WRITING THE PROPHETS

WALTER BRUEGGEMANN: When Heschel took up The Prophets, he obviously would have been immersed in historical critical study which would treat the prophetic text as a text to be analyzed. And the great thing about Heschel is that he knew the whole historical, critical process but did not linger there. He went beyond it, and behind it, and beneath it to look at what was actually happening in the text. And he had the freedom and the imagination to let the God who occupies the text be present in his scholarship. This was an incredibly nerve-y thing to do in Berlin because all of the German scholars would have stayed at the historical, critical, objective level and the greatness of his book is that he didn't stay there. He went underneath that to discover the passion and the person of God that was mediated by the poetry.

SUSANNAH HESCHEL: So I think what motivated his study of the prophets was first of all, as a critique of the German theological tradition that had depicted the prophets in a rather negative way, and he writes about this in the book. That depicted prophetic experience as somehow-- they would say the prophets were writhing on the ground in a state of ecstasy, not even knowing what they were saying, etc. He found this appalling. Aaron Strelch in December 1915 gave a lecture and said that the prophets came from rural villages and they would come to an urban center with a king and an army and an economy and they would say you have to worry about widows and orphans. How absurd, how ridiculous. They’re country bumpkins these prophets, they don't know how the world works. And this was a complete repudiation of German Judaism which said the Judaism is about the prophetic tradition of justice, was a repudiation of Hermann Cohen, of all of the great German Jewish philosophers. So in part my father’s dissertation was to repudiate that tradition of German theology that denigrated the prophets. And really is a terribly unfortunate thing because they made it impossible for Germany to call on the prophetic tradition of social justice, of economic justice the way we can do in the United States. They didn't give them the resources to protest when Hitler was coming to power.

FROM THE PROPHETS’ VIEW

BENJAMIN SAX: So, the prophets for Heschel understand that the world is fragmented and fractured and that we need to play a role in building it in such a way that God flourishes. Prophets are the ones that take people out of their sense of comfort and complicity with everyday life and problematize it so that they start thinking beyond their own needs or their own particularities. And that even works on a community level. The prophets are the ones that see an injustice in one place and see that as an injustice everywhere.

ARNOLD EISEN: The prophet feels God's pain, the prophet suffers with God. And Heschel is feeling the suffering of his family and millions of Jews and millions of others and then he sees the suffering of people in the United States of America, which is supposed to be the country that is supposed to be fighting against all this bad stuff, because they're black. And it’s like he can't not ally himself with King. It's a meeting on every level: mind, soul, commitment, everything.

WALTER BRUEGGEMANN: We have no other book like Heschel's on the prophets because he dares to think that this poetic testimony by the prophets is the truth of who God is. So, God is capable of a whole range of emotional extremity that can only be expressed in poetic cadence. He lays that all out in a way that is without imitation by anyone else. He understood that the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew bible is about this God who has so entered into history with all of its aches, pains, hurts, and disappointments. And that this God remains faithful. I think that at the center of his great book on the prophets is his study of the prophet Jeremiah and more than any other prophet in the Hebrew bible, Jeremiah dares to give voice to what it was like to be face to face with God. So, Jeremiah quarrels with God, rebukes God, reprimands God, and prays to God, thanks God.

CORNEL WEST: Christians often times fundamentally misunderstand prophetic Judaism or think that somehow Jews are only speaking to Jews rather than Jews speaking to Jews and the rest of the world. With Jesus of course you have a universal vision indeed, but Jesus comes out of prophetic Judaism and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Esther and the others already put forward this notion of each and every human being having a sanctity to be made in the image and likeness of God. Heschel understood that. And his book, The Prophets, is still the most powerful takes ever written on the great gift of Jews to the world, the prophetic tradition.

Heschel was engaged with and inspired by the nature and meaning of the Hebrew prophets from the time of his doctoral work in the early 1930s (in which he offered a new interpretation on the prophets) through his activity in the civil and human rights movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. Heschel saw the prophets as uniquely sharing in God’s divine pathos, the emotional experience of being in relationship with humankind. Thus, the Hebrew prophets felt what God felt and they expressed those feelings in stunning biblical poetry, expressing their anger at injustice and disobedience or their joy and celebration in response to goodness and mercy. In his highly influential 1962 book The Prophets, which grew out of his earlier dissertation (written in German), Heschel elaborated on what it meant to be a prophet and how the prophet articulated the message. In effect, the Hebrew prophets expressed God’s concern for God’s people, stepping 5 out of themselves in order to care for others. Although their message was not always perfect--- they spoke with human tongues and human understandings---they conveyed God’s intense interest in and compassion for God’s creation. To be prophetic, then, was to be concerned for others, and to stand up for justice, love, and mercy wherever needed or endangered. Heschel’s love of the prophets as models of faith and action was something he shared with his close friend Martin Luther King, Jr. and other leaders of the civil rights movement, as well as with thinkers and public theologians including Reinhold Niebuhr.

1. Heschel wrote his dissertation on the prophets as Nazism was gaining influence in Germany. In what ways might his interpretation of the prophets reflect Heschel’s own circumstances as a Jew in Germany in the early 1930s?

2. In the film, Shai Held suggests that Heschel went back to the prophets at times when the need to assert human dignity and justice was greatest. That is, in the 1930s in Germany and again in the 1960s in America. (Heschel published The Prophets in 1962.) For Heschel, the Hebrew prophets were foremost advocates for social justice. Do you agree with this interpretation of the prophets? Do they have special relevance in times when human dignity and the ideal of justice are threatened? How might some German scholars’ dismissal of the Hebrew Bible in the 1920s and ‘30s, largely due to anti-Semitism, have influenced the German church’s ability to counter Nazism?

3. What, according to Heschel, are the primary characteristics of a prophet? Are the Hebrew prophets men and women with a special knowledge of the future or a special knowledge of or identification with God?

4. Susannah Heschel suggests that it was their shared appreciation for the Hebrew prophets that cemented the friendship of Heschel and Martin Luther King, Jr. and which drove much of their own activism. Do you see a connection here between Heschel’s interpretation of the prophets’ message and the work of both men in civil rights, against the war in Vietnam, and on behalf of marginalized groups (in Heschel’s case, Jews under Soviet oppression)?

5. Arnold Eisen suggests that Heschel’s work on the prophets is a “call to action,” a challenge to modern-day readers to address injustice and inequity and to challenge oppressive authority as the Hebrew prophets did. Is this how you read the prophets, as exemplars of a way of living and of action that contemporary readers are to follow?

6. Heschel interprets the Hebrew prophets as men who are imbued with the divine pathos; that is, they feel what God feels for humankind and experience God’s own joy or disappointment at human behavior. Can you imagine feeling what God feels? Do you envision God as having feelings or emotions, or of being affected by human actions in any way? Does this seem plausible to you?

7. At a birthday celebration for Heschel shortly before his own death, Martin Luther King, Jr. called Heschel a “true prophet.” In fact, both men have been described as prophets by others within and beyond their own lifetimes. Do you consider Heschel a prophet? Do you think he saw himself as one, or simply someone who helped amplify the voices of the classical prophets?

8. Like the ancient Hebrew prophets, Heschel also critiqued the religious institutions of his time, seeing much of contemporary Judaism as being wrapped in platitudes and inauthentic rituals. Is there a place for the prophet in critiquing contemporary religious practices, in whatever tradition? Is this a helpful role, in your opinion, or a destructive one? Can the prophet ever be a popular figure? What price do prophets pay for challenging the status quo, in ancient times or today? Did Heschel pay a price for some of his stances, especially regarding civil rights and the Vietnam War?

9. Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann praises Heschel for going beyond the established historical approach to the prophets. What do you think Heschel adds to the centuries-old discussion and understanding of the Hebrew prophets? What role does poetry and metaphor play in Heschel’s conception of the prophet?