On prophecy.

I am a rationalist and a naturalist. I do not expect such things as an afterlife (what reason have I to believe that the soul could be separated from the body?) or a messianic era (what evidence suggests that human beings are perfectible? -- anyway the messianic era is, by its nature, perpetually in the future), and I am quite sure that there couldn't be such a God as in the Bible, talking to human beings and listening to them. I don't believe in prayer as request and I don't believe in divine vengeance or punishment. But I believe in holiness, and in a way I might say I believe in prophecy. Some works simply have an insight and a beauty that is beyond human. Not that it does not come from humans -- of course it does; what could a prophet be if not human? Rather that it does not seem to come from that human being alone. It does not seem possible that one person did this, or several working together in the normal way either. It seems to express something beyond what one human being could say by herself.

Yesterday was Yom Kippur. I spent a lot of time with the Prophets: Ezekiel, Hosea, Joel, Obadiah, Amos, Jonah. I could not understand Ezekiel or Joel very well, though I have read them before. I think that I understand Jonah less the more I read it. The story seems shorter every time. But Hosea was wonderful.

Hosea is the story of a man who asks God why God does not abandon Israel since it is constantly straying. God tells him to marry a prostitute and have children with her, and to name them symbolically. Hosea becomes committed to his wife and treats his children as his own without regard to biology. To divorce her would be too painful, nor can he abandon them. The rest of the book is full of prophesies that Israel's sufferings are only temporary, but that God still cares for us. Its final chapter (read as the Haftarah last Shabbat, and giving the Shabbat its name: Shabbat Shuvah, the Sabbath of "Return O Israel") asks us to speak to God with our lips instead of bulls, and we will flower again. That is, it's the story of God teaching a human being to understand what human beings are like, and of the human being learning.

Jonah is meant along the same lines, only Jonah doesn't seem to learn: God has the last word, not Jonah, and even so God is reduced to pleading for the lives of the innocent animals of Nineveh rather than its guilty-but-repentant people. Jonah ends in aporia, in suspension between divine acceptance and human rejection. (I read in one of the prophets yesterday, though already I cannot remember where, God saying: of course I forgive you; I am not a human being, to cherish a grudge. The commentary pointed out that in Numbers 23 [? Bilaam's prophecy, anyway] God says: I am not a human being, to change my mind.)