Jeremiah Johnson, who calls himself a
“prophetic
minister,” recently wrote in Charisma
Magazine:
I was in a time of prayer several weeks ago when God began to speak to me concerning the destiny of Donald Trump in America. The Holy Spirit spoke to me and said, "Trump shall become My trumpet to the American people, for he possesses qualities that are even hard to find in My people these days… Many will want to throw him away because he will disturb their sense of peace and tranquility, but you must listen through the bantering to discover the truth that I will speak through him. I will use the wealth that I have given him to expose and launch investigations searching for the truth. Just as I raised up Cyrus to fulfill My purposes and plans, so have I raised up Trump to fulfill my purposes and plans prior to the 2016 election. You must listen to the trumpet very closely for he will sound the alarm and many will be blessed because of his compassion and mercy. Though many see the outward pride and arrogance, I have given him the tender heart of a father that wants to lend a helping hand to the poor and the needy, to the foreigner and the stranger."[1]
Trump. Trumpet. Cute. Johnson’s
promotion of Trump does not entail a rational discussion of issues and policies
or an attempt to persuade the reader of his views. In fact, Johnson undercuts
reason by claiming direct communication from God: prophecy. If Johnson were an
isolated case of lunacy, what he wrote might be funny. In fact, there is a
broad swath of America that believes that people like him do, in fact, have a
direct line to heaven. And there is a long history in this country of prophetic
rhetoric and claims to divine insight that avoids rational inquiry and
examination: If God said it, who are you to question it? NYU professor George
Shulman wrote about the American proclivity to address politics in prophetic
terms in American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture
(2008: University of Minnesota Press) where, as the title suggests, he focuses
on race in America. But as Jade Schiff, a professor at Oberlin, writes in a
review, although Shulman’s
book is, “a critical
analysis of biblical and contemporary prophetic traditions… [the book itself] is a work of
prophecy in ways that Shulman does not acknowledge, and it displays the same
tensions in and limits of prophetic thinking that he illuminates. Shulman’s
prophetic voice is at times uncomfortably close to the ones that he resists.
Sometimes he appears to foreclose rather than invite engagement with others,
and so occludes the democratic possibilities he wants to open up. I think this
occlusion is a symptom of Shulman’s own,
tense relationship with prophecy: he is a reluctant prophet.”[2]
Apparently the notion of prophecy so infuses American culture that even some
anti-prophets unknowingly see themselves as prophets.
Prophecy is dangerous stuff because
false prophets—like
Jeremiah Johnson—abound
in every age, as Torah long ago pointed out. In Parshat Shoftim, which
we read this week, Moses assures the Israelites that God will send them
prophets to guide them. But how are they to know these prophets are legit?
Moses supplies criteria by which to discern if one who claims to be a prophet
is the genuine article:
וַיֹּאמֶר יְהוָה, אֵלָי: הֵיטִיבוּ, אֲשֶׁר דִּבֵּרוּ. נָבִיא אָקִים לָהֶם מִקֶּרֶב אֲחֵיהֶם, כָּמוֹךָ; וְנָתַתִּי דְבָרַי, בְּפִיו, וְדִבֶּר אֲלֵיהֶם, אֵת כָּל-אֲשֶׁר אֲצַוֶּנּוּ. וְהָיָה, הָאִישׁ אֲשֶׁר לֹא-יִשְׁמַע אֶל-דְּבָרַי, אֲשֶׁר יְדַבֵּר, בִּשְׁמִי--אָנֹכִי, אֶדְרֹשׁ מֵעִמּוֹ. אַךְ הַנָּבִיא אֲשֶׁר יָזִיד לְדַבֵּר דָּבָר בִּשְׁמִי, אֵת אֲשֶׁר לֹא-צִוִּיתִיו לְדַבֵּר, וַאֲשֶׁר יְדַבֵּר, בְּשֵׁם אֱלֹהִים אֲחֵרִים--וּמֵת, הַנָּבִיא הַהוּא. וְכִי תֹאמַר, בִּלְבָבֶךָ: אֵיכָה נֵדַע אֶת-הַדָּבָר, אֲשֶׁר לֹא-דִבְּרוֹ יְהוָה. אֲשֶׁר יְדַבֵּר הַנָּבִיא בְּשֵׁם יְהוָה, וְלֹא-יִהְיֶה הַדָּבָר וְלֹא יָבֹא--הוּא הַדָּבָר, אֲשֶׁר לֹא-דִבְּרוֹ יְהוָה: בְּזָדוֹן דִּבְּרוֹ הַנָּבִיא, לֹא תָגוּר מִמֶּנּוּ.Whereupon Adonai said to me, “…I will raise up a prophet for them from among their own people, like yourself: I will put My words in his mouth and he will speak to them all that I command him; and if anybody fails to heed the words he speaks in My name, I Myself will call him to account. But any prophet who presumes to speak in My name an oracle that I did not command him to utter, or who speaks in the name of other gods—that prophet will die.” And should you ask yourselves, “How can we know that the oracle was not spoken by the Lord?”—if the prophet speaks in the name of the Lord and the oracle does not come true, that oracle was not spoken by Adonai; the prophet has uttered it presumptuously; do not stand in dread of him. (Deuteronomy 18:17-22)
Is that all there is to it? An
accurate prediction confirms that the speaker is a prophet? Jeremiah, who had
serious credibility problems in his own day, said that a message that is
painful to deliver—and
equally uncomfortable to hear—is more likely to be authentic than a
fluffy one that pleases people and confirms what they want to believe about
themselves. And then there is Amos. Amos protests to Amaziah, the priest at
Beth El, לֹא-נָבִיא אָנֹכִי,
וְלֹא בֶן-נָבִיא אָנֹכִי I am neither a prophet nor the son of a
prophet (Amos 7:14). Here Shakespeare's famous apophasis from Hamlet fits:
“The [man]
doth protest too much, methinks,” for
Amos was, indeed, a prophet. He spoke truth to power on behalf of God,
trumpeting the Northern Kingdom’s failures of social justice
(particularly the growing disparity between the wealthy and the impoverished).
What made Amos a prophet, despite his protests to the contrary?
The Rabbis, in masechet Baba Batra,
discuss whether prophecy still exists in their time. R. Abdimi claims that
there are no longer prophets as of old; rather “wise men” embody God’s
prophecy. In other words, prophecy has been transferred from the Isaiahs,
Jeremiahs, and Amoses solely to the Rabbis. Others support his claim because,
after all, the Sages are engaged in writing “Oral Torah”—it’s very
name embodies a claim to divine prophetic inspiration. But R. Yochanan,
recognizing the danger in the claim, declares: “Since
the Temple was destroyed, prophecy has been taken from prophets and given to
fools and children.” (BT Baba Batra 12a,b) Gemara
supplies examples of the fool and child that prove his point: Prophecy is a
phenomenon of the past. On several occasions, the Rabbis assert that those who
claim communication from, and justification by, the Holy Spirit, rather than
rational reasoning, need not be given credence[3]. The
human intellect is gift enough to tackle the matters of halakhah and
interpretation before the Sages. R. Yochanan’s declaration took enormous courage.
He was bucking not only a millennium of tradition, but all of Jewish
tradition and history to claim that reasoned, rational argument had rightly
supplanted the claim to supernatural inspiration. R. Eliezer’s bat
kol was no longer welcome in the study house.
I can understand that some people
find the give-and-take, rough-and-tumble of intellectual debate, where a
position can seem logical and reasonable one day, but far less so when another
set of arguments are brought to bear the following day to be unsettling.
Prophecy is so much simpler, direct, and definitive—and far
less messy. And that’s
precisely the problem: Hidden in the folds of its simplicity and “cleanness” hide a host of dangers, and not just
those made utterly transparent by the poster children for deranged,
mega-narcissistic self proclaimed prophets: Charles Manson, Jim Jones, David
Koresh, and Marshall Applewhite.
American historian Paul S. Boyer
described many of these in When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in
Modern American Culture (1992: Harvard University Press), which focuses on
how the main tenets of dispensational prophetic belief have influenced the
policies and actions of the American government since World War II. Prior to
the Second World War, dispensational
premillennialist thinkers generally imagined that the end of America’s enemies
would come about due to earthquakes and comets—God working through nature—or perhaps
more directly. With the advent of the atomic bomb, however, many prophetic
thinkers began to consider the use of nuclear weapons to be part of a “divine
plan.” Boyer notes, for example, that the
Reagan administration was stocked with pre-millennialist thinkers—Weinberger,
Watt, and Koop—and
that this thinking influenced their efforts to limit the arms race, craft
environmental policies, and yes, shape an American policy concerning the State
of Israel. But human beings control the bombs; claiming that God mans the
trigger is beyond disingenuous and irresponsible—it’s very dangerous.
Torah took the first step in warning
us about false prophets: If they undermine a moral and value system we cherish
as good and legitimate, their message should be condemned for the artifice it
is. The Rabbis took the next giant leap, establishing extensive examination,
intellectual reasoning, and morality as the criteria for ideas we should adhere
to and promote.
As the 2016 Presidential election
season proceeds, we will see more and more of this and this and this and this. It doesn’t take a
prophet to know that we need to proceed with extreme caution.
© Rabbi Amy Scheinerman
[3] E.g., BT Eruvin 60b and BT Bekhorot 45a. In addition, the
famous example of R. Eliezer’s claim that the Holy Spirit affirmed
all his opinions is roundly rejected by his colleagues who say, “We don’t listen to the Holy Spirit” (BT Baba Metzia 58-59).
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