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Rabbi Listening to the Prophetic Voice
Sacks

t this time, as we recall the became a major feature of Tanach. They predicts – of the future that will happen if
destruction of our two Temples, were the world’s first social critics and we do not heed the danger and mend our
A we read three of the most searing their message continues through the ways. The future depends on us and the
passages in prophetic literature, from the centuries. To paraphrase Kierkegaard: choices we make.
beginnings of Jeremiah and Isaiah. when a king dies, his power ends; when
a prophet dies his influence begins. 1 Nor was the prophet distinctive in blessing
Perhaps this is the only time of the year or cursing the people. In Judaism, blessing
when we are so acutely aware of the The prophet was distinctive not because comes through priests not prophets.
enduring force of Israel’s great visionaries. he (or she – there were seven biblical
The prophets had no power. They prophetesses) foretold the future. The Several things made the prophets unique.
were not kings or members of the royal ancient world was full of people who The first was their sense of history. The
court. They were (usually) not priests or claimed to know the forces that govern prophets were the first people to see God in
members of the religious establishment fate and “shape our ends, rough-hew them history. We tend to take our sense of time
and they held no office. Often they were how we will.” Judaism has no time for such for granted. Time flows. As the saying goes,
deeply unpopular, none more so than people. The Torah bans one “who practices time is God’s way of keeping everything
Jeremiah, who was arrested, flogged, divination or sorcery, interprets omens, from happening at once. But actually there
abused, put on trial and only narrowly engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, are several ways of relating to time and
escaped with his life. Only rarely were or who is a medium or spiritist or who different civilizations have perceived it
the prophets heeded in their lifetimes: consults the dead” (Deuteronomy 18:10- differently.
Jonah for example, and he spoke to non- 11). It disbelieves such practices because
Jews, the citizens of Nineveh. Yet their it believes in human freedom. The future is There is cyclical time: time as the slow
words were recorded for posterity and not pre-scripted. The prophet warns – not turning of the seasons, or the cycle of
birth, growth, decline and death. Cyclical
time is time as it occurs in nature. All that
lives, dies. The species endures, individual
members do not. Kohelet contains the "
most famous expression of cyclical time:
“The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back
to where it rises. The wind blows to the south
and turns to the north; round and round it goes,
ever returning on its course … What has been
done will be done again; there is nothing new
under the sun.”

Then there is linear time: time as an
inexorable sequence of cause and effect.
As French astronomer Pierre-Simon
Laplace said in 1814: If you “know all
forces that set nature in motion, and all
positions of all items of which nature is
composed,” together with all the laws
of physics and chemistry, then “nothing
would be uncertain and the future just
Jeremiah on the ruins of Jerusalem (Horace Werner, Wikipedia 0.3)
like the past would be present” before

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