Shabbat Hazon, named for the opening word of this week’s haftarah – hazon, meaning “vision” – is read on the final Shabbat before Tisha B’Av. Its opening verses present us with a puzzle.

The prophet Yeshayahu, speaking in the time of King Chizkiyahu, delivers one of the most searing indictments in all of Tanakh: “Even an ox knows its owner, a donkey its master’s trough; Israel does not know, My people do not consider. Woe to the sinning nation, a people weighed down with iniquity” (Isaiah 1:3–4). Yet the Book of Kings describes that very same generation in radically different terms: “He did what was pleasing to GOD, just as his forefather David had done…He trusted only in the ETERNAL the God of Israel; there was none like him among all the kings of Judah after him, nor among those before him… kept the commandments that GOD had given to Moses.” (II Kings 18:3–6)

How can both be true? How can the same city, the same people, at the same moment, be portrayed so differently? How do we hold this split screen: Yeshayahu’s moral ruin alongside Melakhim’s spiritual praise?

In the past, I struggled to reconcile these competing visions. Today I no longer do. When I read this haftarah and look at my own contemporary Jerusalem, I see both........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)