Post by Rabbi Neil on Feb 17, 2024 0:05:19 GMT
A few years ago, during Torah Study, we decided to look at the weekly Haftarot instead of the weekly Torah portion. My hope was to reveal the prophets as people who were passionate about their beliefs, who truly wanted the people to come back to God, and who tried to convince them using a variety of powerful metaphors in clearly emotional and sometimes fiery language. It didn’t quite work, though. After a year of study, many people in the group felt instead that the prophets were angry old men, religious zealots who sought to impose their own narrow understanding of how to relate to God onto the people by shouting at them and patronizing them. I felt that I had failed as a teacher.
Reflecting on this, though, I started to wonder if both things could be true, if it might be possible for the Biblical prophets to simultaneously be passionate about protecting the people while also patronizing them. So, while some might be dazzled by the oratory skills of the prophets, others might also rightly be upset by their metaphors and tone. In his book The Liberating Path of the Hebrew Prophets, Rabbi Nahum writes that there are “three qualities inherent in every prophet and in the prophetic stream: an encounter with divine love and concern for the world, courage to name oppression, and moral imagination to articulate an alternative future.” (p.11)
When someone recently asked me to be a prophetic voice on the topic of Israel, I found it difficult because of exactly what Rabbi Nahum writes – I can’t be a prophetic voice because I don’t have an encounter with divine love and concern for the world. I don’t know the mind of God and I would never dare to claim to understand what God wants for the world. Pretending to be so is just religious arrogance. Rabbi Nahum rightly responds to this by saying, “While most of us are not yet prophets, we also know the presence of a great love, a love that includes the entire world. Awakened by that love, we too are aggrieved in the face of human oppression. A voice within us calls out, “This is wrong and cannot stand.” We yearn for a world in which all can flourish.” (p.11) So, if I read him correctly, to him being a prophetic voice means viewing God as loving and yearning for justice. Where we diverge opinions, I think, is on how that justice is to be implemented. The Biblical prophets weren’t pacifists. In chapter 15 of the first book of Samuel, for example, the prophet Samuel tells Saul that God will punish the Amalekites for what they did to the Jewish people and insists that it is God’s will that Saul now go and kill every remaining Amalekite – man, woman, child, ox, sheep, camel and donkey. Saul doesn’t obey and as a result God removes Divine favor from his kingship. Sometimes, the prophets are clear that God wants to protect the people by any means necessary, including the use of violence. Lots of people in Santa Fe seem to think that being prophetic means eschewing war, and that’s clearly not the case. The prophets are not kumbaya peaceniks no matter what - that’s not being prophetic. An interesting question, of course, is the limit of war – and that is where we get into grey areas.
But grey areas are not popular. More and more people today debate in streams of consciousness that can fit a short social media post. They want a clear, loud and simple moral message. But the problem with that voice is that, just like when we studied Haftarot, it has the potential to become extremely divisive, especially when the matter at hand is complex. Yes, clarity of message can sometimes empower, but it can also separate people as “us” and “them” or, worse, “good guys” and “bad guys.” And while sometimes that is necessary when people are behaving appallingly, such as when they express hatred or bigotry, sometimes that is totally counterproductive.
When we read Prophetic literature, the overriding message between prophets is often similar – return to God. If I shared that prophetic voice widely across Santa Fe, it would be deeply inappropriate. So, what’s really being asked for is not a prophetic voice but a moral one. But moral about what? About the destruction of the environment? About systemic economic injustice? About racism? About homophobia? About the rise of religious extremism? About the decline of democracy? About war? About the rise of anti-Semitism? Haven’t I spoken about every single one of those things and more from this very pulpit on multiple occasions? I hardly think that I can be held liable for there not being hundreds of people in our Sanctuary every Shabbat and for not having every member hear my sermons!
Added to that, though, when it comes to really complicated, nuanced matters like our members’ disparate views when it comes to Israel and the Israel-Hamas War, I don’t think the moral position is to validate one group and invalidate another. Instead, I think it is to work to create a community which can eventually hold all people, not just the loudest, and, if possible, to bring them together in a respectful way. That may not be prophetic, but I would say that it is Biblical. Chapter 3 of the Book of Ecclesiastes (3:1-3) says that “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build…” Ecclesiastes doesn’t specify what those specific times are, so it’s up to us to work it out together. When it comes to geopolitics, when it comes to religion, when it comes to decades-long conflicts, there are very few clearly defined moral situations anymore – it’s only religious extremists who hold that God only says one thing or that God compels us to act in a certain way.
At its core, I think that the issue is not about being prophetic but about using the prophetic voice, or a moral voice. Of course, there are times when I use something like a prophetic voice to speak out in public, such as when I organized a 2000-person Rally Against Racism on the Plaza, or when I excoriated the Public Education Department for trying to change the public education curriculum according to the narrative of oil and gas companies and religious fundamentalists. I even have a My View in the newspaper tomorrow about this week’s now nationally-famous anti-Semitic incident in our city. But what is the ultimate goal of the prophets? According to Rabbi Nahum, it’s to name oppression and to have the moral imagination to articulate an alternative future. I respectfully disagree with the first point – Jonah, for example, is the most successful of all Biblical prophets but he never once names oppression. He doesn’t even have the moral imagination to articulate an alternative future, which is why he runs away from his Divine task. On the whole, though, I do think agree with Rabbi Nahum on the second part, though – the prophets had a vision of an alternative future, of a more unified future. To them, unification meant with God but to us it can mean to God or it can also mean to each other. If we think along those lines, maybe doing prophetic work doesn’t need to involve having an excoriating prophetic voice. Maybe morality shouldn’t be determined by who shouts the loudest and clearest, but by who works to carefully bring people together. Maybe moral behavior isn’t just decrying things to a big audience but is going into school after school to teach children and teachers how to stop hate. Maybe God is not in the strong wind or the earthquake or the fire but in the still, small voice after all the noise has died down (I Kings 19).
May we, then, hear the Divine call not just in loud shouts against injustice but also in the quiet work of wrestling with what injustice might mean. May our prophetic work unite us and not divide us. And may God support us in all that we do, so that we bring about a united, loving world as envisioned by God’s prophets. May such be God’s will, and let us say, Amen.
Reflecting on this, though, I started to wonder if both things could be true, if it might be possible for the Biblical prophets to simultaneously be passionate about protecting the people while also patronizing them. So, while some might be dazzled by the oratory skills of the prophets, others might also rightly be upset by their metaphors and tone. In his book The Liberating Path of the Hebrew Prophets, Rabbi Nahum writes that there are “three qualities inherent in every prophet and in the prophetic stream: an encounter with divine love and concern for the world, courage to name oppression, and moral imagination to articulate an alternative future.” (p.11)
When someone recently asked me to be a prophetic voice on the topic of Israel, I found it difficult because of exactly what Rabbi Nahum writes – I can’t be a prophetic voice because I don’t have an encounter with divine love and concern for the world. I don’t know the mind of God and I would never dare to claim to understand what God wants for the world. Pretending to be so is just religious arrogance. Rabbi Nahum rightly responds to this by saying, “While most of us are not yet prophets, we also know the presence of a great love, a love that includes the entire world. Awakened by that love, we too are aggrieved in the face of human oppression. A voice within us calls out, “This is wrong and cannot stand.” We yearn for a world in which all can flourish.” (p.11) So, if I read him correctly, to him being a prophetic voice means viewing God as loving and yearning for justice. Where we diverge opinions, I think, is on how that justice is to be implemented. The Biblical prophets weren’t pacifists. In chapter 15 of the first book of Samuel, for example, the prophet Samuel tells Saul that God will punish the Amalekites for what they did to the Jewish people and insists that it is God’s will that Saul now go and kill every remaining Amalekite – man, woman, child, ox, sheep, camel and donkey. Saul doesn’t obey and as a result God removes Divine favor from his kingship. Sometimes, the prophets are clear that God wants to protect the people by any means necessary, including the use of violence. Lots of people in Santa Fe seem to think that being prophetic means eschewing war, and that’s clearly not the case. The prophets are not kumbaya peaceniks no matter what - that’s not being prophetic. An interesting question, of course, is the limit of war – and that is where we get into grey areas.
But grey areas are not popular. More and more people today debate in streams of consciousness that can fit a short social media post. They want a clear, loud and simple moral message. But the problem with that voice is that, just like when we studied Haftarot, it has the potential to become extremely divisive, especially when the matter at hand is complex. Yes, clarity of message can sometimes empower, but it can also separate people as “us” and “them” or, worse, “good guys” and “bad guys.” And while sometimes that is necessary when people are behaving appallingly, such as when they express hatred or bigotry, sometimes that is totally counterproductive.
When we read Prophetic literature, the overriding message between prophets is often similar – return to God. If I shared that prophetic voice widely across Santa Fe, it would be deeply inappropriate. So, what’s really being asked for is not a prophetic voice but a moral one. But moral about what? About the destruction of the environment? About systemic economic injustice? About racism? About homophobia? About the rise of religious extremism? About the decline of democracy? About war? About the rise of anti-Semitism? Haven’t I spoken about every single one of those things and more from this very pulpit on multiple occasions? I hardly think that I can be held liable for there not being hundreds of people in our Sanctuary every Shabbat and for not having every member hear my sermons!
Added to that, though, when it comes to really complicated, nuanced matters like our members’ disparate views when it comes to Israel and the Israel-Hamas War, I don’t think the moral position is to validate one group and invalidate another. Instead, I think it is to work to create a community which can eventually hold all people, not just the loudest, and, if possible, to bring them together in a respectful way. That may not be prophetic, but I would say that it is Biblical. Chapter 3 of the Book of Ecclesiastes (3:1-3) says that “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build…” Ecclesiastes doesn’t specify what those specific times are, so it’s up to us to work it out together. When it comes to geopolitics, when it comes to religion, when it comes to decades-long conflicts, there are very few clearly defined moral situations anymore – it’s only religious extremists who hold that God only says one thing or that God compels us to act in a certain way.
At its core, I think that the issue is not about being prophetic but about using the prophetic voice, or a moral voice. Of course, there are times when I use something like a prophetic voice to speak out in public, such as when I organized a 2000-person Rally Against Racism on the Plaza, or when I excoriated the Public Education Department for trying to change the public education curriculum according to the narrative of oil and gas companies and religious fundamentalists. I even have a My View in the newspaper tomorrow about this week’s now nationally-famous anti-Semitic incident in our city. But what is the ultimate goal of the prophets? According to Rabbi Nahum, it’s to name oppression and to have the moral imagination to articulate an alternative future. I respectfully disagree with the first point – Jonah, for example, is the most successful of all Biblical prophets but he never once names oppression. He doesn’t even have the moral imagination to articulate an alternative future, which is why he runs away from his Divine task. On the whole, though, I do think agree with Rabbi Nahum on the second part, though – the prophets had a vision of an alternative future, of a more unified future. To them, unification meant with God but to us it can mean to God or it can also mean to each other. If we think along those lines, maybe doing prophetic work doesn’t need to involve having an excoriating prophetic voice. Maybe morality shouldn’t be determined by who shouts the loudest and clearest, but by who works to carefully bring people together. Maybe moral behavior isn’t just decrying things to a big audience but is going into school after school to teach children and teachers how to stop hate. Maybe God is not in the strong wind or the earthquake or the fire but in the still, small voice after all the noise has died down (I Kings 19).
May we, then, hear the Divine call not just in loud shouts against injustice but also in the quiet work of wrestling with what injustice might mean. May our prophetic work unite us and not divide us. And may God support us in all that we do, so that we bring about a united, loving world as envisioned by God’s prophets. May such be God’s will, and let us say, Amen.