Being a prophet must be one of the worst jobs imaginable. If you study the words of the ancient prophets, you quickly start to realize that this was NOT a fun job at all, to say the least! Jeremiah hated it, Jonah couldn't get away fast enough (no, I really mean it. He tried to
run, but God caught up to him; he literally couldn't get away fast enough!). On the one hand, God is barking orders in your ear, telling you to convey messages of destruction, punishment, and doom, and on the other, your fellow humans yell back at you for chastising them. I mean seriously, who wants to hang around that depressing weirdo who keeps saying that God told him we're all going to suffer for our sins? This week, we're introduced to the concept of prophecy, but we are still left asking ourselves, what is the point of it all? Who are these unfortunate people saddled with THIS job, and what are we to make of prophecy in the Ancient World, and in our lives today?
The Torah portion Shoftim informs us, "I will raise up a prophet for them from among their own people, like yourself [Moses]: I will put My words in his mouth and he will speak to them all that I command him" (Deuteronomy 18:18). It sounds so easy, doesn't it? That's why we think it's a great job, and why we talk about 'modern-day prophets' like it's a good thing. It sounds powerful and influential. But what happens when the people don't like the message, and they won't
stop sinning? God keeps getting angrier, and the people - unwilling to change - tune out the prophet. Who gets squeezed in the middle? Mr. (or Ms.) Prophet. I guess I also find myself wondering why God doesn't just WRITE the message somewhere. Why not carve it, like the Ten Commandments, in stone, or iron, or gold (for that really snazzy look)? God could blast a message across the Great Wall of China, or write it on the moon, for goodness sake, so we'd all REALLY see it! Why force some shlemiel to be the bearer of bad news, especially when most prophets really weren't that successful in getting people to change anyway???
In his book, "The Prophets," Abraham Joshua Heschel attempts to answer this question. He writes, "The prophet is a person, not a microphone... The prophet's task is to convey a divine view, yet as a person he is a point of view. He speaks from the perspective of God as perceived from the perspective of his own situation." In other words,
it isn't about an objective message from God, that can be written in some inanimate, lifeless place. God wants us to understand that this is OUR world; WE need to fix it. The prophet is down on the ground with us all, in the trenches, and is speaking from a place of equality and understanding, not holier-than-thou judgment. No, it isn't easy being a prophet. It was probably impossibly hard - for Isaiah and Jeremiah... and for Martin Luther King and Gandhi as well. But what other choice is there? This is our world that we're destroying. Like a person in a boat trying to bore a hole under his own seat, unable to figure out why other people are yelling at him, we go about polluting our planet and looking for other people to blame.
We can't all be prophets though, right? Especially considering what a horrific job it is... But it IS an essential job. We couldn't survive without the prophets. And not because they stop God from punishing us, but because they remind us to look at ourselves. They teach us that things aren't great, that we can't stop growing or evolving, that there's more work to be done. Would we have a French Revolution
without prophets? Or Civil Rights? Heschel reminds us in a most powerful and eloquent way: "Prophecy is the voice that God lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profaned riches of the world. It is a form of living, a crossing point of God and man. God is raging in the prophet's words." Prophecy is indeed a form of living, perhaps even one we cannot live without. As we continue our journey towards the High Holidays, listen for the voices of prophecy around you. They have not quieted down; they have not disappeared. We may not be living in Biblical times, but the lessons of our prophets reverberate around us still. We just prefer to close our ears and our hearts. It's less noisy that way.
Photos in this blog post:
1. CC image courtesy of secretlondon123 on Flickr
2. CC image courtesy of andriux-uk on Flickr
3. CC image courtesy of Capt' Gorgeous on Flickr
4. Image courtesy of the Ohev Players' performance, 'Broadway Bound.'
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