“Hardly any passage of the Hebrew Bible is and has been of such fundamental importance in the history of Jewish-Christian debate, or has played such a central role in it, as has the fourth Servant Song, chapter 53 of Second Isaiah. Nor has any other passage experienced such different and sometimes mutually exclusive interpretations as this one”
- Stefan Schreiner, The Suffering Servant
Regardless of who the Second Isaiah was and when he lived, his vision of ‘the suffering servant’ is central not just to Jewish-Christian relations but also to the understanding of trauma and suffering - how, if, do we make meaning of our deepest wounds - as individuals and as collectives?
In the early 1990’s Jewish theological Eliezer Berkovitz created a global theological storm when, in his reflection on the Holocaust, he stated that “God’s chosen people is the suffering servant of God.”
He hit a nerve in the Vatican. This is also exactly where the fault-line lingers between what may have been Isaiah’s original Jewish theological premise and how Christian ideology adapted it.
In chapter 53 the prophet picks up the theme of the suffering servant - an afflicted person whose pain becomes the purpose of redemption - sort of the early version of the popular self-help notion of ‘No pain -no gain.’ Is he talking about himself and the burden of being an artist/prophet/public servant? Is he talking about some future version of a suffering human who takes on the burdens of the world for everybody’s relief, scapegoat style? Or is he using the symbol of a single human being to talk about the fate of the nation of Israel?
Who is this afflicted one taking on the suffering of the people, how, and why? Does the interpretation have to be an either/or proposal - one individual - or an entire nation?
Of course it can and/both - but in the history of internal Jewish debates and later Jewish-Christian relations - that was hardly the case. Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls contain variants of chapter 53 with subtle but surprising changes that indicate the Jewish sect’s belief in an individual messiah who will be forged through pain and death to become the eternal leader of light. For instance, they add a single word to verse 7: The original version we’ve got alludes to the cryptic future -- ‘Out of his anguish he shall see.’ -- but see what? The scroll found in Qumran adds the word ‘light’ - the suffering of night will bring on bright light. Some claim that this idea is a further extension of the sacrificial notion of the scapegoat - the annual offering on the Day of Atonement during which a single animal bore the transgressions of the entire nation, and was hurled off a cliff- much to the people’s relief.
This will be the seed that will eventually become Christian ideology, using Isaiah 53 as the foretelling of Jesus’s role. This idea would make its way into the New Testament. For instance,
1 Peter asserts, “Christ … committed no sin, no deceit was found in his mouth … He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed” (2:21-25).
By the 3rd century CE, Origen, one of the church fathers, published Contra Celsum a famous letter in which he directly challenges the Jewish reading of Isaiah 53:
“Now I remember that at a disputation held with certain Jews, who were reckoned wise men, I quoted these prophecies; to which my Jewish opponent replied, that these predictions bore reference to the whole people, regarded as one individual, and as being in a state of dispersion and suffering, in order that many proselytes might be gained, on account of the dispersion of the Jews among numerous heathen nations.”
Origen set the standard, and a millennium later, In 1263, the famous Disputation of Barcelona was held publicly to address this issue. The Jews were represented by Nachmanides, the Jewish mystic sage living in Girona, who expressed the Jewish viewpoint of Isaiah 53 as a collective metaphor. Incredibly, the dispute was awarded in his favor by James I of Aragon, but as a result the Dominican Order compelled him to flee from Spain for the remainder of his life. He died in Jerusalem, right where Isaiahs’ original words were spoken, whatever the original meaning may have been.
The historical approach claims Isaiah’s meaning is directly related to the experience of his contemporaries - the Jewish people suffering in Babylonian exile, while some of them try to make it back to Jerusalem. The suffering of the collective is made meaningful and significant because the suffering is understood to be a means to an end - a stop on the journey, a necessary evil towards liberation and redemption. Forest fires that renew and offer new growth, or the inner resilience that is the result of our grappling with illness or say, a pandemic - is what he may have meant.
But either way - the notion that the prophet becomes the messiah who takes on our pains has obviously found home in the world. What we do with suffering - then, now, why and how -- remains one of the biggest questions and animations of religious life.
And maybe we also read this for the internal metaphor it can be, beyond religious dogma - each of us carries that voice within - willing to sacrifice on behalf of the rest of our parts? A suffering inner voice, perhaps our inner child, whose time has come to be heard, healed, helped and honored?
The chapter ends enigmatically, going into the next set of metaphors - not just the suffering servant as ‘other’ but also the face of the feminine - another ‘other’ in the patriarchal context who awaits redemption and salvation. This series of metaphors simultaneously raises up the ideal of the nation as cherished mother, spouse and sister - while retraining a sexist attitude that makes us cringe.
Who is she - in no less than five representations - who awaits the return of love?
Image: @MarcChagall, White Crucifixion, 1938, Art Institute of Chicago
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Goodbye Isaiah, Hello Jeremiah
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You mjght want to add Jung's "wounded healer" to the catalogue of adaptations of this idea. The phrase is picked up by Henri Nouwenin a book of that title,
You mjght want to add Jung's "wounded healer" to the catalogue of adaptations of this idea. The phrase is picked up by Henri Nouwenin a book of that title,