Exile and the Prophetic: Tell me, have you ever been fed by ravens?

This is part eleven of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.

A hoot.  LOL.  Leftover land.  Leftover ethics.  Mapping Disappearing Palestine in New York’s suburbs.

Reports of the maps being at the Chappaqua Metro-North station – Hillary Clinton territory.  Lots of wealth there.  With the accompanying caption: “4.7 Million Palestinians are Classified by the UN as Refugees.”

That should do it, shouldn’t it?  Not sure at all, really.  Can anyone “read” these maps when we are so imbued with other, more comforting maps?   Reading maps has a contextual reality.  If the maps you can read are the maps you know are true, then other maps can provide a jolt to the knowledge system or be dismissed.  (un)Read.

The Colonial Map of Israel – shall we show it from Tel Aviv to the Jordan River?  If we read the Colonial Map of Israel then the Colonial Mezuzah appears.  Or is the Disappearing Mezuzah – related to Disappearing Palestine? – our future?  Both?

As Palestine disappears, Jews are enhanced.  Say that it’s (not) so!  But the accusing images multiply on advertising billboards.  Then even Jewish commuters disappear – or want to.  Or get angry and accuse the images of being anti-Semitic.  Mapping Disappearing Palestine, in God’s name, how is that anti-Semitic? 

No doubt this dark reality brings to the fore dark myths.  But, then, should Jews be silent about Palestine?  Should Palestinians be silent about Palestine?  Because it brings all of this stuff up once again?  For most American Jews and Jewish leadership the answer is yes, silence please or silence forced. 

If only the trains would run on time.  If only authorities would exercise their due discretion. Less time for advertising eyes to pry into actual, not mythic, Jewish history. 

This reminds me of another experience during the Uprising years. I was visiting a Progressive Jew, a Rabbi and an American who went to Israel after the 1967 war, one of those, who has now left Israel and lives in – of all places – Germany.  Quite a journey.  Back then he wore a colorful kippah but I noticed that when we traveled to the West Bank he removed it, placing it in his pocket.  I asked him why he removed his kippah.  He was silent.  I pressed the issue.  Was it because he might offend the Palestinians we visited? Out of fear we would be targeted as Jewish settlers?  Or because of the shame he felt for what Israel was doing to Palestinians?  After thinking for a moment, he responded – all three.

There we have it, contemporary Jewish life in a nutshell.  The American, Jewish, Israeli, Rabbi who deepens his Jewishness by moving to Israel, then out of fear and shame doesn’t want to be identified as a Jew among the people he helped dispossess.  Then he’s done.  Can’t take it any more.  He departs Israel for Germany.

Trajectory – America – Israel –  Germany.  White settler states.  Holocaust.  Empire states.  Looking for refuge.  Exile-time.  Germany – what a place to finally lay his (now kippah (re)adorned?)head!

Does that mean Jewish (Holocaust) history has come full circle?  Of course, he can’t escape.  Germany is now our new found friend.  Billions in restitution payments.  Nuclear submarines as restitution gifts.

An omen perhaps but for the first time in more than fifty years, I see vultures on the beach here.  No seagulls in sight and only a few pelicans, my favorite beach birds from youth.

Scavenging vultures.  Scavenging through history.  Ecological food cycle.  Nothing wasted.  Those on the top of the food chain.  Those on the bottom.   Elite eaters.  Bottom feeders.  Sometimes they are one and the same, at least with reference to the human.

Does it matter if “Jewish” is recycled and becomes something else?  Disappearing Jewish just when we are appearing big time?  Sure it happens often in history.  Just when the sun will never set on this or that empire, it does.  Then what?  Have Empire Jews thought about the Jewish escape hatch if and when the Mediterranean Jewish sun sets?

Scavengers.  The prophets might be found here.  They root around in places few want to go.  If there, who wants to be seen?

My memory roams back to those Uprising years again.  Another Rabbi.  Like mezuzot, do I have Rabbis on my brain? 

Before you make a judgment, tell me, have you ever had a Rabbi contact you and want to meet, but won’t meet you in his synagogue or a restaurant or even in the lobby of your hotel for fear of being seen in your presence?   This particular Rabbi was willing to meet with me in my hotel room only but I thought, this is ridiculous, if he doesn’t want to be seen with me, he doesn’t want to share my fate, so why do him the favor of agreeing to a secret meeting?

On the brighter non-Rabbinic side, during those same years I used to meet with Jewish and Palestinian students who worked side-by-side on Israel/Palestine.  I remember the time when the Jewish and Palestinian editors of the University of Michigan newspaper, a quite good one, met with me in my hotel room – for convenience sake.  This was after the university Hillel asked the university to ban me from campus and shut down the campus newspaper, all in one swoop.  Hillel recommended the Jewish editors to their local Rabbis for counseling as their parents were too divided within themselves to deal with the issues at hand.  The parents didn’t know what to do with the ethical impulses of their kids precisely because they didn’t know what to do with their ethical own impulses.  Let the Rabbis sort it out, the parents agreed.  But the kids didn’t want to be sorted.

How prophetic the Jewish kids were.  Are?  I don’t know what became of them.  Do we have anyone following the ethical development/regression of Jewish kids who want to do right in the world and are pressured by every side imaginable?  Since the prophetic is the Jewish indigenous, this is an ongoing problem.  That is, the prophetic.  Exploding in our time.

The prophetic that the parents and Rabbis are frightened of.  Where does it come from?

When I think of the Jewish prophets, I think first of the Bible, where the prophetic is introduced.  The prophetic is at the very heart of the Biblical narrative, beginning with the Exodus story.  The liberation of captive slaves from Egypt is so important to the Jewish canon that the origins of the universe and even the unfolding of the patriarchs appear as a Biblical second thought. 

The stories in the Bible are fascinating and sometimes macabre. They all have their place. Yet the prophetic is front and center in the origins of people Israel and in their quest to be faithful as a people.  Everything revolves around the prophetic.  For after all, why had God chosen this nothing of a people except for a mission that was extraordinary?

Separating Biblical fact from Biblical fiction is difficult.  No it’s impossible.  Whatever one can say about the historicity of the Bible, we know it isn’t a history as we know history today.  Instead a narrative of formative events is placed before us, events like the Exodus, whose overall importance exceeds its mundane details.  As if something happened in history that cannot be explained or explained as a temporal event only.   That is the essence of a formative event – in history/more than history.

The Bible doesn’t explain or explain away these formative events as transcendent events either.  Events like the Exodus are caught midway between the realm of history and a realm beyond history.  That is the power of the Exodus.  Parts of the Exodus narrative are believable in ordinary time while other parts aren’t.  Just as the Bible takes a miraculous flight of fancy we are struck by how profoundly human the hope and despair of the people Israel was.  Reading the Bible, we are drawn away from history, then toward it, then away/toward.  This is where the Bible finds its mark.

Entering the Promised Land, Moses issues one of his periodic dire warnings, though this particular warning has an unusual trajectory.  Sure God has promised the land to the people Israel whom he led out of slavery in Egypt. Yet Moses foretells all sorts of dangers in the land that the people will naturally and almost inevitably fall prey to. We have the false Gods and the pagan Canaanites as temptations to stray.  The main pitfall, however, is the injustice of the Israelites, within Israel. 

Israel’s unjust behavior is judged against the promise God has made to Israel.  For God hasn’t given the land to Israel for its own sake.  Rather, a special task awaits Israel.  The task is to create a new economic and political order over against the slave empire God brought Israel out of.  Many years ago, Norman Gottwald, a Biblical scholar, wrote that the thrust of God’s command to Israel was to create a socially egalitarian decentralized tribal democracy. 

Gottwald’s description of Israel’s destiny is an academic mouthful. Once you have digested its meaning though, think about its ramifications.  Follow the Biblical story as it unfolds. After Israel’s entry into the land and as Moses predicted, Israel clamors for wealth and power, even a human King, because they mistrust the power of God and their own ethical principles to maintain a society centered on justice.   Obviously, Israel’s social/economic/political experiment fails. Division and oppression flourishes.  The documentation of that failure – the emergence of the poor and disenfranchised. 

The Bible summarizes injustice by noting the marginalization of the widow, the orphan, the poor and the stranger.  In effect, God accuses Israel of recreating Egypt.  As far as God is concerned, Israel might as well adopt the Egyptian Gods or some variation thereof and abandon Israel’s God of Liberation.  The Egyptian Gods sanction such a society.  Israel’s God does not.  In fact, that is how the Biblical story begins to see Israel’s relation with God – as a conscious abandonment of the liberation process. When Israel creates an unjust social order, she has abandoned the God that liberated Israel from bondage.

God’s message of Israel’s failings is brought to the people by God-commissioned prophets.  The prophets in early Israelite history are legion, the more familiar ones being Jeremiah, Isaiah and Amos.  My personal favorite is Jeremiah, if you can follow his plight without giving into despair.  You see simply being commissioned by God doesn’t guarantee safe passage, just the opposite.  The prophets are driven pillar to post, often ending up in jail, exile or worse.

One of my favorite chapters from the prophets is found in Ezekiel, who is prone to psychedelic visions. God calls Ezekiel to speak to a renegade Israel but, get this, with the knowledge that the Israelites won’t listen and that their wrath will be visited upon him. After this dire commissioning, Ezekiel is handed a text that God commands him to eat. 

The text is God’s commission to Ezekiel.  On the symbolic level, ingesting the text means to internalize it. In other words, God tells Ezekiel to eat, thus inscribe, his own doom as fidelity to God and to Israel. Ezekiel expects such a doomsday text to taste bitter, which makes sense. Fearing the worse, Ezekiel is surprised by how the text tastes. As Ezekiel remarks in amazement, the text tastes sweet, just like honey.

This is the other side of the doom that God announces to the prophets and, in turn, the prophets announce to the people Israel.  It is part of Israel’s plight that injustice is denounced and, as well, it is part of Israel’s possibility to have the prophets sent to them.  For when the prophets speak there is still time to change and begin again.  Change your policies!  Change your heart!  The prophets are Last Chance emissaries.  There is still time.  Time is running out. 

The prophets are front and center in God’s plan and Israel’s destiny.  What a privilege to be chosen to be a prophet!  Even if the personal consequences are difficult, if not calamitous.

I want to avoid a Bible lesson, even for myself, but the Bible as foundational to Jewish life lays it down rather boldly. Israel has a special destiny which it abandons at its own peril. That destiny is to follow a God of Liberation and to do liberation when it is free to create for itself the conditions of justice. God gives Israel that chance.  In most cases, Israel blows it.

Sometimes the Bible has a modern ring to it.  The society Israel creates is to be decentralized and concentrate on the welfare of the people.  At all costs, it should avoid concentrations of power, elite political and economic classes and, it seems, standing armies. The four together mean injustice.  And the four go together.  You can’t injustice without all of them working in tandem.  Sound like Political Science 101?

The prophets are those who come in God’s name but also begin to experience the consequences of what it means to come up against the power of those who want it their way.  The penalty for Israel’s failings is exile from the land. The prophet in trying to bring Israel back to senses is already in there – in exile within the land.

You see, the prophet is the warning and embodiment of what is to come – what already has become.  Are Jews of Conscience the ancient prophets come alive?

Besides Ezekiel, lately I have been meditating on the Prophet Elijah.  Elijah is a long story – packed with everything imaginable as these Biblical stories often are – but in essence Elijah is non-stop truth-talker that doesn’t hesitate to tell those in power to go to hell.  This includes the King. 

Ultimately God rescues Elijah by taking him to heaven in a whirlwind – a rescue package Jews of Conscience might look into – but what immediately grabbed me was an earlier sequence when God tells Elijah to flee the powers-to-be.  This after Elijah informs the King that because of his actions the coming years will be drought years – not a “drop of dew or rain.” Obviously unwelcome news.

When he queries where sustenance will be found in the ravine God orders him to flee to, God tells Elijah to drink fresh water from the brook.  As for meals, God informs Elijah to await the ravens.  They will bring him food.  Which they do.