What we know today of mental health in all its varieties and nuances may not have been known to the ancient, nor to generations closer to us. If a prophet is one who hears voices and reports those messages to his community - how does society respond back then, and how do we respond right now?
Hosea’s 8th Century BCE reality likely included a vast spectrum of seers and mystics, prophets and oracles, priests and providers of spiritual truth. Some were deemed false by others, and often politically motivated reasons glorified some or negated others.
Like others who spoke unpopular truth to power, he too was likely considered crazy more than once.
And in today’s chapter - he actually says so, projecting ahead to a future in which his dire warnings will become real and the people who scorned him will know, too late, that he was not mad - that he was right:
בָּ֣אוּ ׀ יְמֵ֣י הַפְּקֻדָּ֗ה בָּ֚אוּ יְמֵ֣י הַשִּׁלֻּ֔ם יֵדְע֖וּ יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל אֱוִ֣יל הַנָּבִ֗יא מְשֻׁגָּע֙ אִ֣ישׁ הָר֔וּחַ עַ֚ל רֹ֣ב עֲוֺנְךָ֔ וְרַבָּ֖ה מַשְׂטֵמָֽה׃
The days of punishment have come
For your heavy guilt;
The days of reparations have come—
Let Israel know it!
The prophet was a fool,
The wise one a madman -
By constant harassment.
Hosea 9:7
The word Hosea uses for ‘madman’ is the Hebrew ‘Meshuga’ - a word that appears 7 times in the Hebrew Bible, three of them related to prophecy. The word also migrated to Yiddish and eventually to the English dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), defines ‘Meshuggeneh’ as “Esp. in Jewish usage: mad, crazy; stupid.”
But what’s Hosea telling us about the links and possible differences between prophecy and psychosis?
In 1962, Heschel published his famous ‘The Prophets’, in which he writes the following paragraph:
"The mind of the prophet, like the mind of the psychotic, seems to live in a realm different from the world which most of us inhabit. Yet what distinguishes the two psychologically is most essential.
The prophet claims to sense, to hear, to see in a way totally removed from a normal perception, to pass from the actual world into a mysterious realm, and still be able to return properly oriented to reality and to apply the content of his perception to it. While his mode of perception may differ sharply from the perceptions of all other human beings, the ideas he brings back to reality become a source of illumination of supreme significance to all other human beings. Once the psychotic crosses the threshold of sanity to take refuge in a world of his imagination, he finds it difficult to return to reality, if he wishes to return. The delusions and hallucinations to which he is subjected can in no way be relevant to the lives of those who are not disoriented...The prophet's maladaptation to his environment may be characterized as moral madness as distinguished from madness in a psychological sense.”
Would Heschel’s word pass the test of time in the 21st century? Are they accurately describing what may have been a much more fluid and flexible status between those so called prophets or mad-people?
Dr. Moshe Sokolow, in reflecting on today’s chapter, reminds us that then, as now, taking a stand against popular views is already somewhere on the line between courageous and crazy:
“Arguably, acceding to a divine imperative to call out others on their faults and inform them of the harmful consequences of their misdeeds requires a disregard for personal safety and disdain for one’s own reputation that verge on the irrational. Who but a “madman” would place himself in jeopardy by telling the truth to power?”
What we know today of the variance of mental health, beyond stigma, and with so many better ways of supporting nuance and needs, may help us understand the predicament of the prophet and all those who speak truth to power and name inconvenient truths. Beyond the binary option that Hosea alludes to and Heschel depicts there is likely a far richer liminal grey zone of conscious-driven messaging and alternate states of consciousness, where we find ourselves torn between terror and truth.
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