Daily Prophets
Day 101
“For they have forsaken Me and made this place alien to me. Thus said Lord of Hosts, God of Israel I am going to bring upon this city and all villages all the disaster which I have decreed upon it for they have stiffened their necks and refused to heed My words.”(Jeremiah 19:4,14).
The opening verse makes me cry and tremble. God is again crying out to the people for their connection/reconnection. God is mourning the loss of a loving relationship or at least what was hoped to be a loving relationship with the people Israel. God’s cry can be heard ‘round the world’ and identified with by all of us who have been forsaken by another person.
There is a sense of bewilderment that I hear in God’s cry-why is this happening? What happened to you and our relationship that you would forsake me, leave me and make the place I created for you something that is so alien, it is going to be destroyed. You have not only screwed up your lives, you have not only ruined the lives of your fellow humans and children, you have made a holy space into a defiled space that can never be cleaned without first destroying it and you. WTF??
The second verse above and the last in this chapter is also a sad cry of God. You foolish people who refuse to hear and heed the call of My prophet, who is speaking for Me, are going to bring ruin and destruction upon all of you and each of you. This is not victory for God, rather it is defeat. The people God had the closest relationship to, the people God saved and nursed to health and wellness, the people who God spoke to directly as a group, this people said: “No Thanks God, we did everything ourselves and don’t need you” with their actions.
This is the great sadness for God and Jeremiah, I believe. God is crying out to the people to change, Jeremiah is relaying this cry with countless appeals to return, yet the people say no. This verse is God’s realization that the people abuse God’s mercy so Justice and sadness (not anger) have to prevail. The stubbornness of people to believe they can ‘get away’ with anything they want, make an insincere amends/tshuvah and return back to their old ways is devastating to God, as I read this verse.
Only when we relax our stubbornness and we become willing to learn from God and teachers of decency, ethics and morality, spirit and loyalty to principles, will we realize the errors of our ways, will we begin a new journey to wholeness, joy and connection.
Rabbi Heschel reflects: “What a sublime paradox for the Creator of heaven and earth to implore the people so humbly. The heart of melancholy beats in God’s words. These words are aglow with a divine pathos that can be reflected but not pronounced: God is mourning Himself.”(The Prophets pg 110,111). These words can allow all of us to breathe better when we face paradoxes and are torn as to what the next right thing to do is. Sometimes we are going to have to turn away, sometimes we have to continue to reach out and sometimes we just have to mourn what we have lost. People say, you can’t lose what you never had and, while I see the wisdom of this saying, I know that we do have relationships and connections that get lost when one or both of the people involved are too interested in being stubborn, need to be right and/or fail to hear the call of the soul of another. Mourning the loss of relationship and connection is difficult and Jeremiah, God and Rabbi Heschel are showing us how to get through the pain.
In recovery, we are keenly aware of the paths we took to forsake God, forsake another(s) human being, forsake ourselves and mess up any and every place we were in. We have PhD’s in stubbornness and refusal to heed God’s words much less the words of another(s) human being. This is the shift we made when we came into recovery; we are not experts, we don’t know everything, we have to act our way into right thinking and feeling, we need to be one grain of sand better today than yesterday, we fail forward by learning from our errors, we seek forgiveness and change our negative paths each and every day, we acknowledge that without God we have no chance at positive change. In recovery, we bless God and another(s) for this knowledge and assistance to be better versions of ourselves each day.
I hear God’s anguish, I have cried God’s anguish, I have called out to others as Jeremiah does, I have been stubborn and, on rare occasions, I have forsaken God in the past 32+ years. I am writing this, today, with tears in my heart for the many times I experience loss of connection with people and I look at my own actions to see if I was fooling myself and how desperate I was to see connection where there was only a transactional relationship. From today’s verses, I understand my need to see connection and the truth that this is one of my fatal flaws, needing to make something real that just isn’t. I saw and experienced it yesterday in an interaction and it made my heart break at the pettiness of people whom I have helped and sad that their pettiness is going to inhibit many people from being able to grow and expand their goodness, talent and soul. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark