Three times the sound of the shofar, a ram’s horn, is heard in today’s chapter, piercing the air with a battle cry, a siren, and a wake up call. The shofar is an ancient instrument that’s based on breath - the hollow horn creates a vacuum that can shatter silence and shake up our hearts - and that is how it became the signature sound of the Days of Awe, once again upon us.
So what does it take to hear the call, notice what’s wrong, and take upon oneself commitment to change and repair what's not working?
For Jeremiah, walking the streets of Jerusalem with dismay and rage, things are so bad that he is not sure there is a chance for change at all. The countdown has begun.
He hears the sounds of the battle cries and imagines the end of the world as he knows it, all because the people refuse to take on the responsibility for a society governed by truth, justice and care.
What he imagines is the end which is a bookend to the very beginning. His dystopian imagery echoes what the Hebrew Bible imagines as the primal force that existed before Genesis, pre-creation. It’s the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end:
The Hebrew for ‘unformed and void’ is Tohu va’’Bohu --a term used only three times in the Hebrew Bible. Tohu and Bohu may be the names of ancient demons in the Mesopeomian pantheon, and in the biblical imagination this terms represents the void. Isaiah referenced it once. The first time is in the first lines of Genesis.
Why is Jeremiah referring to this cosmic moment of chaos when looking at Jerusalem’s tragic loss?
“Jeremiah confronts a society on the verge of collapse: invasion, destruction, death and suffering are just around the corner, and the prophet is wrought with pain at the prospect of “the blare of horns, alarms of war.” Intriguingly, he continues by stating: “I look at the earth, it is unformed and void; at the skies, and their light is gone.” Jeremiah seems to be saying that the destruction Israel is to experience is an un-doing of God’s creation: a return to the state of darkness and chaos which prevailed ‘before’ the world existed.
Clearly, Jeremiah did not mean that the death of Israelite people and the destruction of their towns was somehow tantamount to the structure of reality being untwined. Rather, his reference to Genesis is evidence that for some in ancient Israel, the concept of creation was much less a matter of an all-at-once production of something from nothing, and more a matter of establishing order in the midst of chaos. Seen this way, God’s act of creation loses its distance — and its permanence. Instead, creation is revealed as something rather precarious, a process in need of constant reinforcement, and which could be undone at any moment. In this paradigm, we ourselves are participants, if junior ones, in the ongoing creative act — each contribution we make to maintaining the peaceful stability of the world staves off, for a moment longer, the dark forces of chaos which would undo the work of God.”
What can be done to prevent this disruption?
Jeremiah hears the shofar and listens to the void, the hollow sounds that for many of us still evoke dread and the demand for repairing our wrong ways.
He calls to his people, then, now - “Wash your heart clean of wickedness, O Jerusalem, that you may be rescued.”
And he offers a recipe for repair for those willing to listen and return to doing the right thing, to try and avoid the chaos - the people must get back to the core - vowing to uphold ‘truth, justice and righteousness. Jeremiah 4:2
And if we won’t? Jeremiah warns that if there is no justice there is no reason for the world, and the end will bring back again to the beginning - the nothing that will replace something, creation mushroom clouding into chaos.
it's on us, he wails, to be partners in this perpetual creation, to hear the call, to pass it on, to do what’s best so our civilization manages this time to avoid the void.
Image: Poster for the movie “Oppenheimer” 2023
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