You ask whether the ancient tragedy in which Jeremiah appears as a tormented and tortured protagonist can give us any bearing on the present upheavals in Israel. I think this has been a consistent question for you, and here it goes unanswered. It may be true that those who fail to understand the past are doomed to repeat it, but that seems to me a psychological truth---the return of the repressed; it does not appear to be history's truth. As far as I can see, there is no past upon which we all ever agree. What I learn from the book of Jeremiah is something about how difficult it is to align the word and the will of God with the juggernaut of history, the massive, impersonal greed and shortsightedness of political power. Human protest, wisdom, and goodness are all but ground under, and yet thanks to memory and imagination there are the Jeremiah's whose stories and anguish are miraculously preserved. Such figures inspire in me a counterforce of personal witness and exertion. As, my dear man, do you.
You ask whether the ancient tragedy in which Jeremiah appears as a tormented and tortured protagonist can give us any bearing on the present upheavals in Israel. I think this has been a consistent question for you, and here it goes unanswered. It may be true that those who fail to understand the past are doomed to repeat it, but that seems to me a psychological truth---the return of the repressed; it does not appear to be history's truth. As far as I can see, there is no past upon which we all ever agree. What I learn from the book of Jeremiah is something about how difficult it is to align the word and the will of God with the juggernaut of history, the massive, impersonal greed and shortsightedness of political power. Human protest, wisdom, and goodness are all but ground under, and yet thanks to memory and imagination there are the Jeremiah's whose stories and anguish are miraculously preserved. Such figures inspire in me a counterforce of personal witness and exertion. As, my dear man, do you.