Eighth Day of Pesach – Torah and Isaiah at their most idealistic

As a Reform synagogue, we celebrate 7 days of Pesach rather than the 8 days that other Diaspora movements celebrate. This means that in order for our Torah reading cycles to all line up, we would typically divide the Parasha Acharei Mot into two parts, reading part I this week and part II next week. Conservative and Orthodox congregations will be reading the special Torah and Haftarah portions for the 8th day of Pesach tomorrow.

This year, I’d like us to take this opportunity, however, to study the special readings for the 8th day of Pesach, and we can cover all of Acharei Mot next Shabbat. As we near the end of primary election season, it seems only fitting that we learn what the Torah has to tell us about a vision of a better world. In particular, I think we can easily detect where modern Jewish socialist movements (perhaps our co-religionist Bernie Sanders, but I’m thinking more of the Lower East Side in the early 1900’s) and also our prophetic Reform movement got some of their inspiration when we read the texts assigned to this Shabbat.

The special reading for the 8th day, when it falls on Shabbat, is Deuteronomy 14:22-16:17. The Haftarah comes from the end of the first cycle of prophecies in the book of Isaiah.

Both of these texts lay out idealistic visions of how the world could be. Deuteronomy imagines a world in which all of the poor and hungry are cared for, through the observance of laws such as tithing and the remission of debts. We have the extraordinary statement that “There shall be no needy among you.” And we also have some of the laws related to celebrating the festival of Passover.

Isaiah goes even further, in painting a beautiful, peaceful, and hopeful portrait of the transformation of reality in the Messianic Age, when, “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb…., a babe shall play over a viper’s hole, and an infant pass his hand over an adder’s den.”

I look forward to discussing a number of questions:

First, why we think these texts were chosen for the 8th day of Pesach?
Do we see the ideals in these texts as central to our Jewish identity today?
Are the ideas and visions in this text at all connected to reality? Can they be implemented, at least in part? Or are they completely beyond our reach, and if so, why are they here?