Haftarah for Devarim

This haftarah opens the entire book of Isaiah with a sweeping indictment: God has raised children who have then rebelled, and even an ox knows its owner and a donkey its master's stall, yet Israel does not know or understand. The land is described as desolate, and Zion left like a shelter in a vineyard after the harvest, a besieged remnant barely surviving.

Isaiah rejects the sheer volume of sacrifices being offered as meaningless while the hands presenting them are full of blood, and calls instead for the people to wash themselves clean, to stop doing evil and learn to do good, to seek justice, correct oppression, and defend the orphan and the widow, offering the famous invitation that though their sins are like scarlet, they can become white as snow.

The haftarah closes with a lament opening on the word how, eichah in the Hebrew, asking how the faithful city has become a harlot, once full of justice and now filled instead with murderers, before promising that Zion will eventually be redeemed through justice and its penitent through righteousness, a passage whose opening word gives this particular Sabbath its name, Shabbat Chazon, and directly echoes the opening word of the Book of Lamentations read on Tisha B'Av itself.

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.