Daily Prophets
Day 137
“And God said to me, human, I am going to break the staff of bread in Jerusalem and they shall eat bread by the weight, in anxiety, and drink water by measure, in horror. So, lacking bread and water, they shall stare at each other, heartsick over their iniquity.”(Ezekiel 4:16-17).
In this Chapter, Ezekiel is speaking in a much more punishing voice for God. He is not able to see any good nor is he able to give any hope to the people. Jeremiah, while angry, also found compassion and Ezekiel, so far has not been able to. Ezekiel began as a priest, so he witnessed the other priests and the people engage in empty rituals that had no influence on the people’s actions. They might bring a sin offering and then go out and do the same thing right away. Ezekiel’s punishing rhetoric may be from his own frustrations and anger with the mendacity of the people while in Judah and Jerusalem.
In the first verse above, Ezekiel is describing the need to break the people through famine. These people who live in a land flowing with milk and honey, are now left to ration their meals and even their water. The implication, to me, is that they have so defiled the land, defiled their covenant with God and each other, the land cannot/will not produce enough food for the people. This is what happens, I believe, when we take what we have for granted, when we don’t see the correlation of our actions today with outcomes later and we are so arrogant to assume that God will always be on “our side”. The horror and anxiety that is present when we are afraid of where our next meal will come from and/or how we will feed our children is palpable in his words.
This defeatism has been present throughout the millennia, and it is present in our world today. In America, as well as across the globe, families go to sleep hungry and fearful, which leads to more separation, crime, and exile. Some religious leaders say this is happening because God is punishing these people, overlooking the way the leaders, religious and secular have used people’s horror and anxiety to gain and wield power over them. Mendacity, denial of responsibility, and perversion of Justice were what God was so angry about and needed to purify the people of Judah from. Yet, it seems as if we have not learned and are arrogant as the nations of antiquity that are no longer around and, we can learn from this verse to stop thinking: “it won’t happen to me!”
The last verse above is probably the saddest to me. Ezekiel is saying that we are unable to be heartsick over our iniquity unless we experience dire consequences for our behaviors. It is only when the Jews are lacking bread and water, do they “stare at each other, heartsick over their iniquity”. As I said above, Ezekiel was a priest and his frustrations and anger/punishing may come from both the people’s inability to be changed by the rituals and his own inability to effect a change in the people.
In this last verse, Ezekiel is telling us that the people and the priests failed in this pursuit, we could not/would not allow the Holy rituals to change our behaviors, we couldn’t/wouldn’t act our way into right thinking and feeling, we broke the promise/covenant of “we will do and then we will understand” that was made at Mt. Sinai. Only when famine strikes, only when we are too weak to resist will we be able to understand the errors of our ways and begin to be able to begin the process of T’shuvah, repentance, return and new response. Does the punishment fit the crime? Maybe, because without the punishment, the people would never admit to the crime. This was true then as it is true now, we have not learned much from Ezekiel, the other prophets and the experience of Judah. Well, we have learned to cover our mendacity more, engage in more self-deception and denial more and better, I guess.
In recovery, we know the moment of horror and anxiety was the beginning of our recovery. It was in this moment that we could surrender our will to the Will of God and begin to change our ways/paths/thinking. We were suffering from a famine of the spirit if not our bodies, we were in horror over our emptiness inside and could no longer lie to ourselves and others that we were “fine” and the self-deceptive/self-destructive behaviors we were in engaging in were actually helping us. In recovery, we have made it a point to stop living in mendacity, we have learned we are not perfect and making mistakes doesn’t mean we are a mistake and we can repair our past and present each day. In recovery, we feed our spirits and our inner life with healthy, holy actions and these fuel our purpose and passion each day.
I stare at the horror and have felt the anxiety that my “fight or flight” brain chemistry has created and I have done T’shuvah for it each time. It has lessened over the years and, I understand it more and better each day. I know the heartsickness of being exiled and, in my case, not being allowed back. I know the sadness of seeing the destruction of family, friendships, etc. I also know the value of reconnection, of friendships that never wavered and the love of people, both old and new. Being heartsick helped me clear out the poison of my actions and the actions of ‘the powers that be’ so I face today clean and excited for the next chapter. Stay safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark