This week's Haftorah has a strange focus. The Haftorah is intended to mirror the content of the parsha. However, this week, it is about something different altogether. The parsha tells the story of how Yaakov ran away to Charan, sought out his uncle Lavan to marry one of his daughters, married two (Rachel and Leah) plus two of their servants (Bilhah and Zilpah), had twelve children (eleven sons and one daughter), and journeyed back to the land of Israel, reaching its border. On the other hand, the Haftorah talks about why the ten tribes of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, led by the tribe of Ephrayim, went into exile. The prophet Hoshe'a tells us that it was primarily because of their idolatry. The primary link between the two stories is that Yaakov went into exile north of Israel to Aram of the rivers. Similarly, the northern tribes were exiled to Assyria, north of Israel. Is that link highlighted in the first verse of the Haftorah the only link between the two stories?
Ramban (Nachamanides) explains in many places that we ought to read the stories in the Torah through the rubric of "Maaseh avot, siman lebanim," or "stories of the fathers are a sign for their children." The Torah lays out a series of stories that then form a pattern of the subsequent travails of Israel. For example, just as Avraham went into exile in Egypt, so would we. Just as Hashem took him from danger and rewarded him monetarily, He would do the same for us in the Exodus story.
The story of Yaakov is used here in a similar way. Just as Yaakov would eventually (after many years) return to his family in the land of Israel, so too, Hoshe'a tells the ten tribes will the people of Israel, Yaakov's descendants. However, here, something is different from Avraham's example. The northern ten tribes have yet to return. The prophecy of Hoshe'a has yet to be fulfilled.
The Haftorah ends on a note familiar to us from a different week. The last part of this week's Haftorah is the same as the Haftorah of Parshat Shuva, read between Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur. There, it is an exhortation to us, to Israel, to repent and return to G-d. Here, it has a different meaning. When brought into the context of the previous two chapters, it is clear that Israel here refers primarily to the northern ten tribes that made up the Kingdom of Israel, as opposed to the Kingdom of Yehuda. Hashem is telling the northern ten tribes, through Hoshe'a, to repent so they may return.
Unfortunately, this has not yet happened; however, as Jews, we are fundamentally optimistic. We believe that the world can be better and that despair is never appropriate. We waited for our partial return for two thousand years and were eventually rewarded in a world-first historic event. Since then, Israel has seen an extraordinary ingathering of the exiles. Yaakov, this week, comes to remind us that we are still working on it. Many Jews have returned, and yet many are not able to. If we repent and continue to return to Hashem spiritually, if we continue to strengthen our Jewish identity and our connection with Hashem and with the Torah, Hashem will reward us without final redemption as he promised so long ago.
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