The Last Prophet, On the Eve of Destruction (excerpt)

Fiction Piece #3

(“Jeremiah the Prophet", by Michaelangelo in the Sistine Chapel 1512)

“Eicha – HOW, how could this be?” The streets were filled with wailing. Everywhere he turned, he saw weeping.

“Eicha, how? How could this be?” Mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, friends and enemies alike, they all cried out in anguish.

“Eichaaaaaaa, HOW! How could this be?”

The streets were filled with trash. Stray dogs roamed freely, gnawing on the bones of their former owners. Mothers and grandmothers paraded through the market, offering their flesh in exchange for a morsel of bread.

“Eicha – how, how could this be?”

~

There was a time when the sunrise brought him unparalleled joy. He made a habit of rising an hour before dawn so that he could climb Mount Scopus to watch the sunrise over the hills of Jerusalem. He would wrap his tefillin, say the morning prayers, and meditate. Once the sun rose high enough to pass its light through the temple, Jeremiah lowered himself all the way to the ground in supplication. He would stay there, perfectly still, sometimes for hours at a time.

But the sunrise no longer brought him joy. Where it once shed light on his golden city, it now shed light on its desolation. Where it once revealed pious men on their way to temple for morning prayer, it now revealed degenerates, stumbling home from a night of revelry and bacchanalia.

“Eicha – how, how could this be?”

He heard his people crying out, asking anyone and everyone, anyone and everyone but themselves.

~

Jerusalem, a desolation. This was all anyone could say about that fair city, that golden palace, that warm hearth. The city of David, the palace of Solomon, the home of the living G-d, Eicha – How, how could this be?

The tyrant King Nebuchazzenar brings his armies of fire and destruction to our land. He destroys the righteous and the wicked alike, demanding the supplication of men and the deportation of children. All his enemies have fallen before him, and now he has trained his eye on our golden city. His armies march southward from Tyre, and westward from Ashur, burning everything in their path. Soon, they will be upon us. Soon, the siege will begin. Soon, we all shall perish.

From Mount Scopus, he can see the dust of the Babylonian army. It will be here within a day. Inside Jerusalem, there was a strange kind of quiet. The quiet of a man peacefully freezing to death, no longer worried about his circumstances.

The men who still had food rose early to see what treasures they could extract for their grain, while the men who didn’t offered them whatever shreds of dignity they had left. They sold their homes, they sold their heirlooms, and, when all of that ran out, they sold their families. If there was ever any justice in the world, it had certainly gone from Jerusalem.

Eicha, how, how could this be?

The people cried out in the streets, they prayed to their idols, they begged their soothsayers, but all they heard was exactly what they wanted to hear. They practiced their mindfulness, and they manifested their affirmations. They consulted their star charts and they sought help from self-proclaimed gurus. They worshiped idols of their own creation and then wondered why those idols could do nothing to protect them.

Eicha, how could this be? Go and ask your idols.

~

Jeremiah awoke with a freight. He had been dreaming again, or was it a nightmare? Or had he been awake the whole time? Jeremiah had a hard time keeping track of these things ever since they threw him in jail. The mad king had cast him away in favor of prophets who prophesied more to his liking. He locked Jeremiah away in a cell deep below ground with no windows. Jeremiah yearned to look on once more at the beautiful Jerusalem sunrise. He yearned once more to see the brilliant light piercing through the golden buildings.

But Jerusalem was a desolation. Its sacred sites, its holy hills, ruined! And for what? What bounty have their idols brought them now? Fire and brimstone! Sweeping out of the east, plundering down from the north, the vicious scourge of Truth came down upon the people with a scornful wrath. Jerusalem, their holy city, the testament to their G-d, their true G-d, the one who had always delivered, was a desolation. And their lives and their fortunes with it.

Although Jeremiah could not mourn, for it was him who had brought all of these things to pass. Or, so said the king. It was Jeremiah who had stood on the temple mount and loudly proclaimed to the people that if they did not forsake their idols, if they did not return to piety and decorum, the vengeance of G-d would be vicious.

Eicha, they said, “How?”, “how could this be?” How could this be that the G-d who freed our ancestors would destroy us? Surely, they reasoned, ours is a loving G-d, who surely would change our ways if that was his will. Why would a loving G-d hurt his children?

EICHA! Jeremiah cried back, “how could you not see?” How could you not see that he has given you a thousand chances, a thousand opportunities, a thousand gentle lessons that it is time to change your ways! But you do not see. You do not listen. He gave you perfect sight and perfect hearing, but He did not give you perfect vision.

“And what, he gave it to you?” They cried back. For Jeremiah was not a politician, Jeremiah was not polite. Jeremiah was not a man with a smooth tongue. Jeremiah was a maniacal bull, raging through the streets of Jerusalem roaring destruction though the air! EICHA! He cried at the people, his own people! He chastised them, he decried them, he ridiculed them in public! Was this not a sin of its own, to embarrass a man in public?

As Jeremiah’s lyrical rampages grew more violent, so too did the hatred against him. It was not loud, at first. People quietly began to whisper behind closed doors. They said harsh things, cruel things, traitorous things. Jeremiah had been sleeping on the streets, as his profession of criticizing the people was not a lucrative one. He had taken to eating nothing but bread from the alms house and water. He let his hair grow long and uncombed. His beard nearly dragged along the cobblestones. Anyone could see it — Jeremiah was losing his mind.

And so while he was out screaming about the True Prophecy of G-d and the inevitable, impending doom that was coming, they were trying to sleep. Because, for Jeremiah, time was irrelevant. He was struck by the word of G-d when he was struck by the word of G-d, and a man who is struck by the word of G-d cannot wait until morning to tell you about it.

The neighbors grew angrier by the day. They started to put their idols inside of their homes rather than risk getting yelled at. Everyone was in agreement – yes, sure, he had some good points. But of course, Jeremiah was a prophet; he didn’t have to live like the rest of them. He didn’t have a social reputation to maintain. He didn’t have employees to account for. He didn’t own anything he had to protect.

So of course he couldn’t understand why a man would take time out of his busy life to build for himself an idol. Of course he couldn’t understand that. He couldn’t understand that a man wants to feel proud of himself in this world, like he means something. A man wants to feel like he’s important.

And Jeremiah said he understood that. Or screamed it rather. He screamed about how everyone is equally important to G-d and that they did not need to feel insecure about the things they lacked in this world, for G-d would provide for them in the world to come.

But they were not concerned with the world to come because their problems were in this one. They were smart people; they knew there is no such thing as a spirit world. There is no such thing as Karma, there is no such thing as astrology, there is no such thing as unsecured financial assets – these are just things that people believe in to help them get through the day. They were invented by people for personal gain, to appear as though they knew something that everybody else didn’t. G-d was no different. G-d was just another silly spiritual belief that was made up by people to benefit the priests and the preachers. Because they got to eat pretty well, according to the Torah. And Jeremiah, of course, was a preacher.

“But your argument makes no sense!” Jeremiah would cry out. “How can you say that our G-d is a farce that is made up by people with one breath, and then go and pray to an idol you created with the next! Your idols are a farce of your own creation! And yet you disparage me?”

“We may know that our idols are a farce, Jeremiah, but at least our farce is kind to us! Our idols grant us good fortune and wealth. They protect us from the wind and the rain. Your farce is the one that sends the wind and the rain to annoy us!”

This always shocked Jeremiah. The gall, the arrogance, the stupidity a man must have to chastise the very things he needs to live. If it were not for the rain and the wind, he would tell them, they would have no crops to worry about.

Of course, they said, they knew that. They were grateful for the wind and the rain, when it came at the right time. But he had to admit that it was frustrating when they would not. It was frustrating when they could not store their water, and then there would be a drought. Until a man created the cistern, and that is when they started worshiping the cistern! The cistern, unlike the wind, is reliable. It is manmade. It is perfect. It is not afflicted with all of the unfortunate irregularities of the natural world.

But the world is perfect! Jeremiah would scream. The world is perfect because it made you, and you are perfect, and if the world is not perfect, then you are not perfect, and if you are not perfect, well it must be very difficult to live!

But we’re not perfect! They would say. We’re not perfect, and G-d expects too much. Baal expects nothing, other than material sacrifice. The more material I have, the more I can give to Baal. The more I give to Baal, the more he helps me make.

But – Jeremiah would convulsively try to say. He hated these arguments. He hated them more than anything. He hated arguing with his friends, he hated hurling insults, having insults hurled at him. He hated all of it. Every morning he woke up, he secretly prayed to G-d that he might lose his tongue. That he might never have to say another word again. Jeremiah would serve his G-d however he could; he just wished it didn’t have to be this way.

But it did have to be this way, because everytime Jeremiah saw his people worshiping lies, he would break down screaming. Because he saw the truth. He knew that the repercussions for their actions would be far greater than they could ever imagine. But they wouldn’t listen; they were busy enjoying their instant gratification.

There was no point in replaying all of these old arguments in his head. Jeremiah had lost, and that’s why he was rotting in this cell.

~

Some nights, Jeremiah didn’t sleep at all. That’s when his visions were the most intense. They had the same horrid intensity as his nightmares, but they lacked the dreamy fogginess of sleep. “Insomnomaniac,” they would one day call him – for he had been driven to madness by his unrelenting wakefulness.

Would that he could sleep! But that, he could not. Would that these dreams would stop! But that, they would not. Like a moth, towards a flame, his mind could not ignore the light. Would that his mind would stop thinking, if only just for a moment! But that, it would not.

For Jeremiah was a prophet,

An unlucky one at that.

He’d been given all the answers,

but the people turned their backs.

So the man could not find sleep,

No peace inside his cot,

He saw the flames unleashed,

As the rubble turned to rot.

He cried into the night,

He cried the whole night long,

Besieged by visions cloaked in light,

He found no sleep till dawn.

But oh, the sun, what wretched sight!

Revealed its dreadful spawn.

His vision blurred, with aching spite,

His dreams had not been wrong.

~

Jeremiah awoke in a cold sweat. A dark hand gripped him by the spine and held him paralyzed. He wanted to scream, he wanted to cry, but he could not move his lips. It was as though he was petrified in amber, stuck forever in the grips of his horror.

As the paralyzing fear left and some semblance of consciousness returned, Jeremiah moaned. For he realized that he was no longer asleep. He was no longer dreaming about the destruction of everything he loved; he was living through it.

All of his dreams, all of his nightmares, all of them had come to pass. Why, why had G-d forsaken him this way? Why had G-d cursed him with this debilitating madness to always know the Truth? What Jeremiah would have given in that moment, in that cell, to have never known anything at all. What sweetness oblivion must be, he thought. Grateful are the dead who no longer need to know things. For knowledge was pain, and Jeremiah knew it well.

The war was coming closer. Soon, the walls would finally fall. The walls David built. He heard the crying outside his door, and he wondered what these people were possibly crying out for. The one who could hear their tears, the one who could answer their prayers, the one they were calling out to now: they had cast him out. They had cast G-d out of his home, out of his kingdom. And now they cried out for His help? Jeremiah could not help but laugh. But quickly his laughter gave over to weeping, because there was no joy in this “I told you so.” There was only bitter regret and disappointment, and the ever-present feeling that there was more that he could have done.

In his anguish, Jeremiah prayed to die before the Temple fell.

~

Jeremiah awoke with a start. He had been dreaming that a pale fire was burning all around his head, and his eyes and his teeth were melting inside of his skull. He went out in search of a doctor, but, as soon as they saw his condition, everyone turned him away. He was on the verge of giving up when he found a stray cat, nearly frozen to death in the street. Jeremiah then laid down next to the cat and put his burning head next to him. The cat was purring and licking the flames when Jeremiah awoke with a start.

“Come on, it’s time to go.”

It had been ages since he’d heard a voice. It had been a lifetime since he’d heard a word. His mind was playing tricks on him.

“Come on Jeremiah, there’s very little time. We must do what we must do.”

He felt the warmth of a torch flame, but after so long in the dark, his vision had blurred, and there was a thin film over his eyes. Jeremiah was nearly blind.

“Who are you? What is the meaning of this?”

His jailor now looked upon Jeremiah’s face and saw what such an incarceration had done to him. His beard was long and unkempt. His skin was wrinkled and worn. There was so little flesh on his bones that you could see the blood pumping through his veins.

“Who are you? I demand to know what is going on.”

The young Kohanite Priest took Jeremiah’s hand and ran it over his breastplate. Jeremiah’s complexion instantly changed, as though he had been struck by lightning.

“How dare you come to disturb me! Leave me alone to my desolation, have you not forsaken me enough?”

“Jeremiah, I am sorry. We should have listened to you, we should have taken you seriously. We should have -”

“You should have what, your excellency?”

“We should have humbled ourselves before your true words.”

This brought a smile to Jeremiah’s face. He had never expected to receive any validation for his work in this world. He had long since given up the hope that people would turn from their evil ways and see the truth he had been preaching. Although he was blind, he could still feel the embarrassed look of shame on his jailor’s face.

But Jeremiah’s joy quickly gave way to uncontrollable wailing. His mouth cried out like a wounded beast, and his eyes burned with a thousand fires. His body shook convulsively with his tears.

His jailor did everything that he could to restrain him. He held Jeremiah’s body down and held his tongue so he wouldn’t bite it off. Eventually, he had to hold Jeremiah in his arms and rock him back and forth, like a baby, to get him to calm down enough to speak again.

“Jeremiah, my friend, we don’t have much time. We really must go.”

Jeremiah was gathering his breath. He was finally sitting up, and he was taking deep breaths to calm himself.

“Come on, it’s time to go.”

“Eicha?” Jeremiah said, “How?”

“Eicha what?”

“Eicha,” Jeremiah protested, “how? How wretched must the devastation be if a stiff-necked sinner like you has come down here to eat crow. In all my prophecies, I saw destruction beyond the wildest imagination. I saw wailing, the likes of which have not been heard since Egypt. And yet, never, not once, did I see something as unimaginable, as unfathomable, as world-shatteringly unusual as a rich man taking responsibility for his mistakes. Tell me then, why is it you have come down here?”

“Because, Jeremiah.”

~

Each step was agony. His body had been imprisoned for so long that he had forgotten how to walk. There was no fat left anywhere on his body, and he felt the hard stone pressing up against the bones in his feet with every step.

Jeremiah could not stop himself from chuckling. He remembered the day that he had walked down these stone steps – it felt like a dream. That was the happiest day in his recent memory. Prison was not a punishment for Jeremiah; it was a blessing. Prison gave him total freedom from the thoughts of others. Prison kept him happily locked away from the delusions and justifications of a corrupt society. Prison set Jeremiah free.

But now he was being released. His jailors had come to reimprison him in the world at large.

It was not space that Jeremiah needed to be free; it was time. He needed time to get his head in order, to think through the thoughts he needed to think through. Space was just a distraction. Space was something that children needed to give them the illusion of freedom. A child is imprisoned at home because there are too many walls for him to run into. His body needs an open field to run.

But for a man like Jeremiah, space was only a distraction. The more open the space was, the more open the mind was. And the more Jermiah’s mind opened up, the harder it became to keep to his thoughts.

They began to slip out, sometimes out of his head, and sometimes out of his mouth. When they slipped out of his head, it was only Jeremiah who suffered. What agony it is to lose one’s own thought. But when they slipped out of his mouth, the words poured out like acid. Everyone they touched, and everyone who heard, looked at Jeremiah as though he were the serpent that spat at Eve’s innocence.

This is why Jeremiah had felt so comfortable in his jail cell. He was alone with his thoughts, alone with his feelings, alone with his toxic venom. His true thoughts could not hurt anyone else while he was imprisoned, and that was the greatest freedom Jeremiah had ever experienced.

~

As they climbed higher and higher out of the dungeon, Jeremiah’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, and he realized that the priest was not wearing his robes.

“Where are your vestments, my priest? Surely this is not a time for comfort.”

“I had to come to you under cover of darkness; I could not risk being discovered. May G-d forgive me this sin.”
“Are you sure this is the sin you want to spend G-d’s forgiveness on?”

The priest stopped walking for a moment and sighed. This was the reaction Jeremiah had been hoping for, he had wanted to sting, but, now that he had, he regretted it. And for the sin of embarrassing his fellow man, Jeremiah also asked G-d for forgiveness.

~

After they had climbed for nearly half an hour, they came upon a large metal door. This door had a very heavy bar across it that could only be lifted with the strength of six men. Jeremiah looked at the priest.

The priest knocked on the metal 3 times, and out of the shadows, four men dressed in black appeared. They greeted the priest with a hand gesture Jeremiah had never seen before, and they placed their hands beneath the bar. They waited for Jeremiah to put his hands on the bar, and, together, they lifted the weight.

~

On the other side of the door was an enormous vaulted room. It must have been 100 yards long by 100 yards wide. There was an ancient chill lingering in the room. There was no heat, and no light, except for a small torch standing in the middle of the room. Around the torch sat six men.

“Jeremiah, good of you to join us. Please, take your shoes off and come sit.”

“I don’t have any shoes; they took them away from me because you were afraid I would hurt myself with the laces.”

“Oh, yes, right. Well, come now anyways, and let the Sons of Levi bathe your feet.”

Jeremiah was annoyed. When they had first thrown him in jail, that was disgraceful enough – but when they took away his shoes, that was an indignity like no other. What kind of a man can go through this world without shoes? If nothing else, wearing shoes is what separates us from the animals. But Jeremiah was deprived of this dignity. They said he could not have shoes because they feared he would hang himself with the straps. This Jeremiah could not protest, because the thought had certainly crossed his mind. But still, he felt that the overwhelming despair and inhumanity of his imprisonment might have been improved by the dignity of shoes.

He walked across the cold marble floor to where the levitical priests stood with the bathing basin. They washed his feet, as was tradition for any Kohan entering the Holy Temple. It reminded him of his youth, of the joys he got from serving the lord. How he loved to learn Torah and teach it to whoever would approach him. How much excitement there was among the wise men of learning.

It had been years since then. It had been years since righteous men came to the Temple. Years since he had heard words of Torah being spoken by the Kohanim and the Priests. Yet here he was, back in the Temple, after his long stay in prison, having his feet washed once again before he walked upon its holy ground.

After the washing, Jeremiah was given fresh white robes and a brief but respectable hair trimming. By the time he finally joined the other men around the torch, he looked almost like a man.

“Jeremiah, I am sorry to call you here under such circumstances, but we don’t have much time.”

“And what circumstances would those be?”

The man in the white robes addressing him sat silently for a moment. He was chewing on something rather tough in his mind, and he looked as though he wanted to spit it out.

“They’re here, Jeremiah. They’re camped outside the gates. My sources tell me that, by tomorrow morning, they will breach the walls, and there will be nothing more we can do.”

“Who? Who is outside?”

“The Babylonians.”

“The Babylonians? Why on earth would the Babylonians come all the way to Jerusalem?”

Jeremiah was speaking out of turn. He had finally been released from prison, after G-d knows how long, and now he was spitting in the face of his liberator.

The King’s face scowled, but, before he spoke, he righted himself with what almost looked like dignity.

“OK, Jeremiah, now is not the time for gloating. All of your prophecies have come true. Would you like to say ‘I told you so,’ now? Is that what you want?”

Jeremiah burst into wailing. His chest heaved with short, heavy breaths, and tears poured down his face. In that moment, he saw everything that had happened since his imprisonment. He saw the city lean into its idolatrous ways. He saw the men cheating one another in the morning, and bragging about it at night. He saw the Babylonian armies marching through the land, raping and pillaging every where they went. He saw mothers trading themselves for their children. He saw fathers forced to watch as their daughters were raped. He saw the earth bleed.

And there was nothing he could do. There was nothing he could do to save the people from themselves. There was nothing he could do to get the people out of their own way.

The visions that he saw now, these were no different from the visions he had seen 20 years prior. They were no different from the visions he preached on the day he was arrested. They were no different from the nightmares he had on the cold cell floor. The only difference was that those visions were of what could come to be, and these were visions of what already was.

The King was shocked by this display of heartache. He had been preparing himself for the shame of admitting that he was wrong and being forced to eat his own words. He had expected Jeremiah to give him the tongue-lashing of the century. And he deserved it. He knew he deserved it. Even though he was the King, and he was above everything else in the land, he was not above Truth. And Jeremiah had him there.

For many years, Jeremiah had been a thorn in the side of the King. Every time the King took a step, Jeremiah complained. It was like living with the personification of your own self-doubt. Even small matters, like where to host different dignitaries and foreign emissaries, Jeremiah would complain about.

So, eventually, he imprisoned him. If you cannot rid yourself of doubt, it is better to hide it deep below the surface, in a dark pit where no one else can find it.

Many times, while Jeremiah had been in prison, the King had contemplated consulting him. Once the prophet was in prison, there was no one left to doubt the King.

At first, this was excellent. The King spoke, and the nation listened. All of his advisors gave testimony to his wisdom and cunning, and there was no one left in court who wanted to be the king’s thorn.

But then a strange ailment befell the King. Several months after Jeremiah’s imprisonment, he began to lose sleep. At first, he was waking up in the middle of the night. He had horrible dreams, but none of his advisors could interpret them. He would wake up sweating and out of breath, as though he had been running through a furnace. Or he would shake so violently in the night that he would wake up on the floor, yards away from his bed.

His doctors gave him many different cures, but none of them worked. The King grew less and less patient everyday. He was irritable, tired, cranky – very similar to a child. And this child was in need of a spanking, but there was no one to give it to him, since he had imprisoned the scourge of truth deep beneath the world of sight.

Although, now that he was watching this man, the man who had caused him so much anguish, writhing around on the cold marble like a fish, he wondered what exactly he had been so afraid of. This was a man, just like any other. He cried, he screamed, he felt things. Jeremiah was a prophet, but nothing more than that. And he was the king, what did he have to fear?

~

When Jeremiah finally regained calm, the King spoke once more.

(End of Excerpt)

~

Spread Love, Spread Light,

Am Yisrael Chai