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The Third Affliction Reading, Sharing Its Own Opening Word With Lamentations

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The Third Affliction Reading, Sharing Its Own Opening Word With Lamentations

This is the third and last of the Three Haftarot of Affliction, read on the Sabbath immediately before Tisha B'Av itself, known as Shabbat Chazon after the opening word of Isaiah's prophecy. As with the two haftarot immediately before it in this same sequence, its selection is governed by the fixed calendar leading up to the fast rather than by any specific content shared with Parashah Devarim, whose own material is Moses beginning his final address by recounting Israel's history and failures across the wilderness years.

The deliberate exception within this pattern is the haftarah's own closing word, eichah, how, the identical Hebrew word that opens the Book of Lamentations chanted on Tisha B'Av itself only days after this haftarah is read, a genuine and intentional textual echo rather than a coincidence of imagery, tying this specific reading directly to the fast it precedes in a way the two earlier Affliction haftarot do not share quite so precisely.

That said, a secondary resonance with Devarim does exist: both texts are, in their own way, review and rebuke of the nation's conduct delivered by a single authoritative voice, Moses reviewing forty years of wilderness failure and Isaiah reviewing the corruption of a settled, sacrificing, yet unjust society, so the calendar driven pairing still lands on a parashah whose own tone of retrospective accounting is not entirely out of step with it.

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