The Prophets (Abraham Joshua Heschel)
5
Wow! This is the best book I have read in years! When I read books, I try to take notes, but books like that almost make me feel like I have copy large portions and portions of the book in my notebook for later reference. A while back I read F. B. Meyer on some of the characters of the Old Testament. I was turned off. Christian Fundamentalists don't help the situation either for me. They keep talking about judgement and anger and all these words that remind me of the god of Islam called Allah. But as I have come to read Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, I have come to rejoice in the God of the Old Testament and his judgement and be at peace when I hear about his anger. If I was still a Muslim and heard Rabbi Heschel and what he had to say about the Lord in the Hebrew Bible, I would have converted to Judaism right away. He reads the legacy of his Jewish mindset and not like those who read fragmented, mutilated passages here and there in order to justify their self-righteous "fire and brimstone" version of faith. On p. 21 Rabbi Heschel introduces us to the prophet. In my mind as a Muslim, the prophet was just a messenger. And in the Baptist seminary they taught us that the prophet is just "telling forth" what he hears from God. To me this sounds more like a mouthpiece, not too far from the Muslim concept of a prophet. In the Hebrew Bible the prophet claims to be far more than a messenger. He is a person who stands in the presence of God ( Jer. 15: 19), who stands "in the council of the Lord" ( Jer. 23: 18), who is a participant, as it were, in the council of God, not a bearer of dispatches whose function is being limited to sent on errands. He is a counselor as well as a messenger. In Amos 3: 7, we read "Surely the Lord God does nothing without revealing his secret to his servants the prophets". In Islam, the prophet is nothing more than a mouthpiece who conveys what is told to him verbatim, mechanical dictation. Never is it so in the Hebrew Bible. That is why people make huge mistakes when they say that the God of Islam is the same as the God of the Old Testament or that Mohammad functioned like any prophet in the Hebrew Bible. Not really. They can just wish all they want. This secret of the Lord that the Lord is dying to reveal to His servants to the prophets, as Amos has already told us, is one of awe. Yet the prophet does not hesitate to challenge the intention of the Lord, something that never happens in Islam. Yet here the prophet says to the Lord, "Oh Lord God, forgive I beseech Thee! How can Jacob stand? He is so small!". When the lives of others are at stake, the prophet does not say "Thy will be done" but rather "Thy will be changed". in Amos 7: 3, the prophets reports that he had a way with God and "The Lord repented concerning this; It shall not be, said the Lord". Rabbi Heschel assures us the that the prophet does not prove anything. He is not in the business of arguing his message. He is merely a witness. As a witness, the the prophet is more than a messenger... and as a messenger he bears witness that the Lord is divine. Mohammad used to argue and curse those who will not agree with his message of Islam and made it a divine mandate to curse those who will not be subjugated to his religion. This is called mubahalah in Islam. Read Family of Imran verse 61. Essentially it is, if we don't reach an agreement and you don't convert to a Muslim as a result of the debate, let us raise our hands to the sky and vehemently curse those who refuse to convert to Islam. On the other hand, the prophet in Hebrew Bible is not interest in the least to argue or prove anything to you. He is just a witness. He bears witness to the message he received from his Lord. The thought he has to convey is more than the language can contain. Divine power bursts in the words. The authority of the prophet is in the Presence His words reveal. You just have to hear his words and sense the power coming from the Presence behind them and they are to cut to the core of our hearts. This prophet didn't have to worry about Richard Dawkins or worry himself about giving proofs for anything. The prophet had the right concept: there are no proofs for the existence of the God of Abraham. There are only witnesses. The greatness of the prophet lies not in the ideas expressed, but also in the moments he experienced. As a witness, he experienced his moments with the Lord he has been with, and his words are a testimony to that- to God's power and judgement, to His justice and mercy. If we look for prophetic coherence, it won't be in what the prophet says but of WHOM he speaks. Indeed, not even the word of God is the ultimate object and the theme of his consciousness. The ultimate object and theme of his consciousness is God, of Whom the prophet knows that above his judgement and above his anger stands His mercy. On p. 24 Rabbi Heschel states that the attitude that the prophet takes to the tension that obtains between God and the people is characterized by dichotomy. In the presence of God he takes the part of the people. In the presence of the people he takes the part of God. On p. 25, he says that the conception of the prophet as nothing but mouthpieces, the assumption that their hearts remain unaffected, would almost compel us to apply to them the words that Jeremiah used of the people in chapter 12 verse 2, "Thou art near in their mouth, and far from their heart". The prophet is not a mouthpiece, but a person; not an instrument, but a partner, an associate of God.
In chapter 2, Rabbi Heschel deals with concept that we all know, Israel being the chosen people of God. He explains that from the beginnings of the Israelite religion the belief that God had chosen this particular people to carry out his mission has been both a cornerstone of Hebrew faith and a refuge in moments of distress. What Rabbi Heschel is so important for Muslims to hear, especially Palestinian Muslims who chose Atheism as they accuse the God of the Old Testament of being a racist god. Rabbi Heschel says, the prophet had to remind the people that chosenness must not be mistaken as divine favoritism or immunity from chastisement, but, on the contrary, that it meant being more seriously exposed to divine judgement and chastisement. In Amos 3: 1-2, he says,
1 Hear this word that the LORD has spoken against you, O people of Israel, against the whole family which I brought up out of the land of Egypt: 2 "You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.
Does chosenness mean that God is exclusively concerned with Israel? Does the Exodus from Egypt imply that God is involved only in the history of Israel and is oblivious of the fate of other nations? Amos 9: 7 has the answer:
"Are you not like the Ethiopians to me, O people of Israel?" says the LORD. "Did I not bring up Israel from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Syrians from Kir? 8 Behold, the eyes of the Lord GOD are upon the sinful kingdom, and I will destroy it from the surface of the ground; except that I will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob," says the LORD. 9 "For lo, I will command, and shake the house of Israel among all the nations as one shakes with a sieve, but no pebble shall fall upon the earth. 10 All the sinners of my people shall die by the sword, who say, 'Evil shall not overtake or meet us.'
The nations chosen for this comparison were not distinguished for might and prestige- countries such as Egypt and Assyria- but rather, nations which were despised and disliked. The color of the Ethiopian is black and in those days many of them were sold on the slave markets. The Philistines were the arch enemies of Israel, and the Syrians continued to be a menace to the Northern Kingdom. The God of Israel is the God of all nations, and all men's history is is His concern.
On p. 46 Rabbi Heschel discloses an important concept to us about the God we meet in the Hebrew Bible: He is a God of pathos. No matter how angry he is, he is always on the side of his people and is seeking every means to show his redemption to them and restore them to Himself. His anger simply means he responds to how we act and his not without emotion or passive or uncaring. But as we speak about his anger we have to instantly mention his compassion. The two go hand in hand inseparably. All prophets felt the pathos of God even in the midst of his anger. That anger of the Lord did not express all that God felt about the people. Intense is His anger, but profound is his compassion. It is as if there were a dramatic tension in God. Rabbi Heschel puts is so beautifully when he says, God is conceived, not as the self-detached Ruler, but as the sensitive Consort to Whom deception comes and Who nevertheless goes on pleading for loyalty, uttering a longing for reunion, a passionate desire for reconciliation. Of all prophets, only Jeremiah has sensed a wider scale of personal relations, a more intense subjectivity. Hosea has given us a supreme expression of the vision of the subjective God so typical for prophetic awareness (please read Hosea chapter 11: 8-9). On p. 83, Rabbi Heschel presents with a beautiful concept that didn't cross my mind before. The prophets were moved by sympathy for God. Isaiah is animated by a sense of dread and the awareness of the transcendent mystery and exclusiveness of God and only secondarily by a sense of intimacy, sympathy, and involvement in the divine situation. Isaiah's sympathy for God comes to expression in a parable describing the crisis in the relationship between God and Israel(Isaiah 5: 1- 7):
Let me sing for my beloved
a love song concerning his vineyard:
My beloved had a vineyard
on a very fertile hill.
Here Isaiah knows how his beloved feels. He sings about it. He feels the pain of his beloved. He is fully sympathetic. He is telling the people, Look at how the Lord feels, see where He is, see what you did and how that is making him feel. Feel for him. What intimacy!
