Biography
Dr. Alfred Gottschalk is a gifted educator and theologian at Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati. Dr. Gottschalk has pioneered many changes. He ordained the first woman rabbi in Jewish history. His school of Jewish Communal Service has become a model for others throughout the country. He initiated a program in Jerusalem which, in 1980, produced the first ordination of trained leaders of the Reform movement in Israel.  [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"Prophetic Thinking in the Nonprophetic Society" 
Today in the world of theology there is a major concern: the updating and modernization of religious life. The motivation which animates this concern is often difficult to pinpoint and varies within each religious tradition. If one may generalize, there surges to the forefront the overwhelming need to highlight the relevance of the ancient truths of the Judeo-Christian heritage. We feel we have something eternal and positive in our religious faiths which responds to a crisis-stricken world, and we search our respective religious traditions to find that hidden spark that will reclaim adherents to our beliefs. Revolution within religious thought, reformations of its beliefs and practices, “updating” and adjustment to the times, are not new to the thoughtful student of the history of religion. There is nothing unique in the dynamics of religious reform, even though the particular phases of its development, and the changes that it brings about, often leave us awestruck by their disconcerting novelty.

An example of this is Josiah’s great religious reform of 621 B.C.E. which must have unnerved his contemporaries. This religious reform stimulated the monumental book of Deuteronomy, with its emphasis on the binding nature of the moral requirements of the covenant, all of which had been espoused two centuries earlier by the Hebrew prophets. The religious reform which Josiah effected brought the prophetic movement to its peak and changed the essence of Jewish religious life.

The genius of any reformation of thought or belief lies in its contention that it is really not a reformation at all. Josiah claimed to teach nothing more than the basic tenets of the ancient covenant entered into by the people of Israel at Sinai. A century or so earlier Amos, surveying the religious milieu of his day, asked, “Did ye bring unto Me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel?”1 Did God require the noise of song, or the solemn assembly, the burnt offerings, the sin offerings and the many variations of tithes, as manifestations of faith? Certainly not! Speaking for God, the prophet replies in God’s name, “I hate, I despise your feasts. And I will take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Yea, though ye offer Me burnt-offerings and your meal-offerings, I will not accept them. Neither will I regard the peace-offerings of your fat beasts. Take thou away from Me the noise of thy songs; and let Me not hear the melody of thy psalteries. But let justice well up as waters. And righteousness as a mighty stream.”2 With the sounding of that note, a revolution in religious life of monumental importance was initiated. The impact of that revolution has reverberated throughout the generations. Yet Amos did not claim to be innovating. He was only reiterating the basic truth of the Sinaitic tradition as he understood that tradition.

Other raptures with religious traditions proceeded from similar claims. The Protestant Reformation, which was espoused by many great and diverse voices, claimed to be a return to the true meaning of the Scriptures. If one can draw a tentative general conclusion about the Second Vatican Council, especially Nostra Aetate (October 1965), its “Guidelines and Notes”, it would have to be charted along similar lines to the thoughts of Hans Kung who wrote: “With Pius XII’s encyclical Mystici Corporis (1943), [and]... During the twenty years since, Catholic theology has concentrated more and more on the Church as the ‘people of God’, the ‘community of believers’, and has thus begun to think out afresh, for theology and for life, starting with the New Testament, this most important and most ancient concept of the Church ...”

Whether the start in the reformation of our religious traditions originates in the covenant at Sinai, or more generally in Scriptures — both Hebrew and New Testament — the essential quality remains the same. It is an attempt to move through barnacled traditions and ritual acts to the very essence of the revelation. This motivation which is the positive aspect in any meaningful reform is the capacity for “prophetic thinking”. In Jeremiah’s words, it corresponds to the need “to root out and to pull down, and to destroy and to overthrow; to build, and to plant”.3

The fact that from time to time the capacity for prophetic thought and action manifests itself is the greatest index of the fundamental richness and vitality of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Jews and Christians often retreat from its demanding truth and fall into nonprophetic action and thought. This unfortunate response constitutes the greatest challenge to both of our religious missions.

During periods of reformation, when there is a restructuring of the means and forms which bring us into closer and more immediate confrontation with God’s commandments, another set of negative motivations manifest themselves. These negative motivations prevent us from effecting a true and complete reformation and frustrate its ultimate goals. Born of the desire to maintain the nonprophetic society, these negative motivations abort the reformation by stopgap and superficial measures. These so-called reforms conspire to keep us from hearing God’s commands for social justice more clearly. Emphasis on trivia occurs when we concentrate on ritual, with questions like: Shall this prayer be said in Hebrew, Latin, English or German? Shall we shorten the service by abbreviating the liturgy? Shall services start at 10:00 A.M. or 10:30 because of the additional half-hour of discomfort it may give to the parishioner? Shall the preacher deliver a sermon, or is a sermonette more appropriate?

There are some religious-minded people who need to be in communication with God, while there are others who seem to remain estranged from God, to eclipse God from their lives. Recently, two groups of religious-minded people have emerged: one group enamored of prophetic thinking and the other of thinking profit. The latter group wants religious reforms to be accommodated to its comfort while the former seeks to create a measure of discomfort. One group is sick of conscience, the other sick with conscience. Estrangement from God seems to require only some anemic form of religion in which lip service replaces the service of the heart. Characteristically, such a religion becomes a palliative, an opiate, and substitute for the demands that are made upon us by the prophet Micah, “To do justice, love mercy and walk humbly before God.”4

Thomas Carlyle, more than a century ago, proclaimed in his Heroes and Hero-Worship that “Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of great men who have worked here.” This view emphasizes that an orientation of history gives just due to those heroes of culture, those unusual and singular persons who found strength in times of turmoil and brought light into a dark world where ignorance and hatred held sway. The hero-image of ancient Israel, the prototype of the religious culture-bearer, is the prophet. Judaism built its vast ethical and religious system around the image of the prophet. So deeply did the prophet leave his imprint upon Jewish consciousness, that Moses was depicted as chief of the prophets; and even the Messiah according to rabbinic tradition is understood to be a prophet.5 The medieval Jewish commentator, Saadia, described the messianic age as one in which “prophecy will reappear in the midst of our people so that even our sons and daughters will prophesy.”6 We can learn more about prophetic thinking by looking closely are prophets and observing their mission. The prophets locked horns with the power structure of their day and with the evils that beset their society.

We need to define the prophet. The word “prophet” is a translation of the Hebrew, Navi; a word the meaning of which we are still not sure. Navi may mean “one who is called”, “one who proclaims”, or “one who shouts”. The English connotation of “prophet”, derived from the Greek, suggests that the prophet is a teller of fortunes or a foreteller of the future. This is part of the prophetic personality, but more than being a fore-teller or seer, the authentic prophet is a forth-teller, that is, a commentator on what is happening. The prophets themselves had criteria for true and false prophecy, and the fortune-telling aspect was of relatively minor concern in determining who was “true” and who was “false”. What was crucial in this determination was not whether the prophet foretold the future correctly or not, but rather whether he abdicated his moral obligation or not.

Micah gives us an apt example of a false prophet. “Thus saith the Lord concerning the prophets that make my people to err; That cry: ‘Peace’, when their teeth have nothing to bite on; and whoso putteth not into their mouths, they even prepare war against him.”7 The prophetic group was a complex one. There were prophets who were ecstatics, prophets who were priests, and prophets who claimed they were. not prophets at all. Saul, the first king of Israel, naked and in an ecstatic state prophesied before Samuel.8 Jeremiah and Ezekiel, among others, were priests as well as prophets. Amos denied the title, claiming that he was neither a prophet not the son of a prophet.9 The institution of Neviut, prophecy, underwent change. This is clear from the literature itself. Jeremiah was the first among the literary prophets to willfully designate himself a Navi.10 By his time, those whom we now call literary prophets hardly ever used the ecstatic state for the purposes of divination. No longer did true prophets travel in bands, or accept hire for their foretelling. What really came to distinguish the prophets from the ordinary seers was not their vocation, or the way in which they said God spoke to them, but the very nature of their message, the Devar Adonai, (the word of the Lord), which they claimed to speak.

This is also true of some of the pre-literary prophets, men whose actions were described in the Scriptures. Their words ring true to us as the clear demands of conscience. Samuel, who anoints Saul king, also breaks him as king when Saul violates the requirements of the prophetic word.11 Nathan confronts King David when the latter has the loyal soldier Uriah exposed to sure death so that he might take Bath-sheba.12 Nathan’s accusation: “You are that man!” has reverberated throughout the history of human conscience. David confessed his wrong, and Nathan left the court unharmed. The king was not above the law. An Israelite king was bound by a firmly established code, already deeply ingrained in the conscience of the people of Israel by the time of the monarchy. There was a tradition of equal rights, to which all who were descended or were witnesses to the bondage of Egypt, the Exodus, and the wilderness wandering, were heir. The formal consolidation of the state and the established priesthood often obscured these early traditions. Kings, such as Solomon, who opened the commonwealth to foreign influences, often tended to forget these traditions.

This was particularly true of King Ahab, who wantonly attempted to repudiate the ancient tradition that a man could not be severed from his patrimony against his will. The prophet Elijah confronted the king with the charge of illegal appropriation and was exiled into the wilderness for it. Elijah appeared on the horizon of history as a reminder that God’s law had been broken and a human being, Naboth, had been unjustly treated. Samuel, Nathan and Elijah were remembered by the historians of their period because of their commitment to Torat Moshe, the “Law of Moses”.

Yes, there were early traditions among the Hebrews of basic human rights. These rights, when violated, lead to revolutions and reformations of thought and institutions. The human rights revolution, which we are still witnessing, and I use the word “witnessing” decidedly in its theological sense, is but one further example of this process. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., among others, chose to wage this revolution along prophetic lines of thought. Quotations from Amos, Isaiah, Micah and Jeremiah relating to the early formulation of these ideas are common language today. The prophetic words seem to live again, as they once did in the streets of Jerusalem, and on the hilltops of Galilee, on the heights of Mt. Carmel, and in the barren beaten wadis of the deserts of ancient Israel. The courage to defy wrong, to pluck it up and tear it down, is prophetic courage, but that is not enough. One must also plant anew and prepare the way for a greater society. Prophetic thinking in our nonprophetic society makes us aware of these wrongs and should propel us into the forefront of the battle for human rights.

The prophet’s vision means that he looks at the world with a concern for eternity. It is not just the glaring social wrongs which occupy his thought, but the entire realm of human conduct. He is concerned with the totality of the quality of life; each and every aspect of it is vitally important to him. In this context of prophetic concern, let us attempt to “'listen” to the words of Amos as he trudges the rock-strewn roads from Judah to Israel to deliver his message. As we “listen” we must ask, “What was wrong with this land that God could not bear?” From outward appearances the reigns of King Uzziah of Judah and Jeroboam the son of Joash were prosperous and secure. The markets were at their all-time highs. There was wealth and plenty in the land. The people were pious. They brought more than the required sacrifices and said all of the proper liturgy and thronged to the altars of worship. The foreign policies of these kings had made their kingdoms prominent and had led them to restore their historic boundaries. Outwardly nothing seemed amiss.

Amos began to pry the lid of his society open. He pointed first to the transgressions of Israel’s neighbors and with sure and ruthlessly logical arguments showed that they were guilty of gross acts of genocide. Damascus had “threshed Gilead with sledges of iron”. Tyre had sold all their captives to Edom. Moab had burned the king of Edom until his bones turned to lime. These were clearly acts which violated the human conscience. Judah’s sin was that it had rejected God’s law. Israel’s sin was that in the midst of great plenty, it was rife with social injustice. The rich exploited the poor; virtuous people were demoralized; the poor were oppressed; the needy walked the streets hungry while the wealthy classes, remote in their vacation spas, mindless to all, thrived. With power and with the aid of the courts, the rich seized all they could from the system. The vulnerable elements of society — the fatherless, the widows and the orphans — were unprotected and manipulated. On the surface all seemed well, but to the eyes of the prophet, the rotten core of society was evident.

It is characteristic of “prophetic thinking” to be radical, it is often given to extremism. The prophet by his very nature tells the truth and his own life is an example of truth in action. He stands for the ideal society based upon absolute righteousness in which ideals are uncompromised. Dire consequences usually follow this kind of expression and there are many examples from history. Amos was exiled, Jeremiah imprisoned, Jesus crucified, Giordano Bruno burned at the stake, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., assassinated. Yet such consequences of prophetic action are irrelevant to the prophet. It is not that he does not care what happens to him. He does! But he cannot control his impulse for truth-telling. It is, as Jeremiah says, “a fire pent up in the bones”. He must speak. The prophet often laments that his life is abnormal. He gives up home, wife, children and position to carry out his mission. He is possessed by an irresistible drive to right wrong, to “undo the yoke of the bound”, to “let the oppressed go free”. He sees himself as an instrument of God’s will and as a mouthpiece of God’s word. This is a frightening sort of man. The prophet and his thinking make us uncomfortable, and that is why we try to avoid them both. Prophetic thinking is based upon eternal truth, and yet it is revolutionary in the way that is must be applied in every age to the nonprophetic society. The prophets in their wisdom, aware of human frailties, signaled the millennium Ba-aharit ha’yamin, “at the end of days”. They realized that as long as human society exists, their programs and their ideals will always need to be rediscovered. We hope and pray that at each threshold of the advancement of human civilization more of the prophetic program is fulfilled and the Messianic millennium brought that much closer. But the regressions of human civilization are always there to renew the call for prophetic thinking and prophetic effort.

That is why we need constantly to be reminded of some of the indispensable qualities in prophetic thinking. All of the prophets believed that they were agents of a living God who made requirements of man. They needed no further proof of God’s existence and of God’s Providence than their experience of God’s closeness. This experience is lacking by and large in the life of modern man. There is, in Martin Buber’s words, “an eclipsed God” who confronts us. We treat God as an object in the same way we treat people as objects: an “it” to be manipulated and not a “thou”; a subject to be confronted, a Being with whom to interact. There was a time when we used things and loved people. Now we use people and love things. The prophets confronted, held dialogues, and disputed with God. yet with it all they fully understood what God required of them. When people are eclipsed from God, no relationship of positive significance is possible with the deity or the requirement of prophetic action.

The question must by now be forming in our minds: can we ourselves become prophets? I think not, for prophets are chosen; they can will to be nothing other. We can, however, engage in “prophetic thinking”. This should not be an idle pious pastime but a vigorous surge to action and deed. The Jew calls this mitzvah and the Christian calls this “works”. We saw more prophetic thinking in the revitalization of the Judeo-Christian heritage through united interfaith and interracial participation in the struggle for human rights, than in all of the theological treatises on the subject laid end to end. If Amos could have been there, he would not have felt as lonely today as I am sure he felt at Beth El. There are many other issues which beg for prophetic thinking. There is the problem of war and peace, of physical and spiritual genocide, of nuclear disarmament. Most of our world lives in poverty. There are still so many hungry children. There are those who are ground under the heel of oppression, exploited and hopeless, who look to us for some measure of deliverance. The revival of the social gospel and of the prophetic mission represents the greatest opportunity for a meaningful reformation of contemporary life. And the challenge to our own age is still reflected in the plea of the prophet Isaiah:

Come now, let us reason together,
Saith the Lord;
Though your sins be as scarlet,
They shall be as white as snow,
Though they be red like crimson,
They shall be as wool.
If ye be willing and obedient,
Ye shall eat the good of the land;
But if ye refuse and rebel,
Ye shall be devoured with the sword;
For the mouth of the Lord hath spoken.13