EE & R, 4_4: Manasseh Against the Prophet Isaiah: The Counter-Testimony of the Prophet
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4. Manasseh Against the Prophet Isaiah – Is Worship Without Knowledge Fidelity or Betrayal?
Enough of the heretical Torah teachings promulgated by the wicked Manasseh, whose blistering words sear the ears of Hashem’s loyal servants! Let us cleanse our minds from this harrowing descent into the learned intricacies of heresy with the purifying teachings of our true master, the great Isaiah. How did the prophet counter these brilliant yet godless ravings and reclaim the Torah from a logic so sharp it threatened to hollow it out? What is the true meaning of the Torah of Moshe, which forbids worshipping idols because other gods are “not known,” yet commands the worship of the God Who says that No man can see Him?
The nature of prophetic vision has already been explored at length earlier in this work.1 The prophet sees the unfolded future as if it is present – and by perceiving it as already realized, he brings the infinite good of what will be into the reality of what is, his message the channel through which the here and now is fashioned after the image of the ultimate. In this way, the prophet is said to know and see God, for his enchanted craft makes God’s infinite goodness become manifest. Whereas Moshe sought to know God as He is, without projection or presumption – and was therefore denied – the prophet allows the future to shape the present, and in doing so, gives infinite divine goodness bounded form. Moshe sought truth without self; the prophet does not await truth, but rather calls it into being by entering it.
The prophets’ ability to know Hashem is what renders possible the Torah’s prohibition against idolatry – binding first upon them, and through them, upon the entire Israel. For all the people are called to participate in the knowledge perfected by their leaders, whose far-seeing vision forms the shared foundation of the nation’s worship. But if this knowledge belongs only to the non-Mosaic prophets, and nowhere in the Torah itself is such a vision recorded, then how can it command the people to reject other gods? Is not Manasseh’s reading, which defers the worship of the One true God to the end of days, the only faithful and unflinching interpretation of Moshe’s instruction?
To answer this challenge, let us examine more closely the account of Isaiah’s vision of Hashem.
Upon beholding the Divine, Isaiah cries out, “Woe to me! I am doomed! For I am a man of impure lips, and I dwell among a people of impure lips; for my eyes have seen the King, Hashem of Legions” (Isaiah 6:5). One of the fiery seraphim then flies toward him and touches his lips with a burning coal, saying, “Your iniquity is removed, and your sin is atoned for” (ibid 7). Isaiah then hears the voice of Hashem proclaiming, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” – to which he responds, “Here I am. Send me” (ibid 8).
The meaning of the story appears straightforward: Isaiah, recognizing that his impure lips made him unworthy to bear the words of the exalted God, is purified by the seraph and thereby rendered worthy. But the Sages say otherwise. They see in the coal not mere purification, but punishment – a reproof for having spoken ill of Israel in declaring, “I dwell among a people of impure lips.” Speaking lashon hara about the people is a grievous sin, and the seraph’s fiery rebuke comes to correct it.2
This reading seems forced. Why depart from the plain meaning of the text? But actually, the Sages are responding to a deeper difficulty: If Isaiah’s impurity stems from the people’s impurity, then how does a coal to his lips resolve the problem? The issue lies not only in his own mouth, but in the nature of the people with whom he dwells. He cannot speak the word of the thrice-holy God while his identity is entangled with theirs. How, then, can a coal to his own lips correct a problem rooted outside of himself?
The answer is profound. By protesting that the people are of impure lips, Isaiah disqualifies himself from prophecy. If they cannot speak purity, neither can he – how can he speak holiness if his voice is their voice? What does the coal change? It proves that the prophet need not be bound by the impurity of his society. If his lips can be seared clean, that means that the prophet’s speech is not limited by his era. He is lifted above the sinful generation among which he might live, and made to speak not for a momentary public, but the eternal am, the collective body of Israel that spans time. That people is not of impure lips. That people is destined for goodness. The prophet’s voice is indeed the voice of the people – only not as they are, but rather as they will be. And in speaking for their future, he affirms that future as already real.
That is why one must never speak evil of the nation of Israel. The am is righteous, their destiny the very redemption of history. To slander them is to deny their eternal mission. The coal taught Isaiah to transcend his historical context and align himself with the eternal people whose end is goodness – for the infinite future is necessarily good.
But Isaiah was not the first whose lips were touched by fire. There is one other, whose mission was shaped not by vision, but by its impossibility. Moshe, too, had a coal placed upon his lips, according to the well-known story in the Midrash:
Pharaoh’s daughter would kiss, hug, and show him love as though he were her son, and would not take him out of the king’s palace. Because he was beautiful, everyone desired to see him… Pharaoh would kiss him and hug him, and he would take Pharaoh’s crown and place it on his head, as he was destined to do when he grew older… The magicians of Egypt who were sitting there said: “We are afraid of this one who takes your crown and places it on his head, lest he be the one regarding whom we said that he is destined to wrest your kingdom from you.” Some of them advised to behead him; others advised to burn him. Yisro was sitting in their midst and said to them: “This boy has no intelligence. Test him! Bring before him a bowl with gold and a hot coal: If he extends his hand to the gold, he has intelligence and you should execute him; and if he extends his hand to the coal, he has no intelligence and has no sentence of death.” Immediately, they brought it before him, and he extended his hand to take the gold. Gabriel came and pushed his hand. He seized the coal and placed his hand with the coal into his mouth, and his tongue was burned. From that he became “slow of speech and slow of tongue” (Exodus 4:10).3
Isaiah’s coal led him to prophetic speech, to declare: “Here I am. Send me”; Moshe’s left him silent, “not a man of words” (ibid), “uncircumcised of lips” (ibid 6:12), reluctant to speak the words of God. He begged Hashem to not be sent: “Send, please, by the hand of him You would send” (ibid 4:13). The coals that touched the lips of Moshe stand in contrast to those that touched the lips of Isaiah. Moshe came to understand that God cannot be known, and thus, he could not speak of Him; Isaiah becomes the counter-image of Moshe – purified to speak, bearing words on behalf of a future he already sees.
And this inversion from Moshe to the prophets that follow him is encoded in the Torah itself. For the person who was “not a man of words,” gave a grand oration at the end of his life, when passing on the mantle of leadership to those who would only approach but never reach his exalted level. This speech is recorded in the book of Devarim – “words” – which begins: “These are the words” (Deuteronomy 1:1). As the Midrash comments:
The mouth that said: “I am not a man of words,” [now] said – “These are the words.”4
In this transitional book, Moshe alludes to the possibility of Knowledge, warning against worship of the “other gods which you have not known” (Deuteronomy 11:28).5 It is in the Book of Words that he implies that Hashem is due worship for being known, for although Moshe himself sought a level of knowing that is beyond the human mind, he established a Torah – with the prohibition against idolatry as its core tenet – designed also for those of lesser insight who would, unlike Moshe, know Hashem.
Devarim serves as the bridge between Moshe and the prophets. It is the Torah’s affirmation of prophetic knowledge, its preparation for the age of visionaries. Indeed, Moshe cannot now know Hashem. Indeed, the full realization of the Torah awaits the day when even a Moshe would know, when “that darkness is removed from there.”6 But until that day arrives, the Master doesn’t teach to turn away from Hashem to other gods – heaven forbid such monstrous heresies! – but rather to embrace that kind of knowledge prophets lesser than him would find, which will serve as a bridge and vessel for the complete knowledge that will be attained only at the end of days.
In the end, even Moshe’s silence became speech, preparing the way for those who would speak in his name and articulate the prophetic and true reading of the Torah. Our response to the fevered and brilliant ravings of the unfaithful king is this: The great Moshe himself pointed toward a kind of knowledge that would be applied to Hashem by the prophets – thereby securing Hashem’s exclusive worship and upholding the Torah’s central commandment.
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See Shir HaShirim Rabbah 1:39.