Reading the biblical prophets during the pandemic of 2020
Since the schedules of our daily lives have been radically changed by the pandemic of 2020, we are offered the opportunity, however much we wish we could avoid the reason for it, to step back and reconsider our work in the face of great uncertainty. As my students and I began weeks of studying the biblical prophets together on Zoom I found myself weighing, almost immediately, the value and importance of such study in an unprecedented time. Was there meaning to be found in a Zoom classroom in the face of all of the tragedy, loss, death and dislocation of the pandemic swirling around us?
“...deeper meaning did emerge in classroom discussions out of an unexpected identification with prophetic expressions of grief and comfort, loss and renewal, as the prophets faced their own trauma and dislocation.”
I found that deeper meaning did emerge in classroom discussions out of an unexpected identification with prophetic expressions of grief and comfort, loss and renewal, as the prophets faced their own trauma and dislocation. The veil created by distance between their concerns and ours, their society and ours, fell away as my students and I came to understand these prophets with a clarity born of empathy. They too witnessed unfathomable developments, though at a more extreme level, including oppression, conquest, disruption and exile by foreign powers. In their time, like ours, the community experienced enormous loss. In the face of rapid and seemingly arbitrary events in their lives, such as we now experience with the Corona virus, the prophets demanded engagement and purpose. They insisted on their community’s endurance, rather than submitting to its demise. Without dropping their sharply worded criticism directed at the People Israel, the prophets simultaneously offered them an expansive vision of collective renewal and possibility. They did so in fierce language and stunning poetry, imagining a path out of despair, a path we too can follow in light of the seismic shifts in our world.
Prophetic critiques of a tumultuous present coupled with strategies to move forward seem now, in light of the present pandemic, to be remarkably prescient, pertinent and meaningful. In the rest of this essay I will briefly highlight the story told to us through a selection of prophetic voices. Together the prophets describe suffering, express rage against inequities in the name of justice, comfort their communities and envision a world made far better by human striving for the good. I join their story with voices of my students, with their permission, in response.
Suffering
The turbulent times of the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem and Judah that culminated in the fall of the First Temple in 586 BCE led to widespread personal and collective suffering. The prophet Jeremiah had reason to call out:
My guts, my guts
I writhe;
chambers of my heart
moaning in me my heart… (Jeremiah 4: 19) [1]
Roughly 50 years later, Deutero-Isaiah,[2] living in Babylon as the Persians were about to release the Israelites from captivity, described the suffering of a man that many interpret as the personification of the People Israel in exile.
Despised, shunned by men,
a man of suffering, acquainted with disease.
As one who hid his face from us,
Despised, we held him of no account… (Deutero-Isaiah 53:3) [3]
By acknowledging and articulating the sufferer’s experience in such specific language, Deutero-Isaiah confirmed the pain experienced by the exiles living in Babylon. In so doing, he provided them an outlet and relief. An acknowledgement of responsibility by those who ignored and belittled the sufferer, “we held him of no account,” implied a further step toward healing and reconciliation between the exiles and the Babylonians.
In our time, Deutero-Isaiah’s description finds a parallel in the suffering, illness and death caused by COVID-19 that has also been experienced unequally. Its victims deserve not only compassion and shared mourning over collective losses but public outrage and accountability for its causes. In order to move forward together strategies to correct such disparities must be identified. Sienna Lotenberg notes the unequal distribution of suffering in our world: “For the Prophets, the suffering of even one person is of broad collective import, and I hope that … I can adopt the pathos of the prophets to call attention to suffering that may not directly impact members of my community, but whose importance is nevertheless paramount.”[4]
Raging at social inequities in the name of justice
The prophets were keenly aware of the suffering of the most vulnerable among them even before the Babylonian exile. Amos was the first of the biblical prophets who critiqued the economic sources of injustice in the Northern Kingdom of Israel in the 800s BCE. Amos attacked landowners and priests for their indifference to widows and orphans who required their attention and protection due to financial vulnerability and insecurity. Amos also demanded protections for the stranger and used five different terms to describe the poor. He complained of those “who trample into the dust of the ground the heads of the poor” (Amos 2: 7) and against the wealthy “who defraud the poor, who crush the needy” (Amos 4: 1).
Drawing on many of Amos’s themes, Isaiah opened his prophecy with a critique of Israelite practices, empty rituals, sacrifices and incense that filled God with loathing (Isaiah 1:14). Even lengthy prayer would be insufficient. Isaiah demanded instead:
Learn to do well.
Seek Justice.
Set right the ruthless
Uphold the rights of the orphan
Defend the widow (Isaiah 1: 17)
In line with his predecessors, Deutero-Isaiah also raged against social inequities. His tirade in chapter 58 of his prophecy, made famous in our time due to being chanted on Yom Kippur, is an example. Deutero-Isaiah advocated for those Israelites who were oppressed and impoverished due to the indifference and worse, exploitation and hypocrisy, of other Israelites in their community. God rejected feigned piety in those who aimed to appease God by fasting yet remained, even in their fasts, pre-occupied with business matters and continued to oppress their workers. In what I imagine as a ferocious and contemptuous bellow, the prophet’s God proclaims:
Is such the fast I have chosen?...
Isn’t this the fast I have chosen;
To loosen bonds of wickedness
And undo the cords of the yoke…
Isn’t it to divide with the hungry your bread… (Deutero-Isaiah 58: 5a, 6-7)
Prophetic rage directed at those indifferent toward and/or exploitative of the vulnerable would find numerous egregious examples in what is occurring during the present pandemic. Those most vulnerable today to illness and death in addition to our elderly are front line workers, many of whom come from the African-American and Latinx communities. The data documented and publicized during the pandemic confirms that inequities in our system have lethal consequences. In the USA, front line workers are underpaid, slow to be provided with protective gear and lack health insurance. Yet they risk their lives to supply our food, deliver our packages, protect and clean our streets, run our subways, drive our ambulances and tend to our sick and dying. In so doing, by high percentages, many have fallen. The shocking discrepancy between those who not only get ill but die and the rest of us is traceable by zip code. A majority of all deaths in NYC happened in African-American neighborhoods.[5]
Each year, I assign my students an essay by Samuel Freedman in which he describes finding God and the prophet Ezekiel in an African-American church in East New York.[6] Pastor Dr. Johnny Ray Youngblood sermonized on Ezekiel’s description of a valley littered with human bones brought back to life (Ezekiel c. 37). Freedman realized that the preacher, along with his parishioners, actualized the prophetic tale of resurrection and acted on God’s behalf by loving and serving the poor, the addicts, and the homeless in their community. Tragically, as of May 18, 2020 East New York had the highest number of dead in NYC from the novel coronavirus.[7] These inequities, rising yet again to the surface, and accompanied by undeniable data, call upon us to act. My students already observed racial and economic inequities before the pandemic but the most recent data reveals just how widespread are such injustices. As Covid-19 raged around us, Heather Shore wrote:
Perhaps now more than ever, the prophets offer us a source of connection that spans both space and time, showing us that even in the moments in which society’s inequities are brought out the most thoroughly and circumstances seem the most dire, there are voices that call upon us to be better and to do better.[8]
I wrote this essay in the days in which major demonstrations against yet another death of a man of color under the knee of a white policeman was videographed, triggering widespread unrest throughout the United States. There were pockets of violence but the vast majority of demonstrators were peaceful. The fact that so many thousands took to the streets during a pandemic in which their chances of getting ill would grow suggests how longstanding and pervasive are the wrongs done to communities of color and how tired and outraged they are by the injustice. The prophets of old would have joined them in the streets.
Comfort
Suffering and rage lead us to take action but, just like our ancestors, we need to sustain ourselves through such times. Deutero-Isaiah had the good fortune to live in a time of great positive change for the Israelite captives in Babylon. He witnessed the Persian conquest of Babylon under Cyrus the Great who then allowed the Israelite captives to return to Judah and Jerusalem. Deutero-Isaiah opened his prophecy with a simple repetition in 40:1: “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.” The prophet described God’s love and commitment to the People Israel, best illustrated by a renewal of their covenant and a return to their home from which they were taken into captivity. The prophet announced a fulfillment of those vows so long ago promised Noah by God.
For as Noah’s waters is this to Me;
As I vowed not to again spread over the earth the waters of Noah,
So have I vowed
Not to be furious with you nor to rebuke you.For though the mountains move
And the hills totter,
My loving kindness from you shall not move
my covenant of peace not totter
Said YHWH who has compassion on you. (Deutero-Isaiah 54: 9-10)
One of the important spiritual tasks of seminary students is to develop their own theological understanding. The prophets help them with that task. As put by Heather Shore in reflecting upon the prophets: “Framing God’s relationship with the people Israel as just that—a relationship—brings us into a realm of messiness, duality, and reciprocity that we may not have otherwise attributed to a Deity-Human connection.”[9] Whether the students conclude that their covenant partner is God (described in the Hebrew Bible through a series of rich metaphors and emotions), one generation obligated by its ancestors, or between one another in community today, the idea of a deep and lasting reciprocal relationship of obligation and love speaks deeply to them. Many passages in the Hebrew Bible understand that the People Israel are God’s covenant partners in the world, called upon to bring God’s loving kindness to those in despair. In our time there is a renewed call to a covenant that must include solidarity with communities of color, including Jews of color, as their allies in mass protests and in urgent plans to transform the systemic racism that has ravaged all of our communities. Loving kindness in solidarity, provided it is accompanied by actions, may offer comfort in a time of crisis.
Imagining a different world.
Finally, the prophetic story told in this essay with such special resonance during the current pandemic comes to its last chapter. Prophetic voices have acknowledged suffering, raged against its causes in the economic inequities and hypocrisy in the Israelite community; and offered comfort for a community they steered toward survival. The prophets also offered a message that today seems to be their most important gift: the courage to call for and begin to envision a different and better community than that the Israelites were forced to abandon when they were exiled to Babylon. God states the task clearly to Jeremiah:
Look, I have appointed you this day
Over nations and kingdoms
To uproot and pull down
To destroy and overthrow
To build and to plant (Jeremiah 1: 10)
In Jeremiah’s time, other nations, including Babylon and Egypt, succeed in uprooting the Israelites from their lands and Jerusalem. Even so, the words of the prophet remained directed at his listeners, both in the land and in exile, to give up corrupt practices and religious hypocrisy.
The last phrase in 1:10 was of course the most important. Once the destruction and punishment ended, the Israelites and their prophets would take on the task of imagining, rebuilding and replanting a new society. Jeremiah understood that only such a focused and persistent envisioning would sustain a will to survive in face of overwhelming destruction. The prophet assured the people that God would restore them to Jerusalem:
Again there shall be heard in this place-which you say is ruined without human or beast- in the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem that are desolate, without human and without inhabitants and without beast- the voice of joy, the voice of happiness, the voice of groom and the voice of bride, the voice of those who say ‘Give thanks to YHWH of Hosts for YHWH is good-for God’s loving kindness is everlasting…’ (Jeremiah 33: 10-11)
“...now people are back on the streets in protest against inequities that have endured from generation to generation, more starkly and visibly than ever.”
How hopeful is that vision and how urgently needed again in our time. The pandemic has led to a swift and terrible uprooting and pulling down of the very basic structures of our communities both physically and economically. And now people are back on the streets in protest against inequities that have endured from generation to generation, more starkly and visibly than ever.
One such vision was that of Deutero-Isaiah. The prophet lived in a historical moment that promised literal and metaphoric rebuilding by Israelites freed from captivity and returned to their land. He opened his prophecy with a vision of God clearing away the debris that remained at the end of exile in order that both God and the people could return to their home:
A voice calls out in the Wilderness:
clear a path for YHWH
level in the desert a highway for our GodEvery valley shall be lifted high
And every mountain and hill brought low
And the crooked shall be made level
And the rough places a plain (Deutero-Isaiah 40: 3-4)
This same prophet (or maybe a third “Isaiah”) had the extraordinary ability to imagine a world far more inclusive than the one left behind. In this new world God would single out and love eunuchs as much as other Israelites and embrace strangers. Robert Alter suggested that Deutero-Isaiah specifically singled out eunuchs because they were considered sexually maimed and thus excluded from participating in the Temple cult.[10] Deutero-Isaiah movingly embraced eunuchs and strangers as symbols of a radical and expansive vision of what was possible in a new community:
I will bring them to My holy mountain
And give them joy in my House of Prayer…
For My house -a house of prayer
Shall be called for all the peoples. (Isaiah 56:7)
Noah Lawrence considered the ways in which this late biblical text envisioned a more inclusive community, a project he hopes to continue in the future.
…when the Return to Tziyon took place — as prophesied with the most profound and literarily outstanding hope, joy, and indeed comfort … by [Deutero-Isaiah] the question then arose: Given that we are now rebuilding our paradigms, how should we rebuild them? In addition to the general human capacity for social change, in a moment of rebuilding following trauma and vacuum — with the power of inertia removed; and with a need to start anew in any case… there is a powerful opportunity to call for that rebuilding to happen according to a new and different vision of society. [11]
“Once the pandemic is behind us, it will be long past time to envision and build a world transformed. That world will need the skills of all of us but in particular our students. They must dream of a future that will become their present.”
Once the pandemic is behind us, it will be long past time to envision and build a world transformed. That world will need the skills of all of us but in particular our students. They must dream of a future that will become their present. Thankfully, as religious leaders they have already heeded a call to service with determination and imagination.
Taking action
In light of the spread of the pandemic from illness and death to economic distress and racial injustice, I think it is appropriate to conclude this essay with a few more examples of student voices shaped by what they studied and are still living through. Amanda K. Weiss defines one of the prophets’ main roles: “to bring to Israel’s awareness the things that they are unable to see—be it through ignorance or their willful ignoring of their own actions.”[12] With that awareness comes faith, as defined by Andrew Mandel.
Faith is maintaining a belief in the vision, no matter what happens. There will always be disappointments, setbacks; nothing is guaranteed, and nothing is fully in our control. But the question is whether we are going to persist or not, particularly when it gets difficult. The prophets are a living example of that persistence.[13]
Jacob Leizman has a more pragmatic approach to actualizing social justice in a manageable way. In a curriculum he designed with the prophets in mind, he writes: “Ultimately, we will narrow the scope of our justice work to a particular geographic area and define our connection to it. This also includes identifying the stakeholders and power structures in our place, as the Prophets were able to do with the kingdoms in which they found themselves.” [14]
Where then has meaning been found in a time of pandemic and Zoom classrooms? My students and I have found meaning in the ways in which our current situation helped us clarify and appreciate biblical prophets in a much deeper way as they took us from suffering through outrage to comfort and transformation. So, too, do I find meaning in the voices of my students as they make the biblical prophets their own.
[1] Translations are mine.
[2] Biblical scholars have identified at least two prophets (perhaps three) based on differences in language and historical references approximately 100 years apart whose writings were combined under the single name Isaiah. For details see Benjamin Sommer, “Isaiah” in The Jewish Study Bible, first edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 780-784. In this essay I refer to Isaiah and Deutero-Isaiah.
[3] Note that this suffering figure provides a model for later Christian descriptions of Jesus Christ. For details see The Jewish Study Bible, n. 52.13-53.12, pp. 890-891.
[4] Sienna Lotenberg, submitted by email to me May, 2020. Throughout this essay I will be quoting, with their permission, final reflections on the prophets due in May, 2020 and submitted via email to me from second year rabbinical students who participated in Hebrew Bible 411 on the NY Campus of HUC-JIR. Comments include those of Noah Lawrence, Jacob Leizman, Sienna Lotenberg, Andrew Mandel, Heather Shore and Amanda K. Weiss.
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/nyregion/new-york-city-coronavirus-cases.html#zipcode (as of June 2, 2020).
[6] Samuel Freedman, “The Valley of the Dry Bones; I learned how to be a Jew at a black church” excerpted from The Good Book: Writers Reflect on Favorite Bible Passages (Simon and Schuster, 2015).
[7] https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2020/05/18/we-may-finally-know-which-parts-of-nyc-have-been-hit-hardest-by-coronavirus
[8] Heather Shore, email May 2020.
[9] Heather Shore, email, May 2020.
[10] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, Volume 2, Prophets (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2019), n. 3, p. 809.
[11] Noah Lawrence, email, May 2020.
[12] Amanda K. Weiss, email, May 2020.
[13] Andrew Mandel, email, May 2020.
[14] Jacob Leizman, email, May 2020.
