 and 49, then 50:4 through 9, and 52:13 through 53:12. "The Lord GOD hath given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary." And the King James hides something. "The learned" is limmudim, "those who are taught." Disciples. The speaker is a pupil before he's a teacher, woken "morning by morning" to listen.
ELI: And our practical disciple says the tongue depends on the ear. And then asks the question that ruined my week a little: when did the first voice I heard in the morning last belong to God instead of my phone?
NATHAN: Then the song turns hard. "I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting." And then courtroom language: "who will contend with me? let us stand together: who is mine adversary?" He's being abused in a human court and is sure he'll be acquitted in God's.
ELI: The practical disciple is careful here. "I set my face like a flint" can be misused to tell people to stay in situations that are destroying them. But the flint isn't self-erasure. He sets his face because "the Lord GOD will help me," and then he names his accuser out loud. Flint is about direction, not absorbing every blow. Then 50:11, the people who walk "in the light of your fire" and "lie down in sorrow." When it goes dark, we manufacture our own light. Can I sit in the dark a while without lighting something that'll burn me?
THE RABBI: Then come the imperatives. "Awake, awake." Every Friday night, Jews around the world sing a hymn called Lekha Dodi, written in the sixteenth century by Shlomo Halevi Alkabetz among the kabbalists of Safed. Its middle stanzas are built from your chapters. Hitnaʻari me-ʻafar kumi, "shake thyself from the dust; arise." Livshi bigdei tifartekh, "put on thy beautiful garments." Hitʻoreri hitʻoreri, "awake, awake." The bride Zion, captive and dusty, is told to get up and get dressed. The Sabbath becomes a weekly rehearsal of her redemption.
ELI: And Latter-day Saints have Doctrine and Covenants 113, where "put on thy strength, O Zion" means putting on priesthood authority. The doctrinal connector adds that section 101 names stakes from 54:2, "strengthen thy stakes." Every stake president holds an office named for a tent peg in this week's reading.
THE RABBI: May I point out what readers tend to flatten? The figure told to wake in 51 and 52 is a woman. Jerusalem, the mother. She has drunk "the cup of his fury." She has "laid thy body as the ground, and as the street, to them that went over." In chapter 54 her story continues as the barren wife whose tent gets enlarged. Read from the humiliated mother of 51 to the exalted mother of 54, and notice what sits between.
NATHAN: The humiliated and exalted servant.
THE RABBI: Jewish readers have long noticed that the servant song is bracketed by the suffering and vindication of the people. Hold onto that.
ELI: One more verse first. 52:7. "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings." The six-outlooks essay spends its whole length on it: a city on a wall watching a runner come over the ridge.
NATHAN: And the message is malak ʼelohayikh, "thy God reigneth," literally "your God has become king." It's the formula for proclaiming a king. For exiles whose own king had been blinded and carried to Babylon, that's the news: the throne in Zion is occupied again.
ELI: And Abinadi's priests throw that verse at him as a trap. You bring only bad news, so how are your feet beautiful? He answers by reciting Isaiah 53. The doctrinal connector's line: you can't have the beautiful feet of 52:7 without the marred visage of 52:14.
NATHAN: Which brings us to the song itself.
ELI: Before anyone fights about who it is, what's on the page?
NATHAN: The most useful observation is from David Clines's little book I, He, We, and They. The poem runs on pronouns. God speaks at the start and the end, framing it with "my servant." In between, an unnamed "we" confesses: "we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions." "They" are the nations and kings, who shut their mouths. And "he," the servant, never says a word. The drama is a change of perception. The "we" read his suffering as proof God was against him, the logic of Job's friends, and then realize it was for them.
ELI: And the lesson leans right in. It suggests replacing "we" and "our" with "I" and "my." "All we like sheep have gone astray" becomes "I have turned to my own way." It lands differently.
NATHAN: Also, "griefs" and "sorrows" in 53:4 are literally sicknesses and pains. That's why Matthew 8:17 applies it to Jesus healing people. And Alma 7 picks it up, "the pains and the sicknesses of his people," and adds a reason Isaiah doesn't give: "that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people."
ELI: Which is where the lesson's title lives. He "does not save us from a distance."
THE RABBI: May I say what a Jewish reader brings into the same chapter? Same words. A very different "we."
ELI: Please.
THE RABBI: Isaiah names the servant before this week. "But thou, Israel, art my servant, Jacob whom I have chosen," 41:8. "Thou art my servant, O Israel, in whom I will be glorified," 49:3. So at 52:13, "Behold, my servant," the default in this book is Jacob-Israel. Rashi, the great eleventh-century commentator, says exactly that. And Rashi and Ibn Ezra agree the "we" of chapter 53 are the nations, astonished at what became of the people they despised. They thought Jewish misery proved God had abandoned us. They were wrong.
NATHAN: The kings who "shut their mouths" in 52:15.
THE RABBI: Yes. And here's what Christian readers almost always miss. Rashi's reading is not a denial of vicarious suffering. On 53:4 he says the servant was chastised "so that all the nations be atoned for with Israel's suffering." The claim is that Israel has borne the sins of the nations, in persecution and exile, and one day those nations will admit it. You may disagree. It's not an evasion. And after the twentieth century, it's not an easy reading to wave away.
ELI: (quietly) No. It isn't.
NATHAN: Let me put the Christian rejoinder on the table, because the honest questioner insists on it. In 49:5 and 6 the servant has a mission to Israel, "to bring Jacob again to him," so he can't simply be the nation. The fourth song is unusually individual: a face, a grave, a trial, silence before accusers. And it insists he's innocent, "neither was any deceit in his mouth," while Isaiah elsewhere is relentless about Israel's guilt. 50:1 itself: "for your iniquities have ye sold yourselves."
THE RABBI: A fair argument. Origen made a version of it in the third century, which brings me to a myth: that Rashi invented the Israel reading in the eleventh century to fend off Christians. Origen refutes that himself. In Contra Celsum he describes debating Jews "reckoned wise men," who said the prophecy referred to the whole people regarded as one individual. He pushed back with 53:8, "for the transgression of my people was he stricken": if the servant is the people, how does he suffer for the people? Jewish commentators have answers. The speakers are the nations, so "my people" is theirs. Or the righteous remnant suffers for the whole. But Origen proves the collective reading was in Jewish mouths a thousand years before Rashi.
NATHAN: And now you'll be frank in the other direction.
THE RABBI: (laughing) I promised. Christians who've been told Judaism never read Isaiah 53 messianically have been told something false. The Targum, the ancient Aramaic rendering, opens 52:13 with "Behold, my servant the Messiah shall prosper," though it moves the humiliation off the Messiah onto the people and the Temple. The Talmud lists names of the Messiah, and one is "the leper of the house of Rabbi," citing "surely he hath borne our griefs." Another passage applies 53:12 to Moses. Another uses "it pleased the LORD to bruise him" for afflictions of love, the suffering that visits the one God delights in.
ELI: That's a lot of voices.
THE RABBI: That's the point. Israel, the righteous, Moses, the Messiah, any sufferer God loves. What those texts don't show is a dying and rising divine Messiah whose death atones for the world. A suffering Messiah in some texts, yes. God incarnate, no. Taking the midrash seriously means taking all of it, not quarrying one line.
NATHAN: The questioner adds one more piece. Two Jewish scholars, Marc Brettler and Amy-Jill Levine, suggest Rashi's national reading likely reflects the Rhineland massacres of the First Crusade. The song explained why faithful Jews were being killed by people who called themselves followers of the servant.
THE RABBI: And that's why it still stings. In 1263, at Barcelona, before the king of Aragon, a Dominican friar, himself a convert from Judaism, cited Isaiah 53 against Nachmanides. Nachmanides answered that the true meaning concerns the people of Israel. He won the argument on the floor, and he was forced out of Aragon. So when Jews hear Isaiah 53 quoted at them, they don't hear a Bible study. They hear a cross-examination by people who had power over them. An honest Christian conversation has to start there.
ELI: Let me ask you directly, then. Our listeners will read this chapter as Jesus. The lesson says few chapters describe his redemptive mission more beautifully. What would you want them to do?
THE RABBI: Read it as Jesus. That's your faith. I'd never ask you to hide it. I'd ask that you not read it against us. And honestly, your own scripture seems to give you more room than most Christians have. Your LDS scholar's essay made me sit up.
NATHAN: Abinadi. He reads 53 as Christ, fully. Then he takes "he shall see his seed," 53:10, and asks, "who shall be his seed?" The answer is a group: everyone who hearkened to the prophets, and the prophets themselves. Then he makes the feet of 52:7 plural: "were their feet," "still publishing peace," "shall hereafter publish peace." Only then does he return to the one "founder of peace," the Lord. Individual and community, held together.
THE RABBI: And that word "seed," zeraʻ, is exactly where Jewish readers balk. A figure who died childless can't "see his seed." Abinadi faces the same word and reads it collectively. A Jewish commentator would recognize that move.
ELI: And then 3 Nephi 21.
NATHAN: The doctrinal connector calls it the most surprising reading of all, and it's the Savior's own. Jesus quotes 52:13 through 15, and in the next chapter applies "kings shall shut their mouths" to a latter-day servant who "shall be marred because of them. Yet I will heal him." Readers have proposed Joseph Smith, or Jesus, or the Book of Mormon personified. Whoever it is, Jesus takes the marred servant and applies the language to someone else.
ELI: So the doctrinal connector says Latter-day Saints should be slow to call the Israel reading simply wrong, while still testifying with Abinadi and Philip that the song finds its fullest meaning in Jesus.
THE RABBI: I'll accept that gratefully. Brettler and Levine argue Christian readings need not exclude Jewish ones. Your honest questioner says the reverse courtesy is worth extending. Agreed.
ELI: Now the claim many listeners have seen online. Synagogues skip Isaiah 53 on purpose because it points too clearly to Jesus.
THE RABBI: Here's what's true. The consolation haftarah that ends at 52:12, "the God of Israel will be your rearward," is followed by one that begins at 54:1. The fourth servant song is never read as a haftarah. The gap is real. But the cycle also skips 51:4 through 11, including "Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the LORD," which is glorious. It skips 56:9 through 57:13. The haftarot are chosen to console Zion or echo the Torah reading. A dirge for a disfigured, dying figure does neither, under anyone's interpretation. Nobody can prove intent. But "the rabbis hid Isaiah 53" outruns the evidence. It's printed in every Hebrew Bible and has been argued over in public for nearly two thousand years. That's a strange way to hide something.
NATHAN: And our essays land in the same place. The questioner quotes Brettler and Levine: "perhaps the verses dropped out of Jewish liturgical readings under Christian pressure; perhaps they were never included." The LDS scholar calls the second the safer claim. I'd say the motive is unproven, and stop there.
ELI: Now Nathan's favorite part.
NATHAN: The Hebrew here is genuinely hard. Four spots. One, 52:14, "his visage was so marred." The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran adds one letter and gets "I anointed his appearance beyond any man." Most text critics think that's a scribe's interpretive change. But it means someone before Jesus was already reading this servant as the anointed one.
ELI: Two.
NATHAN: 52:15, "so shall he sprinkle many nations." The verb usually means sprinkle, as with sacrificial blood. But the parallel line, "the kings shall shut their mouths," sounds like shock, and the Greek reads "many nations shall marvel at him." Modern versions say "startle." Sprinkle is priestly. Startle is about onlookers. The Book of Mormon keeps "sprinkle," which suits an atonement reading but doesn't settle the Hebrew.
THE RABBI: May I take the next one?
NATHAN: Please.
THE RABBI: 53:8, negaʻ lamo, "the stroke was upon them," or poetically "upon him." Lamo is usually plural. Jewish polemicists have pressed that hard since the Middle Ages; Christian grammarians answer it can be singular in poetry. A real ambiguity, not a knockout. And 53:9 has be-motav, literally "in his deaths." Collective readers hear the many deaths of a people. Others call it a plural of intensity.
ELI: And the last?
NATHAN: The big one. 53:11. The traditional Hebrew says "he shall see," with no object. Three Qumran manuscripts and the Greek Septuagint read "he shall see light." Out of the travail of his soul, he shall see light. Most critical translations now adopt it. The servant "cut off out of the land of the living" then sees light.
ELI: That sounds like resurrection.
NATHAN: To Christian ears, yes. And it's where Latter-day Saints have to be honest about the next thing.
ELI: Say it plainly.
NATHAN: Two problems. First, dating. If chapters 40 through 55 were composed among exiles after 586 BC, they couldn't have been on brass plates carried out of Jerusalem around 600 BC, and Jacob reads 50 and 51 from those plates. David Wright, a critic, calls Book of Mormon Isaiah a "double anachronism." The LDS scholar says it bluntly: the usual responses don't persuade the field, and nothing in these chapters solves the problem.
ELI: And second?
NATHAN: King James dependence. Shon Hopkin compared Mosiah 14 with Isaiah 53 and counts twenty variants, fourteen of which he argues have ancient manuscript support. But Hopkin also says the English follows the King James so consistently it "could not have occurred by accident." And here's the sharp test: Mosiah 14:11 doesn't have the "light." If the brass plates preserved an older Hebrew text, that's exactly where you'd expect it to show. It doesn't.
ELI: That's hard to hear.
NATHAN: The LDS scholar insists the evidence be stated as it is. So what do faithful readers do? The honest questioner lays out Joshua Sears's four Latter-day Saint responses. Dismiss the scholarly dating. Defend the unity of Isaiah, for instance by challenging the assumption that predictive prophecy is impossible. Accept much of the scholarship but argue the material was composed or edited in the century between Isaiah and Lehi. Or posit divine involvement in transmission or translation. Sears thinks none of this has to undermine faith. Critics answer that the second rejects the consensus, the third pushes dates earlier than most scholars allow, and the fourth explains anything and therefore nothing.
ELI: Let me push a little. The lesson's frame is that these prophecies "would have been especially precious" to Israelites in Babylon "centuries later." For many members, that's just what prophecy is. A seer sees ahead.
NATHAN: And it's a coherent faith position. I just don't want anyone walking into class thinking the textual evidence is neutral. It leans one way.
ELI: And I don't want anyone thinking the evidence settles what God can do. So we disagree a little. That's fine.
THE RABBI: If I may, as an outsider. Your LDS scholar ends by noting that the Book of Mormon's own handling of the servant matches what the scrolls show: a text read and reread across centuries. My tradition puts a collective reading and a messianic reading on the same page. You're arguing about origins, which I understand. But your Abinadi is doing something any yeshiva student would recognize.
ELI: Now the one people feel. "He was wounded for our transgressions." What does the song say he did?
NATHAN: The questioner lays out three readings. Vicarious: take 53:6 at face value, "the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all." Minimalist, R. N. Whybray's: a prophet who suffered alongside guilty Israel and was released, not killed, and the poem is a thanksgiving. And penal substitution: God punishes the innocent in place of the guilty so justice is satisfied.
ELI: And the Hebrew?
NATHAN: Mixed. The "offering for sin" in 53:10 is ʼasham, the guilt or reparation offering of Leviticus 5. Our academic calls it the strongest substitutionary language in the poem. But the questioner notes it's about restitution, not punishment as such. "The chastisement of our peace" uses musar, more at home in the vocabulary of discipline and instruction.
THE RABBI: Which is why I keep saying Rashi isn't avoiding vicarious suffering. He has a different sufferer, not a different idea.
NATHAN: Then the hardest verse. 53:10. "It pleased the LORD to bruise him."
ELI: That one has always bothered me.
NATHAN: The verb can mean to will, not just to delight. But the questioner says the problem doesn't go away with a gentler verb. Either God willed the crushing of an innocent man, or the text is wrong about God. The usual Christian answer, that the Son is God himself bearing the cost, works less neatly with the Latter-day Saint distinction between Father and Son. So the questioner suggests leaning on Abinadi's insistence that the Son submits his will, and on the song's own voluntary language: "he hath poured out his soul unto death."
THE RABBI: The rabbis read that same verse as afflictions of love. It doesn't make the verse easy. It names the problem tenderly.
ELI: And the questioner notices something I want to keep. The speakers confess "we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God." And the point of the very next verse is that they were wrong. Part of this song is a confession that people misread suffering as God's punishment. The text is arguing with its own most brutal reading.
NATHAN: That doesn't resolve 53:10.
ELI: No. But it means I'm not the only one bothered. Neither was the poet. And one pastoral warning, from the practical disciple. We covenant to "bear one another's burdens." But we are not the servant of Isaiah 53. We don't atone. The ministering brother who acts like every sorrow rests on his shoulders burns out, or resents the people he serves. The lesson points to Brother Wunderli's April 2026 talk, about his little boy who filled a backpack with trail rocks and a picture of Jesus and wouldn't lighten it by taking out the picture. The title is the point: "Jesus Christ Is Not Our Burden; He Is Our Relief." Carry what's yours. Hand the rest to the one who "bare the sin of many."
NATHAN: Then Third Isaiah opens with what our academic calls a remarkable legal reversal. Deuteronomy 23 bars an emasculated man from "the congregation of the LORD," and bars Ammonites and Moabites "for ever." Isaiah 56 speaks to exactly those people. Don't let the foreigner say "the LORD hath utterly separated me from his people." Don't let the eunuch say "I am a dry tree." The eunuch gets "a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters." Meanwhile Ezra and Nehemiah push the other way and expel foreign wives. The questioner's phrase: scripture is arguing with itself, in public.
THE RABBI: "Mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people," ki veiti beit tefillah yikkare le-khol ha-ʻammim, is one of the most quoted verses in Jewish life. Notice the condition, three times: keep the Sabbath, take hold of my covenant. Isaiah's universalism isn't the covenant dissolving into general goodwill. It's the covenant's door opening. And "a place and a name" is yad va-shem. In 1953 the Knesset gave that name to Israel's memorial to the six million, many of whom left no sons or daughters to carry their names. When your listeners read 56:5, I'd ask them to know it now names the place in Jerusalem whose work is to gather and keep those names.
ELI: (after a pause) Thank you for that.
NATHAN: And everyone notices Acts 8. Philip meets a man who's both a eunuch and a foreigner, reading Isaiah 53 in his chariot, and baptizes him. Three chapters later in that same scroll, eunuchs are promised a name.
ELI: The practical disciple turns 56 into a ward audit, and I think it's the most useful paragraph of the week. Who feels like a dry tree in your ward? The single adult in their forties. The couple who dreads Mother's Day. The convert whose family won't come to the baptism. The instruction is specific: don't let them say it. Don't let silence or ward culture tell them they're cut off.
NATHAN: Then chapter 57, which almost nobody teaches on Sunday. It's the most graphic text in the block, and the King James softens it. Rites "under every green tree." Children slain "in the valleys," likely child sacrifice. In 57:8, "thou lovedst their bed where thou sawest it": the Hebrew says you gazed on a hand, and the translators' notes explain yad there as a sexual euphemism. And "the smooth stones of the stream" in 57:6 may actually mean "the dead of the wadi," offerings to the dead.
THE RABBI: And the marriage language returns. The unfaithful wife.
NATHAN: Which is where the questioner brings in Renita Weems's Battered Love: the prophetic marriage metaphor, however powerful, scripts divine love as a husband who punishes and then woos back. The defense is that Isaiah 54 bends it toward tenderness: the forsaking is "a small moment," the kindness "everlasting." Whether that redeems the metaphor or just softens it, the questioner leaves to each reader.
THE RABBI: For my people the center of the metaphor was always 50:1, the husband who never wrote the bill. But I take the point. A metaphor can comfort the wife and still teach the wrong thing about husbands.
ELI: And right in the middle of that darkness, 57:15. "I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit." The practical disciple: God has two addresses. Eternity, and the person who's crushed. If you're looking for him this week, look in both places.
THE RABBI: And four verses later, the one I'd want every listener to take home. "Peace, peace to him that is far off, and to him that is near." Rabbi Abbahu, in the Talmud, notices the order. The far one is greeted first. So, he says, in the place where penitents stand, even the completely righteous cannot stand. That's the Yom Kippur message of this chapter. The one who comes back from far away outranks the one who never left.
ELI: (laughing softly) That would wreck a few elders quorum lessons in the best possible way.
THE RABBI: It should.
ELI: Rabbi, give us your summary of all eight chapters.
THE RABBI: 54:13. "All thy children shall be taught of the LORD; and great shall be the peace of thy children." The Talmud reads banayikh, "your children," as bonayikh, "your builders." Those who learn build peace. We recite it in the Sabbath liturgy. So: the mother was never divorced. The children were never sold. The comfort comes slowly, by stages. And the ones who learn build the house again.
NATHAN: And "taught of the LORD" is limmudim again. The servant's word from 50:4. The book circles back on itself.
ELI: One thing each to carry in. Nathan.
NATHAN: Read 52:13 through 53:12 out loud once, and every time the pronoun changes, stop and ask who's talking. I, he, we, they. Then read it again with the lesson's "I" and "my."
THE RABBI: Read chapter 51 straight into chapter 54, the humiliated mother and the exalted mother, and notice what sits between them. You don't have to agree with my reading. Just see why we read it that way.
ELI: Mine: find your dry tree. One person who's quietly concluded they're cut off. Don't let them say it. Learn their name, use it, and set them a place.
NATHAN: The five study sessions are waiting on the guide page. Start with session one.
ELI: And when a hard verse stops you this week, remember the question we opened with.
THE RABBI: Where's the bill of divorce? There isn't one.