September 4, 2008
It’s not just Wall Street, Las Vegas, and the lotto. Nature itself puts a premium on knowing the future. Lower orders of animals use acute sensory perception to predict weather changes and the threat of predators. Humans have traded in such sensatory acuity for the brain power to speculate on longer-term predictability, such as economic forecasts and actuarial tables.
Over the course of millennia, we have tried tea leaves, animal entrails, seances, ouija boards, horoscopes, and the evil eye, all of which our sedra prohibits as not just nonsense, but idolatry, since only God knows what is yet to come. As Sforno explains, “In ascertaining the future, do so only through God, either God’s prophets, or (when the Temple stood) the Urim and Tumim” that God is said to have provided the priests for predictive purposes.
But prophecy has ended and so has the Temple and its priesthood, so how do we go about this perfectly normal desire to know the future?
No reputable Jewish position nowadays advocates anything but science, the essence of which is predictability. Since God created the natural order, investigating its patterns is equivalent to consulting priests and prophets. With priests and prophets gone, science is all we have.
But prophecy may not be altogether finished. Immediately after warning against augury and soothsaying, Moses promises that God will “raise up from among you a prophet like myself.” Practiced readers of Torah jump immediately to the end of Deuteronomy, which admits, “Never again did there arise a prophet like Moses.” What shall we believe? God still promises that prophet? Or we gave up on it when Deuteronomy got put together?
Tradition has not capitulated on the hope for such a prophet. What we have conceded is that even the finest prophet will never predict the future, because we can see now that prophecy is not only, or even essentially, about prediction. Science is the exercise in discovering truths; prophecy is an education in showing compassion.
Even Moses, the greatest of all prophets, is so far from knowing the future that he is regularly surprised at the turn of events: Pharaoh hardens his heart, the Israelites build a golden calf, the Korahites rebel. Moses is a prophet because whatever happens, he understands our despair, pleads our case, and keeps us going when we have all but given up.
The other prophets, too, console more than they predict. Just a few weeks ago, we read Isaiah’s famous advice, “Take comfort, take comfort (nahamu, nahamu)…. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem.” To be sure, he does predict, “her iniquity is expiated,” but the promise is secondary to the conviction that Israel has suffered sufficiently. So too, Amos ends with what looks like God’s promise, “I will restore my people,” but is really a final note of consolation. The most famous example is Hosea, whom we read on Shabbat Shuva (between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur) because of his certainty that no matter how much we sin, God will reward repentance with love. The prophetic point is always about compassion; prediction is just conviction drawn from faith in God’s compassion.
It is Christianity that has emphasized the predictive capacity of the prophets, because it reads the prophets as foretelling the very specific claim of Jesus as messiah. Not so Judaism, which leaves the details of messianic redemption wrapped in uncertainty, a matter of trans-historical speculation. Our primary use of the prophets is for haftara readings, which we characterize as n’hemta, a note of “consolation” with which every reading of Torah must end.
The Talmud stipulates “40 gates to bina,” which means “understanding,” not “knowledge.” Knowledge is a matter of fact. Understanding is a matter of discernment. We cannot know the facts of the future, but we can understand the suffering that accompanies fear of the present and the potentially dashed hopes if the present gets no better. Prophets specialize in bina, and, as the Zohar reminds us, in its discussion of this sedra, “Bina is the source of hesed” (compassion).
No wonder, then, the Talmud explains Moses’ greatness as a prophet on the grounds that Moses had the key to all but one of the gates to bina. No wonder also that our commentaries hope that the prophet predicted in our sedra may not know more, but will understand better — passing through even the final gate to bina.
So Judaism still hopes for better prophecy: not to circumvent science — the only route to knowledge of the future — but because no matter what the future brings, there is always a present to deal with, especially when the present arrives without the future we had hoped it would be. And for that, we need “compassion” (hesed) and “consolation” (n’hemta), precisely what prophets bring in abundance.
Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, cofounder of Synagogue 3000, is the Barbara and Stephen Friedman Professor of Liturgy, Worship, and Ritual at the Hebrew Union College in New York. He is the coeditor, with David Arnow, of My People’s Passover Haggadah: Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries (Jewish Lights).
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