Dreaming the World

A lovely early autumn day. Last night, the fading light set the field aglow. The woodbine climbs a maple and flames the trunk red. The goldenrods in all their diversity spread a rich yellow along the edges of field and beaches. Looking about, the world teems blossoms, as summer’s fierce abundance slowly dwindles.

I’ve been thinking about the Judaic prophets. (Yes, the High Holy Days are getting close.) Way back when, as a new undergraduate student, I took a class about them. The prof was one of the translators of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and an author of The New Jerusalem Bible. He knew his Prophets! Later on, I studied with another eminent Torah scholar, Eric Freedman. Looking back on those classes, I realize they shaped my view of morals and ethics as much as my family’s Native teachings.

Many of the prophets were concerned about what they perceived as “godlessness”: the mistreatment of children, widows, the poor, foreigners, and slaves. (They generally abhorred slavery in any form.) They railed again greed, indifference, the theft of other country’s land, and genocide, warning Israel that everything comes back around.

I went to college during the worst of the Vietnam War, and while my memory is that neither prof ever mentioned the war, it was always an enormous presence in the room. Out on the streets, Abraham Heschel and Martin Buber were applying their readings of the prophets to civil and human rights struggles in the U.S., in Palestine, and around the world. An aging, and very ill, Heschel famously joined the throngs walking across the bridge in Selma when he could barely walk at all. I wonder how he would respond to this week’s lynching’s in Mississippi. (I am also reminded of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s prophetic stance in wartime Germany, a position that would yield his martyrdom.)

The prophetic vision of these Rabbis stood in stark contrast to many conservative clergy, both Jewish and Christian, who’s only interest in the prophets was their possible role as harbingers of the birth of Jesus. They pointedly ignored the prophets, who, with Micah, insisted we, “only to do justice and to love goodness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8, NABRE). They still do.