[This lecture on the biblical book of Jeremiah was delivered at Spertus College, Chicago, October 29, 1990.]
A short time ago I gave in this forum a lecture on Koheleth. In that case there were sharp differences of traditional and scholarly opinion on the date and identity of the author and the very purpose and meaning of the book. If we find ourselves in an intriguing, enveloping fog in respect to Koheleth, we move to broad daylight in the case of Jeremiah, both with regard to the book, and the personality who gives his name to it. We know with some precision when he lived and exercised his prophetic ministry. There is some debate among scholars whether the date of the beginnin of his activity is 626 BCE or 605 BCE, but this is a mere two decades compared with the gap of seven or eight centuries which surrounds the possible date of Koheleth. We have a clear understanding as to the intent of the book, which speaks to the moral situation of the prophet's times, and the political circumstances. He stresses the need for inward religion, of caring for the poor and doing justice on behalf of those who cry out for it. Aand we know a great deal about the life and character of the author, for this is a frank, revealing book. And if we want yet another contrast, then Koheleth is an academic work, redolent of the atmosphere of the scholar's study. Jeremiah lived his life amid the hurly-burly of everyday event, giving his message publicly and persistently, and suffering many of the deprivations of the individual who deliberately allows himself to become unpopular with the powers that be.
Jeremiah was a prophet. What does that mean? Let us ask this question first because it is the key to understanding him and his achievement. I should like to offer you two definitions proposed by modern scholars, which are strictly empirical, that is to say, they rely on observation of the phenomenon of Hebrew prophecy with an attempt to justify or explain it. Then I will summarize for you two discussions of prophecy, one traditional and one modern, which try to determine what prophecy is, and what function it serves. Samuel Sandmel writes that a prophet was someone deemed close to the Deity who through special revelation was able to predict the future. You will notice that this definition does not address the question of the reality or inner nature of prophecy. The word "deemed" takes away any kind of certainty, pretty much like "alleged" as used by lawyers and journalists. But it is a good start, simple and straightforward. Here is a much more thoroughgoing definition offered by the German scholar Fohrer, which I think is quite an achievement, because it omits nothing, and hardly has a surplus word, a banner example of a successful attempt to define succinctly and fully a complex human manifestation.
A prophet is a person with charismatic gifts, consciously aware of having been singled out and called, who feels constrained to proclaim messages and perform actions suggested in the form of divine revelations during a state of spiritual inspiration, possibly accompanied by mild or intense ecstasy.
Only a German scholar could have come up with such a definition, I believe, and I say it in admiration, not criticism. A prophet first and foremost has charisma, that special something which characterizes a Joan of Arc or a John Kennedy, an electricity which is indefinable, yet immediately observable. Charisma does not make a prophet, but a prophet has it. A prophet has an awareness of his specialness and mission. It may often be an uncomfortable awareness, and Jeremiah certainly had that. He hated being a prophet, but felt compelled to be so. The prophet proclaims messages or performs actions, often bizarre in character. Jeremiah is compelled, for instance, to bury and undergarment. Such odd behavior is usually accompanied by an explanation of its symbolic meaning. Prophets are subjected to paranormal psychic states in which they may display ecstatic behavior which we normally associate with mental disturbance in the individual, or mass hysteria in the group, although we must beware of applying our criteria of mental health or distress to different times and different cultures. Jeremiah fits this definition very well. What does it all mean? Let us hear two very different Jewish viewpoints. One of the great Jews of all time, Moses Maimonides, discusses the character of prophecy. With the medieval love of categorization, he outlines three theories on prophecy. The common folk, he declares, explain simply that God chooses a particular individual for reasons known to him alone, and uses that individual as a conduit for his word. I was interested to note that just a couple of years ago, the highly conservative and traditional Wisconsin Synod of the Lutheran Church reaffirmed a similar viewpoint. The church declared that it is incumbent on the believer to hold that God talks to prophets in actual clear, human speech, just as Scripture indicates, and the prophet repeats these words literally and unchanged in the Bible. In this these authorities take issue with the viewpoint expressed by Hempel, who declares that what really happens is that the prophet undergoes some kind of inexpressible and shattering religious experience, which he interprets to his listeners, using the language and literary conventions current at the time. No, says this church, not at all. God, so to speak, dials the prophet's number whether he will or no, and hands over word for word a message. The second theory which Maimonides outlines is that prophecy is achieved through a deliberate attempt to achieve spiritual perfection.Such is the view of the philosophers, he declares. Potentially anyone can become a prophet. You must put yourself through a gruelling process of spiritual exercises which will reduce the physical clod in your nature and brighten the divine spark until such time as the Divine Will finds you an appropriate vessel for God's word to man. Maimonides holds that elements of both theories constitute the truth. God does not reveal himself through the unworthy. But you cannot ever hope to become a self-made prophet the way you might become a skilled saxophone player, or a fit subject for a weight-watchers' ad. It takes both an individual's intense devotion and preparation plus the will of God, which is, of course, unpredictable, becasue our knowledge can never even approximate to his, or fathom the depth of his understanding. Maimonides sees prophecy as a special gift conferred upon special people.
It is instructive to compare this with the view of Ahad Haam, a modern Jewish thinker, one of the theorists of the modern Zionist movement, who looks at prophecy through the eyes of a rationalist deeply influenced by the budding social sciences of the late nineteenth century, and especially the works of John Stuart Mill. Ahad Haam in his essay Past and Future argues as follows. The human psyche, that mysterious entity to which we refer whenever we use the first person pronoun "I", is composed of past and future, or, to put it slightly differently, we are each a meld of our past experience and our expectations for the future. The child, he declares, is short on experience, and long on hope. His or her future stretches ahead in a seemingly infinite fashion. The middle-aged has a balance of experience and hope.. He or she has gained much experience, and still has hopes, although with it is an awareness of ultimate dissolution. The aged has much experience, but little hope, because death is just along the road. This is where religion comes in, declares our rationalist. Men and women cannot accept the inevitable fact that they will become absolutely nothing. Such a fate is inconceivable. So they fabricate an artificial future, which we call heaven or paradise or the world to come or something of the sort. It is no accident that traditional pictures of such abodes bear more resemblance to a retirement community that to a student dorm. Now groups – peoples and nations – have a similar process. You have a young nation, short on experience, bright with hope and expectation, you have a middle-aged nation experienced yet hopeful. In the days of the prophets, declares Ahad Haam, Israel was already old. And in the same way as religion comes to the rescue of the sad and frightened individual, assuring him or her of a glorious future in the world to come, so the prophets came to the rescue of their people, assuring them of a glorious putative future which they called the messianic era, when all would be bright and made new. But there is a difference between individual and group. However long the individual may live, eventually he or she dies, and those beautiful dreams of paradise go up in smoke. As the Arab folktales say: have you ever heard of a son of Adam who entered this world who did not depart from it? The group, on the contrary, has no clearly defined allotment of years beyond which it is impossible to go. And the prophetic utterances sustained the Jewish people by constantly dangling before them the carrot of the Messianic era, towards which wer were always hopefully and prayerfully moving, but at which we never arrived, or could arrive. This, it is claimed, explains the strange phenomenon of the survival of the Jewish people. Ahad Haam points out that in his day the carrot has lost its bloom. The old verities have gone, we are in the age of science, and if we want to preserve our Jewish heritage some other inducement must be used. And this underlies his theory of political Zionism. We don't have to trace his thought farther for our purposes, but it is an interesting possible explanation of the function of prophecy, which I offer, without even a limited guarantee of its worthiness, for your consideration.
Jeremiah then was a prophet. What else do we know about him? He lived at a traumatic time in Jewish history. More than a century before, the Northern Kingdom of Israel had been desolated by the powerful Assyrian Empire. Now the Babylonians were getting read to destroy the soutern Kingdom of Judah. many felt that the presence of the Temple was a guarantee of safety, a kind of magic charm. Surely God would not allow his house to be damaged or captured. Jeremiah fought this notion. He asserts that national survival is dependent on righteousness, that if the Hebrews would follow the path mapped out for them in bygone ages, all would be well. Otherwise God would punish his people with exile, while yet holding out the hope of ultimate restoration. This is the essential message of Hebrew prophecy, at the opposite pole of the political ideas of a Machiavelli. The jury has been out a long time as to who is right, but maybe one day we shall determine the merits of the competing theories as we did with the notion of a command economy.
Although Jeremiah is a prophet of doom, and his name has become synonymous in English for woeful prophecies, he nonetheless comes across as a man of sympathy, warm-heartedness, and simplicity, with a tremendous literary talent. Let us talk about his personality first. Jeremiah makes no bones about the fact that he does not enjoy his prophetic office, and his protestations bear the mark of total sincerity. When a speaker is elected to the British House of Commons, the individual chosen invariably physically resists, and has to be dragged to his chair. This is now just a charming British custom. Most MPs given the chance would not need to be dragged to that chair, they would run. But they have to pretend to resist, because such is now the custom. Nowadays, after all, it is an honor without danger. It was not always so. There was a time when incurring the wrath of the king could give you a very literal pain in the neck, and there was good reason to resist the job. So it was with Jeremiah. He protested and complained, but he found he had been elected speaker in difficult times, and he had to put up with it. Jeremiah was forced, coerced, to speak in God's name. Abraham Heschel insightfully points out that the prophet used sexual imagery in speaking of this. He translates: "O Lord, thou hast seduced me, and I am seduced. Thou hast raped me, and I am overcome." This is a very daring, almost blasphemous image of divine rape, yet Jeremiah did not shrink from it. He was probably lucky he did not prophesy in Ohio or Florida. He goes on to tell us: "If I say, I will not mention him; or speak any more in his name, there is in my hear as it were a burning fire, shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot." Luther's famous utterance in connection with a sick, corrupt church was probably inspired by his example: "Here I stand, I can do nothing else. It's easy enough to covet the rewards of heroism if you do not count the cost. I guess that was the message of Tom Cruise's Fourth of July. Jeremiah did count the cost. Most, although not all, the time he regrets and resents it, yet he shoulders his masa, his burden, the term often used for the prophetic office. Much of the book reads like a personal chronicle.
Jeremiah has an astonishing style. I like to call it kaleidoscopic. I do not see these toys around these days, although maybe they can still be purchased. When you look through the kaleidoscope, holding it up to the light, you see a beautiful pattern. With the slightest movement, the pattern dissolves totally and is replaced by another, equally beautiful, yet quite different. Jeremisah is life that. He throws at the reader or listener an arresting metaphor. Before you have time to digest it, or probe its meaning, a completely different one, equally arresting, replaces the former. One sometimes gets the feeling that he is almost wasteful with his images. Why does he not expand a little on his idea? But no, he pushes onwards. His images are always simple and fresh, taken from everyday life.
Let us consider a passage early in the book, in the second chapter, to elaborate this point. Two evils my people have done, he declares, me they have forsaken, the source of fresh water, to hew out for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, which do not hold water. The metaphor here is so simple. The water supply was of two types: from a spring, which was fresh and unpolluted, or stored water which would become increasingly brackish, contaminated with moulds, mosses, and insects. The Israelites wilfully deserted God, who is like fresh water, refreshing and sustaining, and went after other gods which are noxious, like stored, filthy water. And he adds an interesting twist. The water would be brackish if it were there. But it is not even there, because the cisterns leak. It is like the people looking in a dark room for a black cat that is not there. Anyway, he has presented us with an image of water, what could be simpler or clearer. Does he elaborate it? Not at all. He continues: Is Israel a slave? Why has he become a prey? Now he speaks of free persons and slaves. Israel is free, yet their behavior is like one who has no freedom, and must act stupidly because of orders. Lions have roared at you, he continues. The metaphor of the slave is forgotten. Now we are talking of noisome beasts, which tear and ravage, just as the enemies of Israel do. Why do you drink Nile water, he asks, or Tigris water? The beasts are forgotten. Now we think of those who find solace or healing in a sacred body of water, much as the Ganges is used today. Israel, by leaning on Egypt to the west, or Babylon to the east, is performing the useless exercise of taking those useless waters. People used to go to Waukesha, Wisconsin, to take the waters, but their health seems not to have suffered since they stopped. Of old I broke your yoke, says God. We have left the symbol of the water once again, and now speak of a tethered beast which cannot move except as its owner desires. God changed that and gave the people freedom, but who cares? I planted you as a sapling, a reliable seed, but you have become a strange vine. The metaphor of the beast is forgotten. To put the new image in our terms, you go to the garden shop, and put out your dollars for the best brand of Kentucky bluegrass. And what comes up? Crabgrass! Homeowners will appreciate the feeling. God planted the Israelites to grown up strong and upright and fearless. But they have become self-seeking and nervous and crabby. The succession of images is truly breathless, a tremendous literary achievement which packs a great punch, piling image on image in its ruthless dissection of the society of the day.
Some say that Jeremiah exhibits signs of depression. Like Job, he curses the day of his birth. "Cursed be the day on which I was born!" he says. "The day when my mother bore me, let it not be blessed. Cursed be the man who brought the news to my father, a son is born to you! -- making him very glad ... because He did not kill me in the womb, so that my mother would have been my grave." Jeremiah was not a sick man, he was an honest man. He gives vent to frustration at the difficulty of his mission in the most clear, explicit terms. There is no mistaking his displeasure and disgust. He does not hide or downplay it. But he keeps on going. His grief brings about some of his most striking statements. In one place, contemplation the sorrows and anguish of exile he declares: "Would that my head were water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of my darling people." The few drops that the tear ducts can produce were inadequate for Jeremiah. His bizarre yet touching idea is that his eyes should be fountains and his head the water flowing therefrom to match the emotion he feels. He sees Rachel, the prototype of the merciful mother, bewailing her fallen offspring, and amid the sorrow finds the strength to declare that ultimately there is hope.
It is significant that a passage from Jeremiah is chosen for the haftara (prophetic reading) we read on the saddest day in the Jewish calendar, the fast of the Ninth of Av. It begins with a passage of such subtle meaning that it is not translatable into English. The first word is asof which implies gathering, taking back from exile, which leads us to expect that the next word will be 'e'esof, I shall gather. But our hopes are dashed. It punningly continues 'asifem which means "I shall destroy them." This anacoluthon is quite deliberate, I believe, signalling hopes that are liars. There is only deolation, no grapes on the vine, no figs on the fig tree. Like Cambodia or Kuwait, war has done its work of desolation leaving only a charred shell behind. Yet towards the end, a glimmer of hope emerges. In this Jeremiah sets the tone for all the qinot (lamentations) that we are accustomed to read on that day. They start in misery, and end in hope. And does this not act as a symbol of the entire saga of the Jewish people, who have suffered so much throughout history, but never gave up, and still look forward to the fulfilment of Jeremiah's prophecy at the conclusion of the reading for the Ninth of Av:
Thus says the Lord: Let not the wise man praise himself for his wisdom, and let not the hero praise himself for his heroism, let not the rich man praise himself for his wealth. But le him who would praise himself, praise himself in this: in understanding and knowing Me, comprehending that I am the Lord, who performs faithfulness, justice and righteousness in the land. Because in these things I delight, says the Lord.