The Trouble with Prophets - Yom Kippur Day Sermon
I’ve always been bothered by this afternoon’s Haftarah portion.
Jonah gets called by God to go to the city of Nineveh and is instructed to tell the residents there that if they don’t change their way, they will be destroyed. Reluctant, Jonah flees from his sacred task. He boards a ship headed in the opposite direction. Soon, God causes a great wind to blow, and realizing that he is the reason the ship might sink, Jonah tells his fellow passengers to throw him overboard so that the winds will die down and they will not die in the storm. As soon as he hits the water, he is swallowed by a great fish and after three days in its belly, Jonah is spit out on to dry land. Resigned to his task, Jonah starts the great trek to Nineveh.
If any of that felt miraculous, what I’m about to say feels to me even more-so. Jonah marches up to king of Nineveh, demands and audience and is quickly granted one. He warns the king that if the people don’t turn from their wicked ways, Nineveh will be destroyed. And in a blink of an eye, the king listens to him. The king declares a fast and demands that all the city’s inhabitants, human and animal alike, wear sack-clothes and repent. Nineveh is spared. Jonah has succeeded in his task. He has warned them and in turn, they change their behavior.
If you know the Bible at all, you know that this kind of successful mission barely ever happens. The story of Biblical prophets, names you make recognize - Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, Elijah and Micah - is more often one of rejection after rejection.
Let’s take the prophet Jeremiah as an example. If you’ve ever read the book of Jeremiah you know, there is no one who speaks with as much passion in the whole of the Bible. In fact, Jeremiah gave birth to the literary term Jeremiad which means is an intense, angry lament about society, always a critique, sometimes a screed.
The tragedy of Jeremiah’s life, and this is true for almost every other prophet as well, is that despite his impassioned words, at most points in his life, he can’t get anyone to actually change. Jeremiah stands in king’s court, beautifully proclaiming God’s rebuke, and he’s thrown in jail, put in stocks, ridiculed, and pelted with trash. In the best of circumstances, rulers roll their eyes at prophets like Jeremiah and then do what they want anyways.
I’m a little embarrassed to tell you how long it took me to see the flaws in these prophetic forebearers. Raised in the Reform movement, I was taught to model myself after these personalities. I was taught to speak truth to power, raise up ethics, be a champion for those with no voice, for the poor, the widow, the orphan, to advocate on their behalf, to compel those who hold their fate.
I loved everything about the books of the prophets, their passion, their foresight, their big picture thinking, and most of all their poetry. Who isn’t inspired when they hear the phrase from the book of Amos, “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream” (Amos 5:24)?
The world needs prophets. They remind us to check our moral compass. They play the long game, unafraid of a little pushback. They expand our thinking and push us to imagine what is possible.
The world need prophets, but only a few.
Today, we have a world full of too many prophets and I’m convinced that’s the reason our discourse is toxic, our politics are paralyzed, and our moral momentum frozen.
We live in an age of stridency. Instead of valuing disagreement and seeking subtle points of connection with others, we often stand firm in our resolve. We vilify our disputants, believing we alone occupy the moral high ground. Our society values those with the most conviction, so we aim to shout the loudest. Instead of seeing the world as complex, with competing values and needed concessions, we simplify and “neaten” it. Absolutist, inviolable moral certainty makes us largely unable to view the world through any eyes but our own.
This kind of thinking may have been OK for our prophetic ancestors because God was actually speaking through them, but today, when God is mainly silent, it’s impossible to separate the true from the false prophets in our midst. We would do best to stay away from their approach all-together.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel reminds us:
The prophet is human, yet he employs notes one octave too high for our ears. He experiences moments that defy our understanding. He is neither “a singing saint” nor “a moralizing poet” but an assaulter of the mind.
The problem with the prophet is that when we encounter these shrill voices in our modern discourse, we discount them. If a prophet’s main task is to challenge our assumptions, their approach alienates rather than guides. We would like to think that if faced with a prophetic screed, we would heed their message. More likely, we would tune them out.
The prophetic figures never dirtied their hands with trying to fix the ills of society. They were expert in naming problems, but did nothing to remedy them. Instead of helping those they critique find a way back to righteousness, most prophets say their piece and walk away, unbothered to get into the messy details. As Michael Walzer, one of the key political theorists of the 20th century explains “No prophet...shows any interest in politics of reform or any readiness for the compromises this might require.”
Prophets are everywhere today. And they show up equally in both political parties.
They are the talking heads on cable news who no longer have skin in the political game.
They are online activists who post controversial material, get in fights, troll their friends, but then walk away.
It’s the marcher on the street who parrot slogans but has never sat down across the table with anyone to unpack them.
They are the guests at the dinner party who just watched a few YouTube videos on a topic and feel ready to show the rest of the table the light.
What we need is an alternative paradigm. Prophets were not successful then and are not successful now.
During Rabbinic school, I was asked a provocative question by my teacher, Rabbi Lenny Kravitz that spoke to the challenge of our ancient prophets. In the Jewish tradition, Dr. Kravitz said, people are often given epithets to their name which sum up their essential place among the Jewish people. Joseph, for example, is called Yosef HaTzadik (Joseph the righteous) and Elijah is called Eliyahu HaNevi (Elijah the Prophet). Yet, when we look at Moses, his epithet seems to defy expectation.
There is little question that Moses was a prophet. He spoke “face to face” with God, having a unique relationship unparalleled in history. Yet, Moses is not called Moshe HaNevi (Moses the prophet) but rather Moshe Rabbeinu (Moses our teacher, Moses our Rabbi). If Moses spoke directly to God and God spoke directly through him, why not give him the prophetic title.
Dr. Kravitz’s answer was a challenge to us all. The main goal of a prophet is to speak God’s words, to convey Truth even if no one listens. However, while a rabbi or other teacher must also strive for truth, he or she must do it in a way that it can be heard. He must move people. True leadership involves changing the hearts and minds of those you serve. Moses understood this in a way most prophets could not. As a leader, Moses’ role was to help his people navigate the messy contradictions of life. His job was not done when he placed the Torah before his people. He had to figure out how it might penetrate their hearts.
I want you to think back to the best teachers, mentors, and rabbis in your life. I bet the ones that made a difference, that made you think differently, that truly shaped you, didn’t do it through bombastic rhetoric. They did it through listening, through giving you space to be heard and in return expecting that space from you.
In our tradition, first “rabbis,” the heroes of the Talmud, and the ones we rabbis base ourselves on lived in the first few centuries of the common era. It was an era without prophets, in part because the earliest rabbis saw just how dangerous prophetic thinking could be.
The world before the Second Temple was destroyed in 70 CE showed the worst of absolutist, divisive thinking. Jews were split into factions. No one listened to one another. People struggled for power. In some cases, zealots roamed the streets. In other cases, people just left Jerusalem all-together to start their own cult-like sects in the desert. Most scholars believe that it was that climate, of stridency, a climate not too far from our own today, that provided the opening for Rome to sack Jerusalem and burn down the Temple.
It’s no wonder then, that when the Rabbis sought to remake Judaism in a post-Temple world they said about prophet that that way of thinking was reserved for “"only fools and children” (Bava Batra 12b).
Instead, the ancient Rabbis, Judaism’s emblematic teachers, charted an opposite path, one that might be useful to use today in our world of over-zealous prophets. Here are three tastes of their thinking:
First, the Rabbis demanded messy compromises from their leaders. One of my favorite stories in Rabbinic literature involves a conversation between a Rabbi named Yochanan ben Zakkai and the soon to be Emperor Vespasian. Vespasian had a good feeling about Yochanan and offered him a favor in the midst of the Emperor’s siege of Jerusalem. Yochanan thought hard about what he might ask for and responded by asking for a plot of land to remake Judaism after the Emperor destroyed the Temple. Later criticized for not asking for Jerusalem to be saved, the Talmud defends Yochanan. Yochanan was right to not ask for the siege to end since he asked for a thing he knew he could get, rather than reaching for the stars and getting nothing at all. Yochanan wasn’t a prophet, screaming in vain at the powers that be. He thoughtfully took his moderate win and went home, teaching millennia of Jewish leaders that sometimes messy compromises are the best option even if it leaves us wanting.
Second, the Rabbis were students of the broader society and stayed only one step ahead of the people they led. The prophets of old had grand visions. But society isn’t always ready for them. Yes, leaders need to push their people. But they can’t be so far ahead of them the people can’t follow. If you push too hard, people will discount you. There are times in the Talmud when the Rabbis want something from their people, but they don’t ask, because they don’t want to set them up to not follow. Instead, they wait, hoping to set the stage for some future, when the people are ready.
Third, the Rabbis cared about preserving relationships, capital, and power. Knowing how toxic things were the era right before the Temple’s destruction, they privileged civility. To keep the peace between Jews they changed beloved laws if they thought it might cause people to fight. To the outside world, they picked their battles and sometimes swallowed their pride. Although they were allergic to Hellenistic culture and idolatry, the Rabbis permitted Jews to interact with Romans even visiting Roman bathhouses which were known to house statues of Aphrodite. Unlike the prophet, the Rabbis knew there is a time for both advocacy and thoughtful capitulation.
In essence, the Rabbis didn’t just ask “what is right” they added an additional question “what will work?” They knew that the right message at the wrong time or to the wrong audience is the wrong message. And they had the humility to keep questioning their positions as circumstances changed.
Today’s world has too many prophets and too few rabbis.
I fear we live in a world:
That talks past one another rather than to one another.
That cares more about being right than getting things done.
That privileges rhetoric and sloganeering over thoughtful dialogue
That puts forth lofty visions without the path to get there
That walks over one another rather than with one another
That views compromise as a dirty word
But it can be otherwise, and Jewish history has shown us how.
Leave the prophecy to others. Roll up your sleaves and get messy. Walk in the footsteps of our Rabbinic forbearers. Know that change is rarely made on the dais. It’s made relationship by relationship, conversation by conversation, messy compromise by messy compromise.
We rarely jump right from the world as it is to the world as it could be. More often, its a slog, a slow march with lots of twists and turns. We just need patience and humility to walk it.
