Haftarah for Bereshit

This haftarah opens with Isaiah describing God in the same terms Genesis itself uses, the one who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people on it and spirit to those who walk on it. From that creator language the passage moves to a call: Israel has been called in righteousness to be a covenant for the people and a light to the nations, opening blind eyes and bringing prisoners out of confinement and darkness.

The passage then turns to a hymn of praise, a new song sung to God from the ends of the earth, before addressing Israel directly as a people robbed and plundered, snared in holes and hidden in prisons, a description commentators generally read against the experience of exile. It reassures that God who formed Jacob and created Israel has redeemed them by name, that they belong to God, and that when they pass through waters or fire they will not be overwhelmed or consumed.

The haftarah closes affirming that God alone is the true witness to this, that no god was formed before Him and none will be after, and that Israel itself is called to be His witness before the nations, closing on the declaration that God alone is savior.

The pairing with Parashah Bereshit, which opens the Torah with the creation of the heavens and the earth, rests on the most direct link the whole annual cycle offers: this haftarah opens with Isaiah using the identical vocabulary of a creator who made the heavens and stretched them out and spread out the earth, language chosen specifically to echo Genesis's own opening rather than merely to resemble it by coincidence.

Beyond that shared creation language, the haftarah's description of light given to open blind eyes recalls the very first act of creation in Genesis, the separation of light from darkness, while the passage's closing insistence that God alone is the first and the last, with no god formed before or after Him, restates in prophetic terms the same absolute priority Genesis claims for its own account of the world's beginning.

The choice also serves the annual cycle's broader opening purpose: pairing the Torah's first reading with a passage that names creation, redemption and Israel's mission all at once gives the very first Shabbat of the yearly reading cycle a haftarah that gestures toward the whole story the year's reading will go on to tell, not only toward the single parashah it accompanies that week.