When the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco signed their agreements with Israel, and when Kazakhstan later added its name, the men who drafted the documents reached for one word to hold it all together. They did not call them the Jerusalem Agreements or the Peace of Washington. They called them the Abraham Accords — Muslim-majority nations formalizing ties with the Jewish state under the name of the patriarch both peoples call their father.
That name marks a reversal. For most of Jewish history, the traffic between the Jewish people and the great powers ran entirely the other way.
We are now in the Three Weeks, the season between the seventeenth of Tammuz and the ninth of Av in which we mourn the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. This week’s reading from the prophets is the second of the three readings of rebuke that we read during this time. It is one of the bitterest chapters the prophets left us. God files a complaint against His own people, and the charges are specific.
Not only have the Israelites abandoned God and replaced Him with idolatry, but they are guilty of another crime as well.
Judah’s leaders were not worshipping idols in that verse. They were doing something that looks, to modern eyes, entirely reasonable — shopping for a great-power patron. Egypt to the south, Assyria to the north, and a small kingdom in between trying to survive by attaching itself to whichever empire looked stronger that decade.
So why does Jeremiah rank it beside idol worship?
The answer runs through an image Jeremiah cannot let go of. A few verses on, God remembers what He had planted: “I planted you as a choice vine, wholly of the purest stock. How then have you turned into a foreign, degenerate vine?” (2:21). Israel was meant to be a sorek, a noble grapevine rooted in one soil and drawing its life from one source. When Judah went down to Egypt for rescue, it was not merely making a bad alliance. It was pulling itself out of the ground that fed it, hunting for its life-source somewhere out among the nations — the same instinct, at bottom, as bowing to their gods. Both are a search for water anywhere but the fountain.
Here is what makes that failure so bitter, and it is the heart of Universal Zionism. God never wanted Israel going out to the nations. He wanted the nations coming in.
The promise to Abraham was exactly this: “In you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). There is a striking reading of that verb, nivrekhu, “shall be blessed.” It shares a root with mavrikh, the farmer’s word for layering — bending a living branch down into fresh soil so that it takes root there while staying joined to the mother tree. Rabbi Shmuel ben Meir, the biblical commentator known as the Rashbam, understood Abraham’s blessing to work the same way. The nations sink roots and flourish by staying connected to a people that stays connected to God and His covenant. The stronger that connection, the greater the yield.
The nations are not asked to stop being the nations, or to become Jews. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks put it exactly: “The God of Abraham is the God of all mankind, but the faith of Abraham is not the faith of all mankind.” Each people keeps its own soil. What the layered branch offers is connection to the source.
Which brings us to how the reading ends, at least in the Sephardic communities.
The reward for repentance is the same blessing promised to Abraham. The demand falls on Israel — truth, justice, righteousness — and when Israel lives that way, the nations see the God behind it.
We read all of this in the weeks we sit in mourning, and that is exactly where it belongs. The reversal Jeremiah promised is not finished, and it does not pretend to be — normalization has stalled where it matters most, whole publics have turned cold, and the road ahead is long. Yet something has begun to turn, and anyone who knows the history can hardly take their eyes off it. Nations that spent generations at war with the Jewish state are beginning to face toward Jerusalem instead of away from it, and they are doing it under the name of Abraham — the man first promised that through him the families of the earth would find their blessing.
Jeremiah watched his people walk the wrong way down that road, and it broke his heart. He would scarcely believe the sight we have been given: the first of the nations turning back, coming the long way home toward the fountain, not to conquer Israel but to be blessed through her. The mourning of these weeks was always meant to point past itself. We happen to be living in the days when it has begun, quietly, to keep its promise.
