Is a rabbi also a prophet?

Like many of those who do my job, ordained or not, I am often asked the same question in many ways by different people any given number of times in the year. Our shabbat services often do not vary a huge amount, our festival services – although only occurring once a year – still feel very familiar to us when they come around, and year in, year out, we hear more or less the same stories from Torah, so it is no surprise that many of those regular questions in many guises are related to these things. But, every week in a Shabbat service, we also hear a reading from a lesser-read part of our Tanakh – we hear a reading from Prophets, and occasionally someone will come to me, and in one way or another, ask why we bother. So much of what we read in prophets can feel very tangential to what we have just heard from the Torah; it can feel overbearing, it can feel threatening (and I think in some cases it is meant to), and it can feel a little bit disconnected from modern life. It has also been brought to my attention that in some cases, it can feel a little, dare I say it, Christian.

The answer, I think, lies somewhere between the answers to three questions:

·      What was prophecy in the bible?

·      What is prophecy now?

·      And, if in the absence of a priesthood we all take on that role, then who takes on the role of prophet? 

Unsurprisingly we have to ask some questions to get answers to the questions, of course, this would not be a Jewish exercise if that were not the case! Trying to understand what prophecy in the bible was, is something that has intrigued scholars for centuries. “In the mid-twentieth century, the classic historical-critical approach to the Hebrew Bible’s prophetic books gave way to the study of Israelite prophecy as part of a social phenomenon known throughout the ancient Near East. Since the 1980s, research on the phenomenon of Israelite prophecy has been marked by two main paradigms. The first extends the basic [experiential] approach and identifies Israelite prophecy as a socio-historical phenomenon shared across various ancient cultures”, so the focus for examination is on how the listener (or in fact reader) would have received this prophecy, and not the actual mode of prophecy itself, “[and the] second paradigm questions the usefulness of the biblical texts for reconstructing the ancient realities of prophecy and suggests that Israelite prophecy was a literary phenomenon that emerged among scribes in postexilic Yehud” (Kelle, 2013, p275).

The word we translate from Hebrew to English as “prophet” is navi, and the English word itself is of Greek origin. In the original Greek, prophetes means, literally, “to tell forward” but figuratively relates to human beings who convey divine messages to other human beings, and I think that this is a definition we could all agree with. Navi, however is not that straight forward. We may well want to translate navi as ‘spokesperson’, but the ‘Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament’ (p661) suggests that the word is derived from an Akkadian word "Nabu," meaning to call, and that the Hebrew conveys a passive sense meaning "the one who has been called" – that is certainly something we can see with Isaiah, but this may well leave people uncomfortable. Rashbam, in a comment relating to Genesis 20:7 states that the root of the word navi is a word that denotes openness (literal hollowness), that suggests the prophet is a vessel to be filled with divine knowledge and wisdom, or perhaps more metaphorically, is simply open to being used as a mouthpiece.  

Whichever origin of the word we like, and I tend to err towards thinking that perhaps none of them are wrong, we are still no closer to knowing what biblical prophecy was – and when one takes into account that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Pinchas, Elisha, Isaiah, Huldah, and Ezekiel (along with 40 other men, and 6 other women) are considered prophets by the authors of the Talmud, and none of them really did anything similar to the others, you may be starting to realise that the answer is not going to be cut and dry.

There are four terms for ‘prophet’ in the Hebrew Bible (Petersen, 1981, in Kelle, 2013):

·      Ro’eh - seer

·      Ish HaElohim – being/man of god

·      Chozeh – visioner or visionary (itself an ambiguous term in English)

·      Navi – spokesperson

And there is a possibility that these were all different types of prophet within biblical society, across a range of time periods. Samuel 9:9 employs this title roeh and Silver (2013, p154-75) posits that the possibility that during the First Temple period, there was a guild of seer-priests who, besides being scribes in their own right, performed divination rituals, rituals for worship and magic, sacrifices, and prophesised through visions, alongside the ‘canonical’ prophets who condemned all of those actions and came only to deliver a message.

Are we any closer, though, to defining, or at least understanding what the biblical authors (and their contemporaries) understood a prophet to be?! I would not say that we are not, but I also would not be so bold as to say that we are. In summary though, I think that we can relatively safely say that prophets had a varied and shifting role across the Ancient Israelite period, and in addition, there was quite possibly no one way of being a prophet. This kind of thinking makes me wonder if we might apply the same logic to our rabbis, and if you will allow me to be so audacious, ask whether or not our rabbis should also be our prophets?!

A member of a community where I work recently brought me a print out from a Chabad web page and said “is it true?” … so let me just bring some of that article to you. The question Chabad was asking in their website was “why are there no more prophets?” and whilst I personally think there are prophets, Chabad says that the “Talmud explains that with the death of the latter prophets Chagai, Zechariah and Malachi at the very beginning of the Second Temple era, “the spirit of prophecy departed”, so here the idea is clearly that prophecy requires a certain spirit available in the world.

The Talmud also states, that “prophecy does not come upon a prophet when he is sad or languid” and I could easily make a joke about rabbis being constantly tired, but I do not think that this is the reason for the ‘lack of prophecy’ either. Maimonides, who as well as being what we might understand as a theologian was also a doctor, in the Guide for the Perplexed, “explains that every faculty of a person's body at times grows weak and at other times is healthy. The “imaginative faculty,” which Maimonides identifies as the source of prophecy, is no different than the other bodily functions. Prophets, he says, were unable to prophesy when they were mourning or angry for example. This, Maimonides explains, is the “primary reason” that prophecy has ended now that we are in so-called exile – ostensibly because in service to “foreign nations” nobody could be happy.

A question arises here for me then about what prophecy could be seen as now, in most part simply because the implication here is that if we are all in exile and so distressed we are unable to prophecy, does this mean also that God is actively choosing not to appoint prophets? Or does it mean that we are unable to access God in the same way and therefore unable to prophesy? I am uncomfortable with both of these things, because they are reliant on a very fixed idea of what prophecy can, or should, be.

Jewish tradition is very much a fluid tradition, and I would like to suggest to you that this means quite simply that we are still in flux, and therefore able to continue to define and redefine who we are and what we do.

A large part of my doctoral research looks at shamanism in ancient societies, and I have encountered a fair amount of scholarship that places prophets within a shamanic tradition. Lester Grabbe (2010, in Miller, 2011), of whom I am a huge fan, and encourage you to read quite literally anything he has written if you want to understand why I love what I do so much, argues that much of what makes the prophets shamans for him is their use of ecstatic trance, but also using studies he has undertaken in Indonesia, Niger, Uganda, Madagascar, and Mongolia, rather than focussing on ecstatic trance, he notes both shamans and biblical prophets “as war leaders, in ambiguous relationships with the government, in conflict with similar practitioners, and whose "prophecies” are subject to extensive literary development.

I promise not to bore you with the technicalities, but despite everything you might think you know about a shaman, the simple definition is someone who is in contact with the divine, offers solutions on behalf of a community, and inspires a community to make change.

I do not think that we could argue, not really, that this does not sound like a prophet. Does this mean then that rabbis are shamans, and by extension even prophets?! I am minded to think that, in some way yes, though it should not stop at just rabbis!

So biblical prophecy was varied, and prophecy now seems to not exist … does that mean then that there is a role to be filled? And should I, as your (student) rabbi, be your prophet? Or should this be a role that we all need to think about fulfilling?

My answer to you is .. both. I would like to suggest to you that we need to return to a First Temple model; in some ways we already have a “guild” of rabbis, and in many ways, this “guild” exists to ensure that all clergy work together to inspire, and evolve Judaism through our congregations. I would go one further though, and suggest that each of us, every single Jew, could be a shaman, and therefore a prophet. Each and every one of us has the capacity to find within ourselves the voice of God, the voice of change, and the voice of inspiration for growth. I am often challenged by congregations to be more of a translator and dictionary than a guide, and I am often told that I do not tell you all enough what to do … so, I am challenging you now, when you finish hearing or reading this, to think about what it means to be a prophet and what it means to be a shaman, and then be that person in the world. You do not need to change the world in a huge way, not at first, and you do not need to have visions and turn into Isaiah or Elisha (especially not Elisha because I do not think we need more people enchanting bears and killing children).

Prophecy did not end, not in my opinion. All that ended was a specific type of prophecy. We all have a responsibility to change the world in which we live, and we all have a responsibility to inspire those around us to do the same … we are all prophets, I think we just do not all know it yet.