By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
Michael Walzer is known as a political philosopher and social critic. A professor emeritus in the School of Social Science at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, he is co-editor of Dissent magazine and a contributing editor to The New Republic. His 35 books and numerous essays cover a range of topics that include just and unjust war, economic justice, nationalism, ethnicity and social criticism.
While his thoughts are firmly in the modern world, he brings a Jewish perspective to his discussions, rooted in a scholarly reading of the Bible. So it is hardly surprising that his three talk series this past month as the 2008 Samuel and Althea Stroum lecturer at the University of Washington was titled “Biblical Politics.”
The talks focused on the roles of three centers of political and moral power in ancient Israel: prophets, kings and the elders. Walzer looks at the Biblical texts not just as holy words, but for what they can tell us about political theory and practice in the ancient Jewish world, when viewed through the lens of modern political theory.
In his second lecture, on May 6, Walzer focused on the role of the prophets as they are depicted in the Tanach, beginning with Amos, in the period before the Babylonian conquest. Prophesy, he said, played a political role in ancient Israel. Walzer refers to the prophets as “poets of social justice.” The talk followed the line of argument made in his 1987 book, Interpretation and Social Criticism, namely that “social criticism is less the practical offspring of scientific knowledge than the educated cousin of common complaint,” and that the best social critics see themselves as a part of the society they are criticizing who “want things to go well.”
By placing the origin of social criticism in the heart of Jewish history, Walzer makes the point that the critical nature of Judaism is as significant to its importance in the development of Western civilization as is its steadfast belief in one true God.
Walzer pointed out that the prophets whose messages have been preserved in the Bible were just a few of the thousands of prophets heard at the time in and around Jerusalem and throughout the Hebrew kingdoms. Before Amos, he said, the prophets did not speak directly to the populace, but were part of the royal court. They gave their advice and prophesies to the king and his ministers exclusively, or were consigned to the temples. But while they were political actors, he said, “they [were] not appointed, they [were] called.”
Prophets were also not limited to the upper classes or the politically well-connected, he noted, but came from every class of society.
“Anyone could claim that he or she were called, and any could be questioned,” he said. The proof that they were authentic was, first, that they were willing to speak truth to power, Walzer said. That is, their prophesies were not molded by what the ruler wanted to hear, nor did they predict only victories — though, he noted, there are references to hundreds of court prophets who did just that. The other evidence of their authenticity was that their predictions proved to be true.
That was not hard to judge in the case of foretelling the outcomes of the numerous battles and wars happening at the time. Other prophesies foretold events over long time periods, however, and could not be independently judged and proved at the time.
“Above all, the important fact was that they spoke in public,” Walzer said. “The prophets demanded only to be heard, and they no doubt were heard — listened to — though not necessarily harkened.” He said what made the prophesy “truly important” was not the foretelling of military victories but their moral focus.
“From Amos on,” he said, “the prophets have less and less to say about the sins of kings,” but instead exhorted the people to turn back to living a morally proper life as the key to the continued success and preservation of the society. At the same time, he added, they continued to recognize the hierarchical nature of the society and did not challenge that power structure, per se.
While Walzer argued a position that he has staked out over the past 20 years — that “the prophets were social critics, perhaps the first social critics in Western history” — he also pointed out that the way that they approached their role was not by commenting directly on the policies and political issues of the time (though that certainly concerned them). Instead, their calls were strictly in terms of moral action; ie: calling on people to trade fairly with one another, to respect the Sabbath, and to treat the poor with compassion.
Their recorded arguments, he said, (since the books of the Prophets are among the only places in the Hebrew Bible to record dialogues) did not concern the validity of their calls for social reforms, but centered exclusively on the authenticity of the prophet him or herself. The reason, obviously enough, was that if the speaker were an authentic prophet, truly speaking the word of God, there was no point in disputing what he or she was telling the people to do.
“Prophesy was a kind of speech that was opposed to deliberation,” Walzer said.
Exactly what brought the era of prophesy to an end is not entirely clear, he said, though it seems to have come within about a century after the return from Babylon, when the priestly rulers had evidently found a way to do without the prophets.
Later, when the Talmudic rabbis managed to dispense with priestly rule rather than return to seeking God’s will through the spoken word of chosen prophets, they adopted the mode of discovering God’s will by studying and analyzing the texts, the approach that has held to this day.