Abraham Joshua Heschel

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this interview, a Jewish teacher, not a follower of Jesus, but his insights and biblical scholarship is world renown. His wisdom is potent and his communication is mesmerizing to me. I wish to God more men grew into such oaks. I dug into finding out more about him after reading his commentary on Jeremiah 20:7, a passage that is deeply troubling and mysterious on so many levels...but at the same time is so true. I know many people will wrestle with the language...as many did, when the prophets often scandalized their hearers. We have unfortunately scrubbed most of the prophets words clean of their dirt and grit today...we have sanitized their words with our soft light translations and paraphrasing, to the point that they are no longer dangerously viral.

We have also moved the deeply mysterious and painfully complex reality of walking, sometime stumbling, often hiding, rarely embracing...dance with God; into a stroll with Jesus that is painfully disingenuous. Too many talkers have faked it to the people, in order to try to convince them about something we know will ruin them, infect them, win them, make them die and pull them out of their graves. God is presented to most as a Gentleman...and to some of us, He has been a conquerer more than someone who offered us a "conversation". He has become to me a King who captured me, am I better for it, eternally yes, but to deny that He has been more than gentle with me...is to belie the fact that He is a God of the Hurricane as much as the whisper.

Here is the commentary from Mr. Heschel

O Lord, Thou hast seduced me,
And I am seduced;
Thou hast raped me
And I am overcome.
-Jer. 20:7

The meaning of this extraordinary confession becomes clear when we consider what commentators have failed to notice, namely, the specific meaning of the individual words. The striking feature of the verse is the use of two verbs patah and hazak. The first term is used in the Bible and in the special sense of wrongfully inducing a woman to consent to prenuptial intercourse (Exod. 22:16 [H. 22:15]; cf. Hos. 2:14 [H. 2:16]; Job 31:9). The second term denotes the violent forcing of a woman to submit to extranuptial intercourse, which is thus performed against her will (Deut 22:25; cf. Judg. 19:25, II Sam. 13:11). The first denotes seduction or enticement; the second, rape. Seduction is distinguished from rape in that it does not involve violence. The woman seduced has consented, although her consent may have been gained by allurements. 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. Jeremiah, who like Hosea thought 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, ofacquiescence 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 forced 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.

(Volume I, pages 113- 114)