A Sermon for Shabbat Hazon — Isaiah 1:18
July 18, 2026 – CBI Boca
“Come now, let us reason together,” says the Lord. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.”
לְכוּ־נָ֛א וְנִוָּכְחָ֖ה יֹאמַ֣ר יְהֹוָ֑ה
We are in the deepest days of summer, and it is supposed to be a time of unbridled joy, ice cream, the beach and driving with the roof down! But even in our summer mood, the Jewish calendar asks us to sit with something heavy. This is Shabbat Hazon — the Shabbat of Vision — the Shabbat immediately before Tisha B’Av. We read from the opening chapter of Isaiah, the prophet’s searing vision of a people estranged from one another and from God. But buried within that rebuke is an invitation so radical, so disarming, that it stops us cold.
Lecho na v’nivakcha — Come, let us reason together. Not: Come and be judged. Not: Come and be condemned. But: Come, and let us work this out. Together.
What does the Holy One want from us in this broken moment? Not our sackcloth alone. Not our fasting alone. God wants our presence. Our willingness to show up, face each other, and build.
Tisha B’Av is not usually observed by many Reform Jews. That is a pity because, while it is ostensibly a commemoration about the Babylonian and Roman destructions of the Temple in Jerusalem, our Sages turned it into something more universal.
They ask in the Talmud: why was the Second Temple destroyed? Not because of idolatry, not because of immorality in the way the First Temple fell. No — the Second Temple was destroyed because of sinat chinam. Baseless hatred.
For them to use this as midrash as the explanation for the destructions of Jerusalem tells us how much danger they thought sinat chinam – baseless hatred – was to the Jewish people. The Temple — the house built to bring the community together in sacred purpose, the place where heaven and earth touched — was destroyed not by an external enemy alone, but by the fractures within. We lost the house of God because we could not keep our own house together.
The midrash in the Talmud that tells the story of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza — a man who sent an invitation to his friend Kamtza, but his servant accidentally delivered it to his enemy, Bar Kamtza. Rather than allow the embarrassed guest to save face, the host publicly humiliated him and threw him out. And the rabbis who sat there, who saw it happen, said nothing. Bar Kamtza went to the Romans. The Temple burned. All from one dinner party. All from one moment of choosing pride over peace.
We often translate sinat chinam as “baseless hatred,” but the word chinam actually means “for free” — gratis, for nothing. It is hatred that costs nothing to give and yet destroys everything in its path. It can be the cold shoulder at synagogue or a clique that refuses to sit at the same table with someone else. It can be the community that splinters over a vote, a policy, a personality — and never recovers.
Sinat chinam is not always dramatic. It is often quiet. It lives in the group chat where someone is excluded. In the conversation that stops when a certain person walks in. In the minyan that can’t reach a quorum because half the congregation won’t come when the other half is running services.
Isaiah saw it in his generation. He thundered: your sacrifices mean nothing to me, your incense is an abomination, your festivals have become a burden — because you have not learned to do good, to seek justice, to correct oppression (Isaiah 1:13-17). The outward forms of religion cannot substitute for the inward work of community.
And then, after all of that rebuke, God pivots to this astonishing invitation: lecho na v’nivakcha. The word nivakcha comes from the root yakach — to argue, to dispute, to reason through together. This is not a courtroom summons. It is an invitation to dialogue. God is not issuing a verdict — God is pulling up a chair.
What would it mean for our communities to do the same? What would it mean to say — not “you are wrong and I am right” — but “come, let us reason together”? Come, let us sit in the same room. Let us listen before we speak. Let us build something rather than tear it down.
The genius of Jewish life is that it is communal by design. We need a minyan to say Kaddish. We need a community to build a mikveh, a synagogue, a school. You can be a Jew entirely alone but you can’t be Jewish entirely alone. God built the mitzvot in such a way that they require us to turn toward one another. And so when we fracture — when we choose sinat chinam over shelemut, over wholeness — we are not just failing each other. We are failing the very architecture of Jewish life.
The Hebrew root for community — kehillah — shares its root with the word kol, voice, and with kahal, the gathered assembly. A community is not a building. It is not a membership list. A community is a chorus of voices that chooses to show up for one another, even when it is hard. Especially when it is hard.
The Talmud teaches that each person who saves a single soul is as if they saved an entire world (Sanhedrin 4:5). But the inverse is also true — each act of sinat chinam, each unnecessary fracture, each community allowed to splinter without repair, diminishes a world. We are not just bystanders to our communal health. We are its builders or its destroyers, every single day.
Shabbat Hazon is called the Shabbat of Vision because of the Haftarah — Isaiah’s hazon, his vision. But vision is not only what we see. Vision is what we choose to see. Will we look at our community and see only what divides us? Or will we have the vision to see what we could become if we reasoned together?
The message of Isaiah is not despair. It is a fierce, urgent, stubborn hope. God does not give up on the people. Even while the Temple is in flames — in his imagination, in his vision — God holds out the invitation: your sins like scarlet can become white as snow. Your fractured community can be made whole. But you have to show up. You have to come.
As we move toward Tisha B’Av, let us not treat it as a day of passive mourning. Let us mourn with intention. Let us ask ourselves the hard question: where in my life, in my community, am I contributing to sinat chinam? Where am I holding a grudge that is costing our community its wholeness? Who do I need to invite — or accept an invitation from — so that together we can build rather than diminish?
The Temple was not destroyed in a day. It was worn away by accumulated small hatreds, by bystanders who stayed silent, by communities that chose comfort over courage. And it can be rebuilt — not in stone, but in the quality of how we treat one another — not in a day, but in accumulated small kindnesses, in the courage to reason together even when it is hard.
Lecho na v’nivakcha — Come, let us reason together. The invitation is still open. It was open in Isaiah’s time. It is open now.
May we have the wisdom and the will to come.
Shabbat Shalom.
Approx. 6 minutes at a measured speaking pace (~130–140 words/minute)
