Traditionally, Jewish congregations each Shabbat read a portion of the Torah and a passage chosen long ago by the rabbis from the Prophets -- one that has some connection with the Torah portion. On the Shabbat (March 21) that followed a week of tumult about Pastor Jeremiah, the traditional Prophetic reading was a passage from the Prophet Jeremiah (7: 21 to 8: 3 and 9:22-23).

Reading it, I found not only our country but myself challenged at a profound level:

The ancient Jeremiah channeled God's burning anger at seeing the people
betray their covenant of love, justice, and fairness. Bitterly, furiously,
he denounced the kingdom of Judah for turning its burnt-offerings of animals
and grains into the burnt-offerings of its own children, thrown into fires
they thought would delight their God..

But on behalf of God, the ancient Jeremiah cried out that "the carcasses of
this people shall be food for the birds of the sky and the beasts of the
earth." Even the dead shall not escape disaster -- for "the bones of kings
and leaders, priests and prophets, even ordinary citizens, will be ripped
from their graves and exposed to the sun they had worshipped, so that their
own bones will become dung on the face of the earth."

How does this differ from the most extreme statements of Pastor Jeremiah
Wright? How does it differ from "God damn America!" except by being far
more graphic?

Why is it that we celebrate the one, or at least pretend to by calling him a
Prophet and assigning him to be read as sacred writ, while viewing the other
as lunatic and reprehensible?

Is it only because we can abide a 2500-year-old teaching that denounces a
country we don’t live in, in a way we can't abide when the target is here
and now and us? Or is there some deeper reason? Even some reason to
reassess the ancient Jeremiah?

We say The Shalom Center is a "prophetic voice": Well then, what is a Prophetic Voice? Is the ancient Jeremiah? Is the modern one? When The Shalom Center honors "prophetic voices" –- Bob Edgar, Sayyid Sayeed, Ruth Messinger, among others, all more gentle than either Jeremiah –- are they really "prophetic"? Are they more prophetic? Do we need a new understanding of the prophetic voice in our own generation?

One article I saw last week said that Jeremiah Wright was saying nothing different from Dr. Martin Luther King in, for example, the profound speech
of April 4, 1967, when King denounced the triple demons of America –- racism, militarism, materialism –- and warned that if they were left to fester, they would bring disaster on America.

There is some truth and some falsity in this comparison. I can't imagine the
words "God damn America" coming from the mouth of Martin King. His
prophetic warning was rooted in love, though anger certainly became a part
of it. One year before he himself was killed, as he condemned the Vietnam
War, he said: "I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the
violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly
to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own
government."

Notice that he said "my own government" – owning and affirming his
connection to it. And notice that he used the word "today" -- for he knew
both that the United States had for generations sometimes behaved violently
toward large parts of the world –- and that the United States had also in
the past sometimes acted with great generosity in the world, and was capable
of acting that way again.

King would also have said that the murderous attacks on the World Trade
Center were utterly a rejection, not a fulfillment, of God's loving message.
The oppressed, said King, always have a choice of how to resist their
oppression. They must not be passive –- and they must not be violent. They
must build, not burn; teach, not torture.

God first spoke to the ancient Jeremiah:

"See, I appoint you this day Over nations and kingdoms: To uproot and tear down, To build and to plant."

The ancient Jeremiah put much more energy into uprooting and tearing down —
or at least condemning and denouncing — than he did into planting and
building. That is why in English we have a word for denunciation filled
with rage: "jeremiad."

Jeremiah Wright did a great deal in Chicago "to build and to plant" –
teaching jobs and self-reliance, aiding those with AIDS. Yet in this past
two weeks, his words of rage, his jeremiads, have echoed louder in the
national ears than the silent seeds that he has sown.

It was those seeds of hope that Barack Obama learned from, not the words of
rage and tearing-down. He, as well as Dr. King, point us in the direction of
a new paradigm of prophecy, just as many of us have worked toward new
paradigms of sacred sexuality and sacred relationship with the earth,
learning from and going beyond the biblical teachings of how to carry out a
sacred covenant.

Perhaps as we struggle our way toward a new vision of the Prophetic, one
more clearly filled with steadfast love, carried out in steadfast
nonviolence, we can light up two verses from the ancient Jeremiah that
follow the denunciations we read this past Shabbat:

"Thus said YHWH, Yahh, the Breathing-spirit of the world: Let not even the wise glory in their wisdom, And surely the wealthy must not glory in their wealth, Nor the powerful glory in their power –-

"But only in this should you glory – yes, glory! --
As you bring to Me your most devoted caring:
That I, the Breath of Life, do loving-kindness, justice, and fairness in the
earth:

In these I take delight."

Rabbi Arthur Waskow is director of The Shalom Center and author of many books on Jewish thought and practice and on public policy. Most recently he is co-author with Sr. Joan Chittister and Saadi Shakur Chisti of "The Tent of Abraham."