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To the editor:
Does the Bible have any relevance for politics in 21st century America? Here’s a story for you.
God encouraged Ezekiel to use dramatic theater to get the attention of his Israelite people suffering deportation to Babylon in waves. Ezekiel dug through the wall of his house by the river Chebar in Babylon, crawled through it with his belongings and carried them out into the street before an audience of the elders of Israel.
The message was that God would soon allow the rest of Judah to go homeless and to be led into abject captivity because of the waywardness of their haughty princely leaders back in Jerusalem.
America is clearly also being taken captive by the ignorance, violence and economic greed of its political leadership today.
Many of our people have already gathered their remaining belongings and are wandering about the streets of the nation giving visible display to the sins, crimes and disabilities of America’s finest.
Also, innocent would-be Americans from south of the border are being savagely deported because of these same sins of greedy, racist politicians, not for any sins of their own.
Kimball Shinkoskey
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Valete
To reduce Ezekiel’s ancient ordeal to a ready-made weapon for modern partisan skirmishes is a symptom of our current political literacy, which prefers cheap sentiment to historical accuracy.
The prophet did not tunnel through mud and brick to provide a tidy metaphor for American immigration policy; he did so to record the literal disintegration of a nation during Jerusalem’s sixth-century BCE collapse. Rabbinic analysts correctly viewed his grueling performance as a heavy bearing of collective guilt, while historical criticism shows it was a necessary psychological shock to shatter the false optimism of a conquered population.
We live in an age where language is systematically corrupted to serve immediate political ends.
America has institutional problems…but equating our domestic failures with the literal, foreign-enforced bondage of Babylon is a gross distortion of scale. True political criticism requires precise terminology, not the dishonest appropriation of ancient exiles.
Thursday, August 27 Report this