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Compiled by Geoffrey AndersenUpdated Friday, Feb. 2, 2007, at 6:34 AM ET

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Have you already arrived at The Big Idea? If so, there's another party going on in the Libby Dispatches. All-comers welcome. GA … 3:35am PST

Monday, Jan. 29, 2007

A darkness has descended upon David Plotz's superb series, Blogging the Bible. In his latest entry, Plotz confesses that the prophet Jeremiah "is not the jolliest way to spend an afternoon." He goes on to explain why:

I finally recognized why Jeremiah bugs me so much. He's a Quisling, a Tokyo Rose! Jeremiah feels no loyalty to his land or his people—he's so traitorous that he's prodding them to surrender to their mortal enemy! [...]
The lesson in his betrayal of his country is this: All our quotidian bonds—to family, nation, and tribe—are nothing compared with our connection with God. But this doesn't comfort me! I am not strong enough in my faith to set aside family and country for God. And I don't want to be. Jeremiah is a righteous prophet, but I can't help feeling that he's also a terrible traitor.

There aren't many criticisms of this interpretation among the sensitive and erudite readers of our Blogging the Bible Fray. This is, after all, the prophet appointed to wage a one-man war against his native land:

I have made thee this day a defensed city, and an iron pillar, and brazen walls against the whole land, against the kings of Judah, against the princes thereof, against the priests thereof, and against the people of the land. And they shall fight against thee; but they shall not prevail against thee.

HLS2003 is sharply crtitical of Plotz's ambivalence towards Jeremiah's central message:

I'll give credit where it's due -- Plotz flat-out admits that his faith is weak-to-nonexistent, that he has placed other gods ahead of God, that he does not trust God, that he wants the benefits of God without the obedience, etc. In short, all the same sins that Plotz has, in the past, recognized that the ancient Israelites had committed for centuries. Good for him on the honesty there.

But then he blows his honesty points by engaging in a curious form of doublethink. He accuses God of being unjust for punishing Israel (and, by extension, himself) even though he has just admitted that he (and they) have committed all the sins that God told them not to commit, breaking the covenant non-stop. If you acknowledge that you (and Israel) are covenant-breakers, then how can you simultaneously consider it injustice to have the benefits of the covenant revoked? It's like a murderer who (1) acknowledges that murder is wrong, and (2) acknowledges he committed the murder, but then simultaneously complains that it's not fair to put him in jail.

Sometimes Plotz's alleged confusion in his blog entries raises hard questions. I can't see how his doublethink here does. He admits he is unfaithful, but wants the benefits of faithfulness. He admits the Israelites broke the covenant, but wants them to retain the benefits of the covenant. That doesn't sound like confusion or justified doubt; it sounds like self-deception, whining, and an adolescent feeling of ultimate entitlement.

For MarkEHaag this spiritual conflict has contemporary political dimensions:

David Plotz asserts that Jeremiah is a traitor for his continual harping on Judah's imminent destruction at the hands of Babylon.

That seems a little one-sided. Jeremiah is prophesying a punishment for the Chosen People. [...] Their apostasy and incorrigibility are especially grievous, as they have enjoyed blessings bestowed on no other people. [...] In the dialectic of suffering and remorse and self-regard that governs the G*d/Israel relationship, it is precisely the divinity's extraordinary malice toward His Chosen People that marks them out as the recipients of special grace.

Plotz, of course, isn't really talking about Israel. He's talking about America. And his understanding of what it means to be "patriotic" is peculiarly American: one must do everything in one's power to make one's country and one's fellow citizens feel good about themselves, to encourage them to think of themselves as better than their opponents, to drive them on to with the game of geo-political pre-eminence. Suffice it to say, in other times and in other places, true patriotism was understood not as a simple willingness to help one's country feel good about itself as it is, as it currently subsides in the present earthly moment, but to try to improve it morally and eschatologically, to raise up one's land and one's folk, through sublime horror if need be, to a higher level, to make of it something more awe-worthy, grand and eternal, above any petty human sort of merely political competition. That is, something that might truly merit a raging G*d's prickly, somewhat self-absorbed attentions . . . .