The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (25 page)

This is exactly what does happen, but not before Jeremiah is imprisoned as a traitor for speaking against the state. When he is “liberated” by Nebuchadnezzar’s men after they have taken the city, they assume he is on their side and allow him to choose between exile in Babylon with the rest of the Judean upper crust or remaining behind with the scattered Judean peasants. Jeremiah chooses to remain. Jerusalem is torched, its walls leveled, its Temple pulled down, the ark lost forever, Y
HWH
vanished. Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, is made to witness the execution of his sons, the last thing he will ever see. Following the carnage, his eyes are put out and he is taken in chains to Babylon, where he will die. Jeremiah will die in Egypt, after having been forced there by well-intentioned friends.

Nevertheless, as Jeremiah prophesied in God’s words:

God’s people will no longer be the proud nobles of Israel and Judah but the marginalized and powerless—the blind, the lame, and the pregnant:

Is this what it will take for the faithless bride to turn to her husband? Gone is the city and the Temple, gone everything that gave the Jews (for that is who they now are) their false security. Is God gone, too, or is he in this terrible exile in pagan Babylon teaching them something new—“creating something new on earth”?

They sat by the Euphrates and Tigris, the very rivers where their story began, sat and wept and meditated on their fate. The prophets, they now knew, had told the truth, had been the spokesmen for God—and it is at this point that prophecy, which had always meant divine inspiration, comes to mean prediction: the true prophet is the one who sees the future implicit in the present; and his authenticity is confirmed when his prophecy comes true. God did not want their sacrifices, their national shrines, their outward show. He was not interested in guaranteeing their political power: he had shown them most painfully that this was of no interest to him. What on earth was this about?

To appreciate how unprepared the Jews were to pursue this line of thinking, one must take a quick look around the ancient world of the early sixth century. Religion then was about sacrifice. All peoples placated their gods in public temples, associated with kingship. The identity of god-king-priests-people was visible and unmistakable. There was no other way. If their God had destroyed their identity, what more could he possibly want from them? It was in the midst of this conundrum that the unheeded words of the prophets came back to them. God wanted something other than blood and smoke, buildings and citadels. He wanted justice, mercy, humility. He wanted what was invisible. He wanted their hearts—not the outside, but the inside.

There is no way of exaggerating how strange a thought this was. The Jews thought as did all other ancient peoples—of houses and fields, flocks and herds, gold and silver. The word which falls so easily from our lips—
spiritual
—had no
ready counterpart in the ancient world. Y
HWH
was spirit, of course, and completely unlike other gods because he was invisible and could not be represented in art. But this was precisely what had always given his people so much trouble, and they longed to depict him as other gods were depicted by their people. The closest they could come to imagining spirit was
mach
—wind, breath—the only invisible thing that was real, real because you could see its effects.
Ruach Y
HWH
sometimes descended on leaders, prophets, priests, and kings, for the sake of directing the people. But the people? The people had no
ruach
, God did not descend on them.

But men and women had the
breath of life, which when they died escaped their bodies as mysteriously as Y
HWH
had abandoned his Temple. There was in every human being an “inside,” which the Jews had never steadily adverted to before. Could God possibly mean that each of them was to be a king, a prophet, a priest in his own right? Was this what God had meant when he said at Sinai that he would make them “a kingdom of priests, a holy nation”? Would he make them a nation of the spirit, a nation without the trappings of a nation? It was to this “inside” realm that the prophet Ezekiel, who accompanied the people into exile, was referring when he said in God’s name of the coming restoration: “I shall give them a single heart and I shall put a new spirit in them; I shall remove the heart of stone from their bodies and give them a heart of flesh.” Could it be that this inside—where “the still, small voice” that spoke to Elijah resided—was the real Temple of God? The ark was lost and the Tablets of the Testimony were gone, but had not God promised
through the words of Jeremiah yet a new covenant in which his Law would be written “on their hearts”? And when God told them, also through Jeremiah, to “fix your mind on the road,” was he speaking of a journey of the spirit?

Those who first thought these thoughts must have felt that a great thunderclap had shaken them to their roots. They could now look back over the whole of their history—from the call of Avraham to journey into the wilderness, to the call of Moshe to lead the people from slavery to freedom, to the anointing of David, the king who sang “I,” to the prophets who warned them that nothing they had yet done was enough for God—they could look back and see that God had been leading them all along, from one insight to another, and telling them a story, “something new on earth,” the story of themselves.

L
ittle is known about the Jews in their exile. The biblical authors are as loathe to describe Babylon as they were to describe Sumer and Egypt. But in the course of their sojourns in various corners of the ancient world, some Jewish refugees, relying on the trading skills they had developed during the monarchy, made new fortunes and became reluctant to leave their new homes. The period of exile, therefore, marks the beginning of the Jewish diaspora, a period that has never yet come to an end. When the Babylonians are defeated by the
Persians, the Persian king Cyrus issues an edict—in 538, almost exactly seventy years after the prophecy
of Jeremiah—allowing the Jews to depart. A small group return to their ancestral home, and more will follow in the years to come.

The people who return to Zion are not the people who were taken away many years before. A new generation, more cosmopolitan in outlook, coming from many of the cultural centers of the ancient world, they arrive to eke out a difficult existence in a land that had been laid waste. They also arrive with books, books that accompanied them into exile and books written while in exile. During the exile or soon after the return, the Torah reached its final form, entwining the oral literatures of Judah and Israel with the concerns of contemporary priests and scribes who, in a time that was out of joint, needed to emphasize continuity and security, which they did through the elaboration of ritual prescriptions, laws, and genealogies, adding all these to the final text.

But the lightning of the prophets and the trauma of the exile must also be absorbed. Sowing their devastated land, replanting their ruined vineyards, the people of the remnant wonder what Jeremiah meant when he said: “Look, the days are coming, Y
HWH
declares, when I shall sow the House of Israel and the House of Judah with the seed both of people and of cattle. And as I once watched over them to uproot, to knock down, to overthrow, destroy and bring disaster, so now I shall watch over them to build and to plant, Y
HWH
declares. In those days people will no longer say: ‘The fathers have eaten unripe grapes; the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ But each will die for his own guilt. Everyone who eats
unripe grapes will have his own teeth set on edge.” The metaphor of the sour grapes: it means, of course, what it says—that each will be responsible for his own sin. No more retribution generation upon generation. The
individual
is responsible, not the tribe. As with the spiritualization of the journey and of religious obligation, the idea of the individual—the single spirit—begins to take hold, an idea that makes its way with great difficulty into this world of groups, tribes, and nations, in which all identity and validation comes only from solidarity with a larger entity.

A new literature begins to emerge. Some of it, borrowing from the literatures the Jews came to know in exile, is more like the worldly “wisdom” literature of the rest of the ancient world than like the Torah and the Prophets; and in the later books of the Bible like Proverbs and Ecclesiastes we sometimes encounter a cynicism that Gilgamesh would have been comfortable with but that would have appalled Moshe and disgusted Amos. But the cultural distance that the Jews have achieved from their own ancient literature also enables them to read it with more penetrating insight. Reflecting on the Psalms and prophecies and only now beginning to understand them, they finally pose the unasked question: why must the just man suffer? For if sin and retribution are upon the individual, what is the meaning of
unmerited suffering? In the figure of
Job, the good man who suffers without sin, they pose their question. But the question has no answer, only: “The L
ORD
gives and the L
ORD
takes away: Blessed be the Name of the L
ORD
.” They have reached that mysterious
core of human life where one heart in pain speaks to another—and the other can respond in sympathy but without an answer. If there is a reason, it is a reason beyond reason.

The new literature is so threaded with such meditations that it often seems existentialist, as contemporary as today, full of the pain and joy of real existence. In the
Song of Songs we meet “the Shulamite” and her lover, an unmarried couple, who play out an antiphonal game that never fails to stir the reader. She speaks first: