We don’t know anything about Jeremiah’s mother or their relationship but in today’s poetic flood of fury that comes out of his mouth he laments his life and wishes he was never born at all. This is the only reference he ever makes to his maternal origins:
‘Woe is me’ is translated from the original Hebrew which contains the oldest Jewish complaint - OY to me! According to the Talmud this loud plaintive exhale, still so familiar to us today, was first used by Adan and Eve back in Eden, and already referenced several times in the Hebrew Bible - including by Jeremiah himself.
But by the time he delivered this litany - things are getting worse in Jerusalem - and worse for him. In this chapter he shows us two sides of his inner reality - both the joy and the oy of prophecy.
On the one hand he is drawn to the divine command and can only obey the voices that demand his obedience - and on the other hand he pays a heavy price for it, hated and persecuted by his people. The chapter picks up where the last one ended - as Jeremiah echoes the despair of the people, priests and prophets, merchants and children roam the famished roads and beg for forgiveness from YHWH.
But it’s too late now, Jeremiah tells them - you had your chance. He lays it out with little kindness, as instructed by the voice of YHWH in his head:
“More than any other prophet, Jeremiah repeatedly complains about the destiny of bitter contention that his calling has imposed upon him. It were better, he says here, had he never been born.”
But it isn’t just despair that drives him to keep going. A few lines later he confides in God that despite the hardships, the role of prophet is dear to him and nourishes his soul with delight. And then, one sentence later, he returns to complaining about his loneliness and rejection:
Perhaps this back and forth between polarities , oh so human, gives us a clue as to his mental health challenges? There is definitely depression, maybe he’s also bi-polar? There is some speculation on the topic, although there is no clear diagnosis. (if any of the readers knows of such research, please let us know!)
In The Prophets, Heschel pays close attention to these inner tensions and struggles of prophets - with Jeremiah as a prime example of conflicting voices. Heschel listens to the theological realities that Jeremiah shares with us but also notices the psychological aspects that of course so intertwined. He exposes a brutal vocabulary that reveals the deeper layers of this ambivalence:
“The words used by Jeremiah to describe the impact of God upon his life are identical with the terms for seduction and rape in the legal terminology of the Bible These terms used in immediate juxtaposition
forcefully convey the complexity of the divine-human relationship: sweetness of enticement as well as violence of rape. But Jeremiah, also speaking of the relationship between God and Israel in the image of love, interpreted his own involvement in the same image. This interpretation betrays an ambivalence in the prophet’s understanding of his own experience.
The call to be a prophet is more than an invitation. It is first of all a feeling of being enticed, of acquiescence or willing surrender. But this winsome feeling is only one aspect of the experience. The other aspect is a sense of being ravished or carried away by violence, of yielding to overpowering force against one’s own will. The prophet feels both the attraction and the coercion of God, the appeal and the pressure, the charm and the stress. He is conscious of both voluntary identification and forced capitulation. This dialectic of what takes place in the prophetic consciousness points to the approach we have adopted in our analysis. Objectively considered, it is, on the one hand, the divine pathos which stirs and entices the prophet, and, on the other hand, unconditioned power which exercises sheer compulsion over the prophet. Subjectively, it is in consequence the willing response of sympathy to persuasion and also the sense of being utterly delivered up to the overwhelming power of God.
A man whose message is doom for the people he loves not only forfeits his own capacity for joy, but also provokes the hostility and outrage of his contemporaries.
The sights of woe, the anticipation of disaster, nearly crush his soul. And yet, the life of Jeremiah was not all misery, tension or pressure. He also knew the bliss of being engaged to God, “the joy and delight” of being, as it were, a bride. Thy words were found, and I ate them, Thy words became to me a joy, The delight of my heart, For I am called by Your name, O YHWH, God of hosts. (Jeremiah 15:16)”
It won’t get any easier for Jeremiah, nor for Jerusalem. Perhaps what we are noticing here is the very essence of the human push and pull between love and rejection, pain and pride, connection to the sacred source - and its utter rejection. The prophet, like the artist, models the extreme human experience in a heightened and lowered sense of sensitivity and with greater exposure to the core - and this exposure is not without its heavy toll.
In the next chapters we’ll meet more of Jeremiahs’ misery including why he chose - or had to - never marry and remain alone.
Breaking the Bottle: Jeremiah’s Prophetic Performance Art
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Was Jeremiah a performing artist protesting social ills? Was he a poet speaking truth to power or a madman everybody tried to avoid?
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I have a sense that Jeremiah as a figure is closest to Job. I can't quite put my finger on what makes me want to put t he two of them in the same sentence, but I think it is my sense as a reader of seeing a kind of god-suffering that gets to some difficult, even ugly aspect of the construction of the deity in this phase of its development. Any thoughts about this?
PS For me the 5 PM is not happy hour but dinner hour, but glad for others if it allows more attendance.
I have a sense that Jeremiah as a figure is closest to Job. I can't quite put my finger on what makes me want to put t he two of them in the same sentence, but I think it is my sense as a reader of seeing a kind of god-suffering that gets to some difficult, even ugly aspect of the construction of the deity in this phase of its development. Any thoughts about this?
PS For me the 5 PM is not happy hour but dinner hour, but glad for others if it allows more attendance.