It is the role of the prophet to keep people free for God ……. It is the responsibility of the prophet to keep God free for the people.
What does it mean to be free for God? If you want to understand the prophets of the Hebrew Bible and how their teachings can transform your life, you must be able to answer this question. Being free for God means engaging each moment uncluttered by the psychological and spiritual baggage of the past. It means encountering God, nature, and everyone you meet from a place of radical not-knowing. It means putting aside the idolatries that pass for truth in your life, and learning to live without surety, certainty, and rationalization. It means standing naked before the mirror of Truth and seeing all your imperfections, and not being quite clear as to whether they are imperfections or not. It means living without a net. The prophets’ chief task is to tear down the safety nets we set up for ourselves, and then to challenge us to live in radical freedom, knowing that in doing so we are also choosing radical insecurity.
Radical insecurity is the way of God: “The One Who Is said to Avram, ‘Go forth from your land, away from your people, out of your father’s house, to the land that I will let you see’” (Genesis 12:1). This is God’s call to you as well: Free yourself from the influences of nationalism, ethnicity, and parental bias, and then see the world as it is: a manifestation of the One Who Is. How do you do this? The Hebrew text tells us, for the English “Go forth” is in Hebrew lech lecha, literally “Go into yourself.” God calls you to turn from the small self (mochin d’katnut), which worships the gods of nation, tribe, race, and ancestors, to your greater self (mochin d’gadlut), which worships God alone. Living without the foundation — however false — of nationality, ethnicity, race, and ancestral ties is frightening. It means living without a fixed identity. Yet this is exactly what God is calling you to do. Your true identity is God, and God is unconditioned, new, and fresh each moment.
Few people dare to live this way. To counter God’s call to unconditionality, you construct all sorts of nets to keep yourself from falling into the radical freedom of unknowing and uncertainty that is key to seeing the world as God in God. These nets are the idols you worship — the work of your imagination that bolsters your sense of separation from God, alienation from life, and estrangement from your greater self. You worship the idols of the small self that subtly maintain the illusion that this self is all of you, and that you are other than the world and the One Who manifests it.
Idols are false gods because they do not reveal the true nature of God as all in all. Idols speak to the small self and offer it a sense of meaning and purpose that blinds it to the deeper meaning and purpose of life that only the greater self can fathom. When the prophets call you an idolater, do not dismiss the charge saying, “I worship no images,” but know they are challenging you to give up the worship of the small self and those fantasies that proclaim it sovereign.
When Moses meets God at the Burning Bush and asks God to reveal the divine Name, what Name does God offer? God says “Ehyeh asher Ehyeh,” we translate, “I am what I am.” Not at all, ”I am what I am” limits God to one mode of being. God is then static, unchanging, and, from the human point of view, irrelevant. But that is not how God refers to God. God says Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, not ‘I am what I am” but ‘I shall be what I shall be,’ meaning you cannot limit God to a name or a form. God is whatever God decides to be. God is not unchanging; God is change itself. God is always surprising us, but the only way we can be surprised by God is if we admit fully that we have no idea what God is. Do you understand?
Religion is the way we humans avoid having to be surprised by God. We invent a god who delights in form, and then worship the form in hopes of pleasing the god. The prophets knew this all prophets know this. That is why they keep reminding us that God doesn’t care about ritual. The prophets of the Bible are forever challenging the easy notion that God wants sacrifices and ceremony, when in fact all God wants is the heart; a heart attuned to justice, compassion, and humility.
The question is: Can you live without form? Can you approach God without the theories and ideologies of religion? Can you take off your shoes as Moses does when meeting God at the Burning Bush, and just be present to the One Who Is Present? Can you, live without form?
In Jewish terms, “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form” means that God is both the One and the Many, the Absolute and the Relative. The prophets are not telling us to live without form, but to live our forms from a deep understanding of emptiness. That is to say use form but do not abuse form. Or use form but do not be used by it.
Now apply this to God’s call to Avram. Can you use your nationality, ethnicity, race, and ancestral ties without being used by them? Can you draw upon these things without worshiping them? Can you see them as windows into the world rather than funhouse mirrors distorting your view of the world by reflecting back to you a distorted view of yourself? This is what God calls you to do; this is what the prophets challenge you to do: Turn inward, free yourself of the distortions you worship, and engage the world justly, kindly, and simply.
This is not the totality of what the prophets have to say, but it is at the core. The relentless prophetic attack on form for form’s sake, on ritual as a way of controlling God, on a theology that is at root manipulative, reducing God to a puppet pulled by priestly strings, is in effect an attack on your own egocentric thinking. Freeing God from theology and ritual is what keeps God free for the people. Freeing yourself from manipulative thinking is what keeps the people free for God.
