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Jewish academic and Hebrew scholar Irene Lancaster explains how Jews interpret the famous passage about the dry bones in Ezekiel.
On the Shabbat which falls during the week of Pesach (this year April 4) we read Ezekiel 36:37 – 37:14. This prophecy includes the famous vision of the ‘dry bones’. Ezekiel tells the people, exiled in Babylon, that though they may presently feel like ‘dry bones’, ‘hopeless’ and ‘cut off’, G-d will eventually revive them and bring them out of their graves.
Why do we read this prophecy on Shabbat during Pesach? Rabbi Hai Gaon of Babylon (939-1038 CE) cited the oral tradition that the resurrection of the Jewish dead would take place in Nissan, the first month of the Hebrew year.
In addition, the resurrection itself would take place ‘with the dew of Torah.’ On Pesach, which always takes place in Nissan, we also start praying for dew. So, reading this Ezekiel passage during Pesach itself is appropriate.
G-d tells Ezekiel: ‘Son of man … prophesy to the bones and say to them: “Dry bones, listen to the word of the Lord (Ezekiel 37:4).”‘
Later commentators compare the ‘dry bones’ to people who are devoid of Torah teaching. For many people this lack of knowledge is due to circumstances beyond their control. Either they grew up in a place where it was forbidden to teach Torah; or their parents were ignorant; or there was a lack of teachers. Torah is a lifeline – compared to water – which reanimates our ‘dry bones’.
And where there is a suitable teacher, that teacher shouldn’t wait for optimum circumstances, but start teaching immediately, even in a ‘low place’, such as the ‘valley’ of Ezekiel’s vision.
And Ezekiel was successful, even in ‘a low place’. For ‘I beheld and behold, there came up sinews and flesh upon them, and skin covered over them (37:8).’
‘And then the spirit came into them and they came to life. And then they stood on their feet, an exceedingly great host (Ezekiel 37:10).’
Ezekiel explains that there are three levels of hopelessness (v 11): ‘our bones are dried up; our hope is lost; and we are cut off.’ Each level is more hopeless than the preceding one.
‘Dried up’ means that at present we are devoid of Torah learning, but we know that we can still return.
‘Our hope is lost’ refers to our thinking that after so many ‘arid’ years change is impossible. There is no way back at all.
But ‘We are cut off’ means that we have left the community altogether. Unlike when we lose hope, when we are cut off altogether there is no one at all to whom we can turn.
However, at this crisis point G-d Himself steps in (v 12): ‘Behold, I Myself, the Lord G-d, will personally open your graves and raise you up out of your graves.’ In the last resort, therefore, G-d Himself is our saviour (v 14): ‘And I will even set you down in your own Land.’
Thus a personal call by the prophet to revival from the Babylonian diaspora is linked to the Exodus story of Pesach. This is when, ‘with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm’, G-d leads us out of Egyptian servitude, through the arid desert, and eventually into the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 5:14).
But the story doesn’t finish here. Around 150 years ago, in 1877, Jewish poet, Naftali Hertz Imber, wrote the words of what would become Israel’s national anthem, HaTikvah, the Hope.
Imber’s words were carefully chosen to respond to this very same Ezekiel prophecy. The song includes the line: ‘our hope is not yet lost.’ These words contrast with Ezekiel’s second stage of hopelessness: ‘our hope is lost.’ Not yet, it isn’t!
Imber was writing exactly 70 years before the UN Partition Plan of 1947 granted statehood to the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. This UN vote itself took place only two years after the end of the Shoah, during which the Jewish people had been abandoned by their fellow human beings. At that time the Jewish people had truly felt as if there were no hope left.
Many have compared the concentration camps, the extermination camps and even the post-war DP camps to a veritable modern-day ‘valley of dry bones.’
UK rabbi, Reverend Leslie Hardman, the Jewish chaplain who, on April 20 1945, led what he called these ‘dry bones’ out of the Bergen Belsen concentration camp, records how the left-for-dead skeletons spontaneously burst into the HaTikvah, singing those very words: ‘our hope is not yet lost’.
These same words would, three years later, become the National Anthem of the new-born State of Israel.
The State itself was largely populated by the Jewish remnant, the nearly-dead Holocaust survivors, themselves resurrected by the ‘outstretched arm’ of G-d.
But, as Ezekiel prophesied, everything became ‘knit together’ (v 7). The new State was declared by Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, while the battle for the Old City of Jerusalem was still being waged. There was no time to lose.
And, despite the best efforts of some, Ezekiel’s prophetic vision continues to be revived on a daily basis in this flourishing, happy, fertile and youthful country which, with G-d’s help, will continue to be a sign of real hope to the world and an everlasting light to the nations.
