The Temple rituals unfold daily, the sacrifices are offered on schedule, the priests perform their choreography by heart, and the people follow the sacrificial cult’s every rule. By almost every measure, the system is working exactly as designed.
And yet, something is broken.
This is the world that the prophet Isaiah sees through in the haftarah read recently on Shabbat Chazon or the Shabbat of Vision. Shabbat Chazon occurs one week before Tisha B’av when we remember the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem. Isaiah warns the Israelites of the impending disaster. He argues that the Temples’ destruction will stem from a people who are lost in their routines.
David Foster Wallace, the novelist and essayist, made almost the same argument in a 2005 commencement speech to students at Kenyon College. Wallace warned the graduates about what he called our “default setting,” the automatic, unexamined way we move through traffic, errands and the same tired arguments with ourselves, running entirely on autopilot.
Wallace warned that the default setting keeps us “going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.”
Isaiah takes that default setting and shows where it leads. The people going through their rituals aren’t merely distracted, they’re doing harm. Their hands, he says, are “full of blood.” While the sacrifices continue on schedule, nobody’s taking up the widow’s cause. Nobody’s looking out for the orphan. Everyone just keeps showing up for services.
Most of us aren’t running a Temple or offering sacrifices, but we’ve got our own version of the very same choreography: the commute, the inbox, the same three errands on repeat — our daily rhythm.
Isaiah’s argument is that, in the middle of all our running, we stop seeing the people who actually need us. We’re too lost in our own routines to look up.
Wallace opened his speech with a story. Two young fish are swimming along when they pass an older fish swimming the other way. The older fish nods and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” The two young fish swim on for a while, and then one of them turns to the other and says, “What the hell is water?”
It’s a joke about how the thing surrounding you most completely is the thing you’re least able to see. We’re swimming in our own routines the same way. Isaiah spent his life trying to get his people to notice the water they were in.
Maybe the question for us is just as simple: What’s the water we’re swimming in, and who have we stopped seeing because of it?
Rabbi Brian Leiken is the senior rabbi at Austin’s Congregation Beth Israel, which is celebrating 150 years and is in the process of building a new sanctuary after the 2021 arson.