The women will wail, lamenting the losses. The wailing will awake the rest of the people to take the matter seriously and to wake up.
But what does it take for any of us to care enough to wail, to protest?
To wake up to the responsibility that comes with grief and dire need for change? And why start with the women?
Isaiah turns again to the proud women of Jerusalem, trying to get them to look up, to wake up, to see what’s at stake, what’s coming, and help turn the people’s hearts towards the inconvenient truth and what can still be done to avert destruction.
We are aware of his sexist attitude as exhibited in previous chapters, in the context of his time, and here we wonder if his approach is not meant to make sure that they, who perhaps are better able to express emotion, can help motivate the movement towards societal accountability and change. He may also be referring to the social roles that some of the women had, as leaders in emotional intelligence. He is also calling out those, who like their men, overlook what’s happening.
In the context of a chapter that laments the corrupt leadership and mounting injustice he calls them out:
נָשִׁים֙ שַׁאֲנַנּ֔וֹת קֹ֖מְנָה שְׁמַ֣עְנָה קוֹלִ֑י בָּנוֹת֙ בֹּֽטְח֔וֹת הַאְזֵ֖נָּה אִמְרָתִֽי׃
יָמִים֙ עַל־שָׁנָ֔ה תִּרְגַּ֖זְנָה בֹּטְח֑וֹת כִּ֚י כָּלָ֣ה בָצִ֔יר אֹ֖סֶף בְּלִ֥י יָבֽוֹא׃
חִרְדוּ֙ שַֽׁאֲנַנּ֔וֹת רְגָ֖זָה בֹּטְח֑וֹת פְּשֹׁ֣טָֽה וְעֹ֔רָה וַחֲג֖וֹרָה עַל־חֲלָצָֽיִם׃
You carefree women,
Attend, hear my words!
You confident ladies,
Give ear to my speech!
In little more than a year,
You shall be troubled, O confident ones,
When the vintage is over
And no ingathering takes place.
Tremble, you carefree ones!
Quake, O confident ones!
Strip yourselves naked,
Put the cloth about your loins!
Isaiah 32:9-11
Isaiah’s call for the women to lament and publicly protest, leaving complacency behind ahead of what’s yet to come is startling. He’s placing them in the role of wailers, public moaners whose cultic role has always been to rouse the mourners and provide a soundscape of sorrow to public moments that have to do with death.
The Jewish Museum in Girona, Spain is a modest affair, exhibiting some relics from this once proud city that boasted scholars and merchants, the heart of Catalonia for over 500 years. One of the murals in the room dedicated to the last of the Hebrew-written tombstones includes a group of wailing women, clad in black. It seems medieval or inspired by that sort of art and of all of the images in that small place I spent most time in front of it - feeling the generations of proud legacy, survival and trauma, the inconceivable exile, how security falls away, like seasons that change, like lives that wither.
In the ancient east the women who wail had a cultic role of importance, reserved for funerals but also for public rituals that mark the death of one season and the birth of the next. One such ritual was held during these days on the Hebrew calendar, the month of Tammuz, named for the Sumerian Vegetation-God Dummuzi, who dies each summer and is born again in spring.
It’ll be Ezekiel who speaks of the women who wail for Tammuz in the Jerusalem Temple, giving us a glimpse into this ancient rite known to our ancestors, eventually becoming the fast days of the three weeks that will begin later this week.
Perhaps what Isaiah is doing here is also referencing that ritual role, reserved for the women, whose keen sense of the sensual and spiritual will get them to look beyond the here and now and raise their voices in the wailing that will wake the rest of us up and do what we can to prepare for those days in which the harvest will fail and the comfort of our homes is not so certain?
Hovering between hope and despair, reality and wishful thinking, Isaiah calls upon the wailers to wail, to shake compliance and complacency, and through these words we hear a wake up call, as timeless as life and as death, to listen to the soul.
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