Meditation on Jeremiah

MEDITATION ON JEREMIAH

BY

DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

Jerusalem was certainly not the utopian ark of Zion the prophet Jeremiah wanted it to be nor was it the cradle of radical reform so that Judah’s wickedness might be extirpated at its root. King Josiah of Judah instituted some legal reforms. They were all right as far as they went, and included the death penalty for violators, but Jeremiah did not think much of them, for he was convinced that formal observances simply would not change the hardened hearts of the people: those hearts would have to be circumcised of their foreskins to enjoy the Lord. Judah was bound to be crushed for her sins; then and only then, when the full weight of his doom was on her, could she be intimate with the Lord.

“Then the Lord said to me in the days of Josiah the king, ‘have you seen what faithless Israel did? She went up on every high hill under every green tree, and she was a harlot there.’” Israel must be duly chastised for her harlotry. True prophets must believe against all odds that justice shall prevail in the long run. If the moral and cultic terms of the covenant between the Hebrews and their Lord are broken, they must be severely punished, perhaps for thousands of years. Yet the prophets also believe in mercy; the chosen people can rest assured that their sins would eventually be forgiven if only they repent and set themselves aright. And that they should want to do forthwith, for no doubt a day of reckoning shall come for all unjust peoples.

For one thing the patriarchs must renounce and denounce the seed-mixing, feminine principle personally represented by the goddess Asherat. She is the great earth mother; matrix of the gods; queen of heaven; goddess of wisdom; mistress of the sea; mother of Baal; counselor to El; and, naturally speaking, the greatest of all harlots. She was worshiped around the trees on the high hill. If a suitable tree was not to be had, a representative pillar would do, yet her metaphysical symbol was the Living Tree. Harlots have their virtues. Jeremiah himself and eleven other priestly prophets were descended from the marriage of Joshua and the proselyte Rahab, reputedly the most ravishing harlot in the world and one whom every great man had enjoyed.

Now the Ten Tribes Northern Kingdom of Israel had been forever lost when Israel was defeated, but Jeremiah thought that the Lord considered the Kingdom of Israel to be more righteous in her apparent refusal to return than her sister the Southern Kingdom of Judah, for Judah was enjoying adulterous intercourse in high places with sacred stones and trees and the heavenly bodies while merely rendering deceptive lip-service to YHWH during her so-called reform, wherefore the Lord threatened to have the brutal and cruel and virtually godless barbarian heathen from the north cast her out of the Promised Land forever for her blasphemous breach of contract.

Judah’s populace did enjoy a whole gamut of occult pastimes that would scarcely raise an eyebrow in our so-called New Age era. Both the Deuteronomist and Chronicler blamed much of the purportedly foreign superstitious and magical practices on the laxity of King Manasseh; but the Chronicler adds information that leads us to suppose that King Manasseh might have simply done what he had to do for the tiny kingdom’s survival, and that he had in fact repented, effected some reforms to restore the worship of YWHW, and built up Judah’s military force. Furthermore, the nefarious influences were not as “foreign” as the pious scribes alleged, but were associated rather with indigenous cults. However that may be, someone must bear the brunt of the blame, and King Manasseh is traditionally disparaged as a corrupt puppet of the Assyrian empire. And he was not the only rotten apple: it is said that Judah had had only four good kings in 350 years, one of them being King Josiah.

As for the elite religious, Judah’s prophets relied on dreams instead of the word of the Lord – the Lord apparently had big ears, to overhear their interpretations: “I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy falsely in My name, saying ‘I had a dream, I had a dream.’ The prophet who has a dream may relate his dream, but let him who has My word speak My word in truth. What does straw have in common with grain?” Furthermore, the people did not heed the Sabbath: they carried heavy loads and brought things through the gates of Jerusalem, a most serious breach of the covenant binding them to their Lord.

To make matters worse, Judah’s morality had been spoiled by good times. Indeed, Jeremiah’s complaints remind us of our own good time with its political cult of selfishness, its tolerance for incredible incivility, and its feel-good religious doctrine of instant forgiveness of the perpetrators of every sort of wickedness, especially when a profit is to be made. According to Jeremiah, everyone including priest and prophet were greedy for gain in his day. Prophets traditionally charged with taking transgressors to task on behalf of the Lord strengthened the hands of evildoers instead. Neighbor took advantage of neighbor. The mouths of the people were filled with lies and slander as each and every one proceeded from evil to evil. The leading men were an assembly of treacherous adulterers. Greedy men had grown great and rich, fat and sleek as they excelled one another in wickedness. The wealthiest of men gave little or nothing to charity. They pled not the cause of the needy nor did they defend the rights of the poor, but unjustly occupied themselves with building roomy mansions of deceit with spacious upper rooms.

A just and truthful man could not be found in all of Jerusalem; otherwise the Lord would not have doomed it. So inured to iniquity were all that none were ashamed. Therefore, said the Lord through the mouth of the loyal prophet, the arrogant shall fall, for justice must be done. Jeremiah tried to warn them in the standard deprecatory language the Lord used to forestall a breach of covenant at the time it was sworn to; in the earliest times oaths were consecrated with blood spilled on the swearing stone (torah). The Lord did not mince words: the corpses of all those who disobey the him would manure the fields and feed the birds and dogs. The bones of kings and princes, priests and prophets, and of the ordinary inhabitants of Jerusalem would be brought from the graves and scattered like dung over the ground. In the Lord’s own condensed words:

“The House of Judah have broken My covenant which I made with their fathers. Therefore do not pray for this people, nor lift up a cry or prayer for them: for I will not listen when they call to Me because of their disaster. I shall appoint over them four kinds of doom: the sword to slay, the dogs to drag off, and the birds of the sky and the beasts of the earth to devour and destroy. They will die of deadly diseases; they will not be lamented or buried: they will be as dung on the surface of the ground and come to an end by sword and famine, and their carcasses will become food for the birds and the sky and for the beasts of the earth. I shall make them eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of the daughters, and they will eat one another’s flesh in the siege and the distress with which their enemies and those who seek their life will distress them. The dead bodes of this people will be food for the birds of the sky, and for the beasts of the earth; and no one will frighten them away. Why is the land ruined, laid waste like a desert, so that no one passes through? Because they have forsaken my law which I set before them. Thus, the corpses of men will fall like dung on the open field, but let him who boasts boast of this, that he understands and knows Me, that I am the Lord who exercises loving-kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for I delight in these things.”

Jeremiah had relayed the divine curses to his people in their prosperity, but the accursed folk paid the Lord’s words no heed. No one repented, asking themselves what they had done. Fortunately the Almighty is merciful enough to contradict himself and make exceptions to his pronouncements of inevitable doom, although a full pardon is not easily obtained. Judah might have been saved from the horrible Babylonian commotion descending from the north in order to turn Jerusalem into a desolate heap of ruins and a haunt of jackals; the barbarians of course were always from the north – Jeremiah learned of the Scythian incursions by way of example during his youth. Jerusalem might have been true to its namesake, the Seat of Peace, if only she had been faithful. Yes, Jews could have dwelt forever and ever in the land promised to their forefathers if only they had amended their ways, shunning other gods besides YHWH, practicing justice instead of magic, refraining from oppressing the weak and from shedding innocent blood. At the very least, insisted Jeremiah to the bitter end, they should forsake Egypt and capitulate to Babylon in order to save a remnant of Israel, the Lord’s Bride, that she might return to Zion some day: “He who dwells in this city will die by the sword and by pestilence; but he who goes out and falls away to the Chaldeans (i.e. Babylonians) who are besieging you will live, and he will have his own life as booty.” But everyone turned to his own selfish course, “like a horse charging into battle.”

No doubt the bride of a lord, or the temptress herself, is to blame for lordly temptations. The Lord’s only fault is his greatest virtue – his kindness for not keeping his bride tethered lest she trot up the hill where the green trees flourish. Since the jealous Lord who wreaks vengeance on his beloved but disobedient nation is alternatively such a gracious and kind Lord, he would not destroy every Jew as threatened, nor would he always be angry, especially if Israel would only acknowledge her iniquity; then he would bring her, duly chastised by exile, to Zion. And finally his chosen people would in fact be the covenant incarnate hence no written law need be secured in a box for future reference lest the people forget again.

“And it shall be in those days when you are multiplied and increased in the land,” declares the Lord, “They shall say no more, ‘The ark of the covenant of the Lord.’ And it shall not come to mind, nor shall they remember it, nor shall it be made again. At that time they shall call Jerusalem ‘The Throne of the Lord.’ And all the nations will be gathered in it, to Jerusalem, for the name of the Lord. Nor shall they walk anymore after the stubbornness of their evil heart.”

At present, pronounced Jeremiah, all must submit to the Lord’s retribution, appearing in the form of the King of Babylon, and those nations or kingdoms who “will not put its neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon, I will,” said the Lord, “punish that nation with a sword, with famine, with pestilence, until I have destroyed it by his hand. But as for you, do not listen to your prophets, your diviners, your dreamers, your soothsayers or your sorcerers, who speak to you, saying, ‘You shall not serve the king of Babylon.’ For they prophesy a lie to you, in order to remove you far from your land; and I will drive you out, and you will perish. But the nation which will bring its neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon and serve him, I will let remain on the land.”

At least Jeremiah counseled peace instead of war, perhaps as a matter of convenience, perforce to save Judah from absolute destruction by a force that she and her allies could not withstand. And he may have had his private interest in mind as well. Although he was a prophet by trade, his family held quite a bit of land, and he himself was preoccupied at times with real estate deals; for instance: “Now it happened, when the army of the Chaldeans had lifted the siege because of Pharaoh’s army, that Jeremiah went out from Jerusalem to go to the land of Benjamin to take possession of some there among the people.”

He had gone to his hometown, Anathoth, a few miles from Jerusalem. He was arrested at the gate there by a guard who accused him of deserting to the Babylonians. Rabbinical folklore has it that the Lord would not destroy Jerusalem while he was present there, hence he took advantage of Jeremiah’s absence from Jerusalem to destroy the Temple, and that upon his walk back Jeremiah thought the smoke he saw rising from the Temple celebrated victory over the Chaldeans, but after he perambulated the road littered with the corpses of his fellow Jews he soon discovered his error and wept bitterly. On the other hand, the standard account has him arrested and taken back to Jerusalem to be jailed until the king called him out for his famous advice: “You will be given unto the hand of the king of Babylon!”

Now it is easy for a man to voice his personal hostility towards his own society when it might stand against his will, and at the same time to deny personal responsibility for his hatred and to allege that he speaks for the good of all by claiming that his words and thoughts and the animosity or ambivalent hate-based love motivating them are not his own but rather belong to a deity who cannot be called as witness to personally testify. Indeed, many evil deeds have been done in the name of a god whose nature is essentially unknown and may not even exist.

History is a mistake the living may or may not learn something useful from. Most recently the greatest superpower the world has ever known rushed to war in Babylonia at the behest of a leader who claimed to be exercising the will of the Almighty Father; the father, he said, who was higher than his father – all other causes given proved to be flimsy pretexts for doing the mysterious divine will. The results of his works have been hell on earth thus far, but perhaps heaven shall follow if he is allowed to stay the divine course – no doubt god’s justice will be done one way or the other; which way is a matter of conjecture on probability, for at heart the god of such calamities is a god of chance and not of will.

The fanatic Islamist prophet in the Middle East denounced the neoconservative Christian prophet, the president of the so-called New Roman Empire who had identified Jesus Christ as his “political” hero. The neoconservative cult would impose a Pax Americana on the world, beginning with modern Babylonia. Prophets East and West are frustrated Jews whose respective religions were originally constituted by calling Jews hypocrites. The Islamist leader’s deprecation of the Western world’s corruption rings true as it sounds very much like that of the prophets of old, but he differs inasmuch as he takes personal responsibility for the virtually random killing, by directly egging God’s Warriors on instead of following the ancient Jewish example and attributing the havoc and panic and death and destruction to an enemy provoked to violent commotion by a jealous tribal god who, ironically, appears to be a greater adulterer and traitor than the people who betrayed him. To that punishment legitimate Jews must submit if they are to remain on this earth and be restored to Zion.

Which prophet is false and which one righteous remains to be seen, and might never be seen until the final reckoning at the end of the world. Of course one can always take the prophet’s word for it, that his word is not his own word but is rather the word of the Lord spoken through him as the Lord’s own oracle: “Is not My word like fire?” declared the Lord according to Jeremiah, “and like a hammer which shatters rock? Behold, I am against the prophets who use their tongues and declare, ‘The Lord declares. I did not send them or command them, nor do they furnish the slightest benefit.’”

Hammer, indeed! The supreme iconoclast shall eventually smash everything below, and whatever is left shall be deemed to be the one and only good by doom – that is to say, Nothing. Wherefore have no faith in things seen, for all things shall pass: only Nothing is permanent; or, if you prefer the positive negation of definitions, only Absolute Being is permanent. Babylon’s “gods cannot defend themselves from the rust, and the moth,” claims the beautiful rhetoric of the apocryphal Book of Baruch – the book was named after Jeremiah’s secretary. Real estate might be the basis of material wealth, yet things that pass as gods or their characteristic attributes are useless in time of need: “Are there any among the idols of the nations who give rain?” asked Jeremiah himself. “Or can the heavens grant showers?” From the Book of Baruch:

“Their gods, of wood, and of stone, and of silver, are like the stones that are hewn out of the mountains: and they that worship them shall be confounded…. And they are made by workmen, and by goldsmiths. They shall be nothing else but what the priests will have them to be. For the artificers that make them are of no long continuance. Can those things then that are made by them be gods?” And, “They determine no causes, nor deliver countries from oppression; because they can do nothing, and are as jackdaws between heaven and earth…. Better is the just man that hath no idols: for he shall be far from reproach.”

The same might be said of the idols of the mind; the notions of false prophets are of no avail when it comes to salvation from the dire circumstances of the Lord’s doom. False prophets, or those who rely on alien gods and demons and on dream prognostication were, for the first time, explicitly outlawed during Jeremiah’s time, even if the prophecies or dreams came true:

“If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder comes true concerning which he spoke to you, saying, ‘Let us go after other gods (whom you have not known) and let us serve them,’ you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer of dreams...but that prophet or dreamer shall be put to death.”

What other vessel than the true prophet is the oracle of the Lord? But how are we to know for sure if a prophet is merely giving lip-service to YHWH? The prophet had better follow tradition and say nothing novel. The unfaithful questioning of authority that arises from false prophesizing shall cause the Lord to abandon the inquirer and to punish the prophet or priest who resorts to ungodly and ambiguous oracles for instant advice and futurist divinations, for thus have the ignorant people been caused to stumble about confusedly and to wonder which words and answers were actually the Lord’s, and eventually to rely on their own authority instead of the authority of the true prophets. “For you will no longer remember the oracle of the Lord, because every man’s own word will become the oracle, and you have perverted the words of the living God, the Lord of hosts, our God.”

Still it remains to be seen who is the false prophet and priest, hence the actual traitor. Perhaps the priestly caste with whom Jeremiah’s priestly family, originally the caretakers of the Ark of the Covenant, often feuded, were the traitors, but who knows for sure?

At the conclusion of one of Jeremiah’s speeches, he was seized by the priests and prophets and all the people, who cried, “You must die! A death sentence for this man! For he has prophesied against this city as you have heard in your hearing.” This commotion caused Jeremiah to give them further warning that, if he were killed, their breach of the Lord’s covenant would be compounded, for his death would bring innocent blood on them and their city, “for truly the Lord has sent me to you to speak all these words in your hearing.” Who could prove otherwise? The proof of the pudding was in the fact that Judah and its capital city were destroyed: If a prophesy comes true when given in the name of the Lord, is it not the word of the Lord, and is not the prophet’s voice His voice?

It was customary for prophets to badmouth their own people for going astray. Prophets ordinarily counseled Judah not to take her own political stands, in effect to remain neutral, and so did Jeremiah up to a point, but then he was so bold as to take a position against Egypt and for Babylon instead of the opposite course chosen by the leadership, and for that he would pay the consequences, even unto his untimely death as a hostage in Egypt, allegedly at the hands of his own people – legends have him reappearing in Babylon, conversing with Plato in Athens, and taking up residence in the British Isles. After all, Jeremiah’s seemingly unpatriotic prophesies not only discountenanced the king and his officials but discouraged the troops, for prophets were given a great deal of credence in those days. And, giving all those concerned further cause to doubt the chosen political course, prominent persons, in Jeremiah’s defense, had pointed out that the prophet Micah had prophesied the very same fate for Jerusalem and the Temple.

The officials in Jerusalem had Jeremiah beaten up and thrown in jail. Yet then the King of Judah had him brought into his presence to ask him if there was any further word from the Lord: “There is! You will be given into the hand of the king of Babylon! In what way have I sinned against your servants, or against this people, that you have put me in prison? Where then are your prophets who prophesied to you, saying, ‘The king of Babylon will not come against you or this land?’” At least there is some sense that the prophecy that comes true has more merit that one that does not, providing it is made in the Lord’s name.

Judah, a smallish kingdom, had vacillated between Egypt and Babylonia – apparently neutrality was not an option. After flirting with the king of Babylon, she double-crossed him, giving him cause to pause his forces in Judah to chastise her. Egyptian forces came to the aid of besieged Jerusalem for awhile, and the Babylonians withdrew. But when the Pharaoh’s army withdrew accordingly, the enemy returned to capture and lay the city to waste, just as Jeremiah had warned the king it would do.

But that was overall the Lord’s providence to begin with. No one can actually see the Lord and survive, therefore the ruthless Lord of loving kindness could not be seen personally wreaking his wrathful revenge, for then there would be no remnant of survivors to be sorry and worship him; in order to ravage Judah for her adultery, he purportedly enlisted Babylon as his ally, his chosen people’s arch enemy, whom Jeremiah perceived as a friend in comparison to Egypt.

Why Babylon instead of Egypt we cannot say. Egypt had mothered several aspects of the Hebrew religion, including, for example, the sacred ark, which was secreted in the temple when not employed in processions, and protected by seraphic wings. Egypt had derived the custom from the African cradle of humankind; still today in some parts of Africa a covered stool is carried in procession and lodged in the place of secrets – a member of the lodge recently confessed that the big secret therein is really no secret at all. The stool serves as the supreme authority’s seat on top of a box into which his sacred droppings are deposited.

Despite all they had learned in Egypt, perhaps the Hebrews – hibirus meant ‘outlaws’ or ‘canal-builders’ – still remembered the tribal warfare with the pharaohs, and resented their legendary captivity in Egypt. Or perhaps Jeremiah, as some of his detractors suspected, figured Babylon would overthrow Egypt, and he had therefore sold out to Babylon in order to preserve his vested interest in things material and spiritual. We believe he did what property holders and prophets were supposed to do at the time, which was really nothing new or reprehensible from the Hebrew perspective.

The gods of old-time religions were as ambivalent and ambiguous, at once as cruel and kind as the people who imagined them. Usually people are not inclined to take deities so seriously when nature proceeds regularly to their advantage, but when nature’s course is violently interrupted to their disadvantage, even atheists among them tend to pray for relief in all earnestness to the very god who crushes them – the supplicant is nearest to the Terrorist Almighty when being crushed. The Almighty, then, is intermittently the Lord of natural disasters, and among those disasters we might as well include grave social disasters such as war and revolution. Today’s scientifically enlightened people do not believe in the existence of an anthropomorphic deity who causes earthquakes, eruptions, hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, pestilences, plagues and the like, and wars and revolutions, in order to punish disloyalty to the god and relative moral turpitude.

Fundamentalists may beg to disagree, and some say America’s godlessness and adultery, sodomy and homosexuality, and the like deviations from righteousness are the causes of such events as Hurricane Katrina, terrorist attacks, and American losses in the disastrous war on Babylonia (Iraq). Scientists disagree: they believe that God has nothing to do with such things, and that given enough time to study and experiment, natural disasters may be more accurately predicted and losses of life and property greatly reduced – as for war and revolution, that sort of calamity might be forestalled altogether if people are treated rightly, said righteousness not to be determined by a deity but by psycho-sociological science. Scientists have a long and arduous row to hoe, however, for their success depends on understanding the fluctuating complex relationships of very large numbers of facts and events, and the outcomes can only be stated in terms of probabilities. Even the safest insurance company shall one day fail, and the mightiest nation as well, God only knows when because our predictions are usually mistaken as to the timing. For some reason, almost everyone lately has had a hunch that the world is doomed for some reason or the other, and that the Time is nigh.

But quite a few relatively intelligent if not wise men and women claim that natural challenges including world wars and the organized immorality of the war of all against all are a necessary part of human nature and are good for humankind, for without such challenges to respond to, no progress of the race to speak of would be possible. Peace is not a place to be resting on one’s laurels, but a place to prepare for the next great challenge, the next hurricane, the next world war, perhaps the apocalypse itself, so that the survivors might dwell eternally in their superior way of life in the Better Place of Nowhere if not in the better places about the wobbling globe where various ways of life prevail.

Jeremiah exhorted the refugees in Egypt to abandon their corrupt ways, to stop worshiping Asherat and to return to YHWH. They would hear nothing of it. The men and women assembled and said to Jeremiah, “As for the message that you have spoken to us all in the name of the Lord, we are not going to listen to you! But rather we will certainly carry out every word that has proceeded from our mouths, by burning sacrifices to the queen of heaven and pouring out libations to her, just as we ourselves, our forefathers, our kings and our princes in the cities of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem; for then we had plenty of food, and were well off, and saw no misfortune. But since we stopped burning sacrifices to the queen of heaven and pouring out libations to her, we have lacked everything and have met our end by the sword and by famine.” Jeremiah retorted that the Lord could not endure the adultery in Judah and had to punish it, implying that the cessation of sacrifices came too late.

Now it may seem that corruption or impurity, the so-called original sin associated with fornication with harlots in seed-mixing cities, once presided over by the Persian devil introduced in Babylonia by the fire-worshiping Dualists whose angels were demons and vice versa, is the way to go – of course the devil’s adversary shall win upon the final analysis of all that has gone before. Having two gods instead of one is certainly more statically logical than self-contradictory hence absurd one-god, or a dialectical three-in-one god whence the synthesis of a hypothetic good and antithetical evil evolves. Still, mutual enmity determines the conduct of enemies; their love of their own kind is hate-others-based self-love. It is a wonder that either one could win in the end and call itself Good. We may arrive at the conclusion that the Lord on high does not really exist, and that tolerance and even the embracement of all sorts of gods and spirits and law-breaking is the cause of our great civilization, not its occasional breakdowns. In fine, there is no virtue absent vice.

Faithless Israel has proved her faith through incredible trials and tribulations, and despite her suffering or because of it she has borne witness of greater things in store for our race. She has been returned to Jerusalem by faithful friends and by faithless enemies who wanted to get rid of her. Her Lord certainly holds a grudge for a long time; perhaps her return is premature. She inspired the world yet is a horror to her neighbors, most of them her cousins. Her Temple remains in ruins, therefore the Messiah is not in sight. Her proud leaders will not acknowledge iniquity. She is considered to be a proxy for the Neo-Roman Empire. She has the awesome power incinerate her enemies with a nuclear holocaust Alas, the mundane powers need a fault, and will not allow her be neutral, in which case she would probably be destroyed. Something awful is in the air up north, something most foul, the smell of burning flesh. Her fate is unknown, but friends and foes expect and unconsciously will the worst, the very apocalypse that shall lift the mushroom clouds veiling the Lord’s glory.

“Babylon is to fall for the slain of Israel; as for Babylon the slain of all the earth have fallen.”

Israel and Jewry are really not at fault. We do not know what is at fault. Maybe the world has grown too crowded for comfort. Many people are angry and anxious: they want blood and they want it soon. Christians have turned from the New Testament to the Old, from Faith to Law, and have forgotten the Love prophesied for the future. Jesus is dead: long live Wrath! The wicked prosper and make atheists of men, yet faith in justice abides among the prophets; in Doctor Luther’s word, “There is a life after this life; and all that is not punished and repaid here will be punished and repaid there.” By Gum, who is not deserving of punishment given his original sin, and when and where will everyone be forgiven and the madness end? Many religious have reverted to crude thinking, the fundamental point of departure long surpassed by sophisticated Jews. The Jewish question is no longer strictly Jewish, nor has it ever been. The world is being roundly Judaized, and is deaf to jeremiads. Each person now would be king or queen of their own little hill; alas, those high places are far from Zion.

Prophecy has grown polite or politically correct – futurists study the trends and predict more of the same perpetually modified by technical innovations. There will be a reduction in national warfare but more local violence. The gap between the rich and poor will widen while millionaires multiply. There is nothing to fear from the poor, since impoverished peoples have endured for centuries without rebelling, but somehow assuage the middle class whose expectations were raised and are now being regularly diminished by economic predators. If everyone has plenty of junk, trash and garbage to recycle along with some sort of hovel, and if the precious articles go to the rich to decorate their mansions and women, all will be well.

Still there is a general sense that all hell is about to break loose. Why? Are we all instinctively subject to a death wish? Our degreed authors who cannot agree in these matters are groping in the dark and we know it well, yet to avoid the real reality we read one useless book after another on the subject and relish the most preposterous of convoluted notions. We might as well read only one book on the subject, and when questioned as to why the end is nigh, say, “Because the Bible says so.”

What can be done to avert the disaster and set things right? There are at least 613 things that can be done. In any event, we are well advised to follow the example of good Jews and to do at least one good deed every day, such as help the sick and poor, employ the unemployed, assist and befriend orphans, widows, aliens and strangers. A good-hearted and tender-minded approach may be difficult in a turbulent sea of wickedness without a rock to stand upon and where nice guys drown. A man who steps out of his house with all good intentions is confronted by organized assaults on his good intentions and the probability that he will perish if he maintains them, so he may turn to the evil ways himself to survive. In his anger he might even will the destruction of his own population if not some foreign scapegoat.

Jeremiah had a few high hopes at first, but the hard-heartedness and stiff-neckedness of his people converted him to a thoroughgoing pessimism. “Thus says the Lord, ‘Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind, and makes flesh his strength, and whose heart turns away from the Lord.’” If we simply revert to the old rituals, or change the system, or just tinker with the machine, we might think that our hearts will change – the heart was the metaphorical seat of the mind in the old days. Indeed, this sort of external reform is preached today by strict behaviorists, as opposed to the behavior-psychology therapists who know that the underlying beliefs must be changed. We recall that the radical reforms associated with the stern laws of Deuteronomy and promulgated by King Josiah, the violation of which called for death by stoning, did Judah little good on the whole. Bad habits and perverse ways of thinking have their rewards. As our psychologists know only too well, neurotic complexes, especially when related to massive social delusions, are terribly difficult to understand and to set aside: “The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick who can understand it?” And, “The sin of Judah is written down with an iron stylus; with a diamond point it is engraved upon the tablet of their heart. As they remember their children, so they remember their altars and their Asherim by green trees on the hills.”

Unless our hearts and minds are changed, we are surely doomed by our clinging to material things – we must let go. All the gods and spirits in the world, if they exist, and especially the mundane as well as the mental idols we cling to, shall be of no avail in dire straits, for they are what led us into the deadly ruts. Neither the Temple nor the Ark nor the Covenant deposited within for safekeeping shall save us. Truly the ineffable word must be inscribed on our hearts if peoples and nations are to peacefully and joyfully assemble under the Dome. The ineffable word signifies the inscrutable and universal Me or the I-Am that can only be known within the heart of individuals: “You will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart.”

Wherefore we speak mystically of the mystery, and say Nothing exists and is pregnant with the cosmos. From the invisible stone everything springs when struck with the magic wand. “And concerning this, the Children of Israel wish to know in their minds, like as it is written: is the Tetragrammaton (YHWH) in the midst of us, or the Negatively Existent One?” All and nothing is the substance of the ineffable word; that is, Being and Nothing. The religion that has faith in nothing in particular, the religion that is not bound to anything but X, is essentially nondenominational, and is free to do good works for all. It may be impossible to tell the atheist from the theist, and the atheist might even be canonized. The seeker does not necessarily have to believe in a god or gods, as did the heathen, or to mouth the pagan word ‘god’ to seek and find the spark within the fallen shard and restore it to the tree of light that none be left behind.

In fond memory of
Bruce Campbell Walters
May 3, 1917 – August 30, 2007