ABSTRACT
david and caryn asked me to respond to this book's introduction, “Heeding Isaiah's Call.” True to their characterization of the “liberationist” generation, I now have the pleasure of reaction. Since I was raised as a secular Jew by a widowed working transgressive mother, I was not exactly clear what Isaiah's call was, and so I searched out my English major's needed copy of the Old Testament and turned to the Book of the man in question. I read my way through the old text, pausing at lines like “obey with a will,/and you shall eat the best that the earth yields/but if you refuse and rebel, locust beans shall be your only food,” sundry references to the damned of Sodom and Gomorrah, the misfortunes to be visited upon “the children of foreigners who have poured into the city,” and the mincing women of Zion who “shall have their hair stripped from their foreheads.” Along with the usual demands for absolute loyalty to the God of the Old Testament were beautiful longings for peace, the protection of orphans and the weak, and other invocations for social justice. As in so many places in the Old Testament, the absurd, the cruel was cheek to cheek with the metaphoric poetry of more humane 24possibilities. And then I came to the passages that the editors chose as their trope: “I have formed you, and appointed you to be a light to all people's, a beacon for all nations, to open eyes that are blind, to bring captives out of prison.” (Isaiah, 42, 6–7)
