Daily Prophets
Day 139
“The word of God came to me.Yet I will leave a remnant, in that some of you will escape the sword and be scattered through the lands. And those of you who that escape will remember Me among the nations…how heartbroken I was through their faithless hearts which turned away from Me and through their faithless eyes which lusted after their fetishes. And they shall loathe themselves for all the evil they committed…”(Ezekiel 6:1,8-9).
Since Ezekiel is in Babylon when we first encountered him, I believe this is a retrospective view of what happened and a cautionary tale for the people to begin/continue the process of returning to God and letting go of their lusts and fetishes. God’s desire to connect with humans is so powerful in that God does not destroy completely. God keeps the covenant God made with Noah to never destroy the entire world again because humans act ungodly.
Being scattered among the nations is, I believe, a key to our return. Without going to another nation, being under their authoritarian and arbitrary rule, we will not be able to appreciate being a nation that worships God, not royalty, has a set of standards that enhances the dignity of every person, and can start to promote this way of being in the land they are living in order to be stronger in their resolve to not make the same mistakes they did before and learn from the mistakes of their ancestors.
It is a revolutionary idea that Judaism in general and Ezekiel above is promoting: GOD CARES! God is so deeply involved with us that God is heartbroken by our faithlessness, by our turning away from God, by our lustful eyes and our running after the latest fad and fetish. We have to be in exile to see this? All of our Holy Books remind us that God is deeply involved in the plight of humanity. The Temple worship service is proof of God’s involvement, yet it became and empty ritual. Our prayer services are proof of God’s involvement and desire to connect, yet it can easily become boring, archaic and void of any power, going through the motions. Our study of Torah, Talmud, etc. is proof God cares and wants to improve our beingness. Yet, we make it about the arguments rather than immersing ourselves in the text to connect with God.
Once we realize how heartbroken God is, we loathe ourselves for the evil we committed as the beginning of our T’Shuvah, our return to God. We need to have this deep disgust for our behaviors so we can taste the bitterness of our actions, like we taste the bitterness of slavery through the Maror at Passover. Tasting the bitterness will stop us, hopefully, from going down this same road again, from breaking God’s heart with our unfaithful heart and eyes. When this realization occurs, when we turn back to God with a clean heart and clear eyesight, we are then able, like Ezekiel, to hear the word of God that comes to all of us. Prophecy may have ended with Micah, however, the word of God still comes into our beings.
In The Prophets on page 226, Rabbi Heschel teaches: “Never in history has man been take