The Voice of the Prophet
Yom Kippur 2019
Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara, CA
I would like to begin with the story of the most horrendous sin recorded in the entire Bible, committed by one of our most beloved and revered heroes, David, King of Israel.
There is not enough time here to tell the full story of David and Batsheva. But here are the essential facts. David’s army was out on the field of battle, and David was back home in Jerusalem....without much to do. One evening, he went out on the roof of the palace, and from there he spotted a beautiful woman, bathing. David asked about her, and was told “That is Batsheva, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, one of your soldiers.” King David sent for her, and had sex with her. He was the king, and apparently he felt that that made it ok.
Some time later, Batsheva sent David a message: “I’m pregnant.”
David thinks “oy.”
He then commands Batsheva’s husband Uriah to come back to Jerusalem, and invites Uriah to the palace. David asks him how the troops are doing, and then sends Uriah home, saying “wash up and spend a really good night at home before going back to the war.” The alert reader understands David’s plan: David wants Uriah to sleep with his wife Batsheva, so that when her pregnancy becomes obvious, Uriah will think that she got pregnant from his night at home.
But instead of going home, Uriah spends the night in front of the palace. In the morning, when David learns that Uriah had not gone home, he calls him back to the throne room and asks “why didn’t you go home last night?” Uriah replies: “When my brother soldiers are all out in the field of battle, how can I go home and eat and drink and sleep with my wife?”
Then David, in cold, cold blood, sends Uriah back to the battlefront, with a sealed message for the general, saying “put Uriah in the front lines, in the most intense fighting, and then pull back from behind him so that he will be killed.” The general follows David’s orders, and Uriah is killed in battle. When David receives the news from his general, he tells the messenger to take back the reply: “It’s OK; this is what happens in war.”
What David had done, the text informs us, was evil in the eyes of God. In case we were wondering. Then something remarkable happens. Nathan the prophet comes to David and tells him this story: “There were two men in a city, one rich and one poor. The rich man had hundreds of sheep and cattle and the poor man had one lamb, whom he raised, and it lived with his family in their house. That lamb was like a daughter to him. A traveler came to the rich man, who prepared a meal for the traveler, but instead of taking from one of his own hundreds of sheep, he instead took the poor man’s only lamb and slaughtered it, served it as a lamb stew to the traveler.” Upon hearing this story, David flies into a rage. “By God! That man deserves to die!” To which Nathan replies: “Atah ha-ish. You are that man. You killed Uriah and took his wife for yourself.”
At last David’s conscience awakens, and he responds, “Chatati l’Adonai. I have sinned against God.”
There is so much in this story to discuss, and I want to assure you that David does not get off with a slap on the wrist. From this point forward his life falls apart. But my questions tonight are about the prophet Nathan. Who is he? How did he get access to the King? How did he have the guts to speak to David, and the deep wisdom of how to effectively confront David? And why does David listen to him?
What is it about the voice of the prophet?
Tomorrow morning we will read the words of another Biblical prophet, the 58th chapter of Isaiah. In the late morning, just as we are beginning to feel really hungry...if we are fasting....we hear a voice calling to us out of our distant past. It is Isaiah crying out to the Jews of his own day saying “You say you want to come close to God. You wonder why you are fasting and not feeling anything. Do you call this the kind of fast that God wants? I will tell you the fast I desire: Unlock the chains of wickedness. Let the oppressed go free! Share your bread with the hungry. Bring the homeless person into your home. When you see a naked person, put clothes on him! Then your light will burst out like the dawn, and the wounds of your world will begin to heal. Then when you call, God will answer, and when you cry out God will say: Hineni. Here I am.”
Hearing this voice tomorrow morning, we might well wonder: Who was this man? What gave him the authority to speak this way to the people? He was challenging everything they had been told and thought they knew about Yom Kippur. They thought that Yom Kippur was a day for holiness, for ritual, for sacrifice and for fasting. This man is saying “none of that means anything if you ignore the suffering people around you!” Did they listen to him? Some must have, because three thousand years later we still bring his passionate protest to interrupt the pageantry and ritual grandeur of our holiest day.
Judaism’s greatest strength throughout the centuries has been our willingness to make room at the very heart of our religion for the volcanic, disruptive, challenging word of the living God.
Where is that voice today? Who is speaking to us from outside of all the power structures? Whose is the shocking, disturbing, inspiring voice that is not seeking self-aggrandizement? Not running for office? Not interested in their own ego or self-interest? Who is speaking God’s truth, but doing it in a way that we can hear? Who is our Nathan? Who is our Isaiah?
As an experiment, I posed this question to myself, with no preconceptions. It took a few minutes, but a few people came to mind. Obviously, this is a purely subjective exercise, and the names that come to you will probably be different from those that came to me. I encourage you to ask yourself the question: whose voice in our world today do you think is speaking for God? When I asked myself that question, I came up with three names.
Malala Yousafzai, who when she was eleven years old began speaking out against the Taliban’s assault on girls’ education in her region of northwest Pakistan. Malala ignored death threats against her and when she was fifteen the Taliban leadership met and resolved to target her for assassination. Malala was shot in the face, and survived. She later explained: “the terrorists thought they would change my aims and stop my ambitions, but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.” In Malala’s voice, I believe we hear the voice of God.
Emma Gonzalez was seventeen years old when she spoke at a rally three days after the mass shooting at her high school in Parkland Florida. Three days had passed since seventeen students at her school were gunned down. That speech, in my opinion, was a miracle. Constantly wiping tears from her eyes, Emma captured all of the raw emotion racking her community, all of the grief, all of the rage, and wove it into brilliant, stirring, passionate call for change. 17 year old Emma’s words went viral and were seen and heard by millions and millions of people. I never get tired of watching her speech and I wonder: how does a young teenage woman, with so little life experience, and only a few days to gather her thoughts, speak words that thunder so powerfully across the globe?
One of those inspired by the Parkland students was Greta Thunberg, then a ninth grader living in distant Sweden, who says that the Parkland students inspired her to begin her School Strike for the Climate. That was in August 2018. Since then, in just one year, people all over the world have come to speak of the “Greta effect,” explaining the doubling of the number of children’s books focused on the environment, an increase by 8% of Swedes using trains rather than flying for domestic travel, new climate action in the European Union and the United Nations, and massive climate demonstrations in places as remote as Santa Barbara, CA. Greta is now 16 years old. How does a young teenage woman speak with such power and impact?
Malala Yousafzai, Emma Gonzalez and Greta Thunberg have each spoken in a voice that has reached across the entire planet....before reaching the age of 18 years old. Each one of them, sadly but not surprisingly, has thousands of people who hate them and are trying to destroy them. Somehow, fear does not seem to affect them. Like the prophets of ancient Israel, each one of these young women speaks for something far beyond themselves. Something that I believe our ancient ancestors would have understood as the holy spirit.
I’m sure that they themselves would say: “Don’t exaggerate!” Most of the time, no doubt, they are just normal young women. Malala herself, in her Nobel prize acceptance speech put it beautifully, saying: “I am pretty certain that I am the first recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize who still fights with her younger brothers. I want there to be peace everywhere, but my brothers and I are still working on that.” These three young women, we can be sure, are struggling with all the same impulses, inner conflicts, doubts and anxieties that we all have. But at certain moments, they have become vessels for the thundering, chastising, exalting moral prophetic voice, imagining and demanding a world worth living for. What a remarkable and wonderful way for God to enter our world.
I would like to conclude with a final question. What does it mean that in our day and age, we seem to be hearing God speaking to us through the voice of young teenage women? A few thoughts come to mind.
First of all, I think this is a positive effect of the internet. Few of us would deny, I imagine, that the internet is producing some terrible outcomes for our world....from sex trafficking to election tampering. But Malala reached her world audience, and Emma gained her one million twitter followers in ten days, and Greta has shifted the needle on climate change consciousness, in part, because the internet exists and allows their courageous voices to travel rapidly across the surface of the planet.
Notably, each one of these young women comes from a family that raised them to be a powerful force in the world. Malala’s father, an educator, is her inspiration and role model, and Greta says that she first learned that she could make a difference when her own family gave up flying in response to her persistent demands. Her mother changed career, in order to stop flying....in response to Greta’s persistence. Our generation has taught our daughters that they can change the course of history. Now here they are, doing just that.
Last, but I think most importantly of all, I think it is possible that human consciousness is evolving. I have lived long enough to remember a time, back when I was a boy, when God was a He, and almost all doctors and lawyers and all rabbis were men, and almost all university professors and members of congress and musicians in symphony orchestras were men. In the fifty years since I was a boy, that has changed. There are, to be sure, still glass ceilings, and salary differentials, and rampant sexual abuse and harassment in the workplace. But it does seem possible that we human beings might actually be making progress. The fact that three young women are speaking with such passionate brilliance, and that the world is actually listening is one indication that we are.
God has all along been speaking to us through the voices of women as well as men. But with a few isolated exceptions, we were not listening. Now, our ears are attuned to a different frequency. We have the awesome privilege to be the first generation to hear and to understand the prophetic voices of Malala, Emma and Greta, young women, messengers of the living God.
Can their words move us, beyond listening.... to action? “Then, as Isaiah said, our light will burst out like the dawn,
and the wounds of our world will begin to heal.
Then when we call, God will answer,
and when we cry out God will say: Hineni. Here I am.”
Ken yehi ratzon. May this be God’s will.