Jeremiah Chapters 29 - 30 ; You Shall Be My People

 

Chapter 29

Jeremiah has sent a letter to the exiled community leaders in Babylon directing them to tell the Jewish rank and file to carry on with their lives. Special emphasis is placed on refraining from following the diviners and false prophets in their midst. The exiled are told to suck it up and endure for an unspecified amount of time, until God brings them back to Israel. For those who have managed to avoid exile, they too will be punished and the land purified of their presence via pestilence, famine and the sword. It would seem that they are the carriers of spiritual and physical contagion, which if left unchecked would infect the returning Israelites.

 Ellen: Jeremiah gives these false Prophets too much energy. Why even react to them?

Joel: Jeremiah is a very specific personality. He’s a bit of a neurotic nudge. I think he can’t help but being annoyed at anything that rankles his defended personality.

Rabbi: Jeremiah is being persecuted! Even paranoids have enemies. These people can actually cause Jeremiah harm, so this is not just about neurotic behavior.

Ceil: Well, Jeremiah tends to be pettish!

Joel: Yeah, he is easily annoyed.

Rabbi: referring to 29:24 Shemaiah sent letters to all the people in Jerusalem to build houses and dwell in Babylon. Shemaiah wants the priests to rebuke Jeremiah for directing the people to accept their fate/punishment. Shemaiah wants Jeremiah to be punished.

Joel: People don’t want to hear that they must endure exile. This is counter- intuitive. A fight or flight instinct dictates that you run or mount an offensive. Exile sounds like submission to the enemies of Israel.

Ceil: Jeremiah is telling them to assimilate but only up to a point. They must remember who they are.

Rabbi: There is a shift in tone now. We can begin to see that Jeremiah is an optimistic realist.

Bill: Jeremiah has come a long way – he’s like the Energizer Bunny. He’s ready for the next round.

                                         

                                                           Chapter 30

Jeremiah is directed by God to write down his words which are to be committed to scroll. God is making the promise to restore the people of Israel. This is like a promissory note whereby God is paying the people with hope so that they will invest in their future. It’s a lot like a business contract.

Bill: referring to 30:10-11. God is going to handle those who have mistreated Israel, even though it was God’s hand that used Babylon to carry out the punishment of exile in the first place.

Joel: Corrupt empires are deserving of this punishment.

Ellen: I’m not sure that I know any longer why this (these books) is important to read. I really don’t! I see people behaving in history and the Prophets are like any leader saying stuff in order to get the people to stay together. They have to say the right thing in order to keep people along a certain path, but I don’t see any spirituality in this. It’s just politics being used by religion. I liked the early books much better. I liked the story of the Garden of Eden. It seems a lot more relevant even though it’s older.

Julie: There is a lot of repetition in the Prophets – same old, same old done in various ways in order to reach different people.

Paul: The value of reading these books, (the Hebrew Bible) is that they function like a compass. There are obstacles along our path and we can decide to go around, over or under them. It’s a compass of experience which we must negotiate.

Rabbi: I like this metaphor but I believe that Jeremiah is addressing a collective experience. It is not about the individual. We as a nation are meant to survive.

Joel: Whether these books actually happened or not Judaism functions under the logic of history. It reveals itself through history. It creates a history with a divine purpose and even if you don’t believe in God, it has great ramifications regarding secular ideas about progress and moral development. You can’t divorce Judaism from history. If you do you are stuck with myth and that’s a whole other story.

Ellen: I want the Torah to have amendments like the Constitution.

Rabbi: They do. Any amendments can be found in the Talmud and commentaries. That’s the purpose of them.

Whether we like those amendments or not, it is another story and entirely up to us. As Reform Jews we are often stuck with amendments to ritual behavior of the Orthodox world, when we as a movement have a history of secularizing Judaism or stream-lining it. How can we make the Torah relevant, when we may not believe in history as God’s particular punishment or reward? How can we remain Jews when laws regarding Temple purity are striven to be maintained in our local synagogue and we may question the legitimacy of those very arguments or requirements?  Our ability to make the Prophets meaningful is their very genius. We are forced to confront our own identity as individuals and as Jews belonging to a community precisely because Jeremiah asked the hard questions in the face of dissolution and annihilation. It is those very questions which posit “What is a Jew? Who is a good moral God-fearing Jew? Who survives and at what price? It is these questions which may be answered through moral, ethical and/or observant ritual behavior. Both exist in Judaism and both are actively addressed. But, it is up to us to make the personal or communal assessment as to how to these issues play out in our daily lives. The fact that Jeremiah presents us with as many questions as answers is our legacy. It is a personal commitment to moral behavior writ large and played out on the global stage. It is this personal commitment which makes up the greater tribal identity, that of B’nai Israel.