Rabbi Rami Shapiro is an award-winning storyteller, poet and essayist, and director of the Simply Jewish Foundation. He's been featured in our Living Spiritual Teachers Project. This is the second book he's done for the Skylight Illuminations series. Here he provides the translations and annotations on the teachings of the ancient Hebrew prophets — such luminaries as Amos, Hosea, Jeremiah, Micah, and others. Following a foreword by Zalman Schachter -Shalomi, Shapiro notes that the prophets are, to use Christian terminology, masters of the Via Negativa, the Negative Way — "stripping away what we think we know in order to come to the Truth." Part of their mission was to hold up a mirror to our destructive and foolish behaviors. Another part is stated bluntly by Shapiro: "This is what God desires: kindness, mercy and justice to the powerful and the powerless alike. Everything else is mere distraction."
Each spread in this paperback has excerpts from the writings of the prophets on the right and interpretations by the author on the left. Shapiro doesn't present the prophets in historical order; rather he groups their writings by theme. One section covers the mission of the prophets and three focus on the acts of repentance they called upon their hearers to make — from ignorance to truth, from injustice to justice, and from despair to joy.
It would be easy for us to read the words of these daring spokespersons for God talking about idols and think that they have nothing to do with us. Think again! Shapiro writes: "What your idols share with their ancient carved and graven counterparts is this: They deplete your freedom and rob you of choice. You may not call the false gods of your life gods, but they are gods nonetheless. Racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism are modern gods of chaos and violence that steal your ability to see people as individuals, and to treat them justly and kindly. Avarice, workaholism, self-loathing, and conceit are gods of inner turmoil that rob you of compassion, Drugs, sex, alcohol, and the rest of modernity's addictions are all gods of despair that make joy and freedom impossible."
Shapiro proves himself to be an admirable translator and interpreter of the Hebrew prophets. He brings the words of the prophets to bear on our ideas about the silence of God, what we consume, faithlessness to God, the meaning of wisdom, the value of living in the present moment, the nonduality of God, reaping what we sow, the power to turn from evil and do good, and the cathartic power of howling.
