Martin Buber's Theopolitics

The Battle for YHVH | 199

Eventually, however, Egyptian interference in the politics of Judah renders
Jeremiah’s qualms moot. Josiah is cut down at Megiddo by the Pharaoh before he
can complete his work. This is a crisis on several levels. First, the king installed
by Pharaoh is willing to adopt the cult reform but not the social reform, and even
this ultimately fails. The centralization of YHVH worship is its only lasting fruit,
which is why Jeremiah finally breaks his long prophetic silence at the Temple
gate. Second, Josiah, fully committed to the will of YHVH, is cut down before
his time. The question of how and why this could have happened “penetrates
the innermost depths of faith. YHVH has been proclaimed by the prophets as
the God of justice. The question comes to include the justice of the leadership
of the world. ... The ready teaching about reward and punishment in the life of
individual and community is shaken. This deity is no more to be formulated.”^105
Jeremiah cannot explain the loss of Josiah, but he is nonetheless incensed as
the panicked people stream to the Temple to say, “We are delivered” (7:10). None
of his views on social justice as a complement to cultic propriety have changed,
and the idea that the people still respond to crisis by making offerings in the
same “den of robbers” (7:11) moves Jeremiah to bar the gate with his body. Buber
notes that the litany of the people’s crimes (“Stealing, murder, adultery, and false
swearing... and following after other gods,” 7:9) resembles the Decalogue, but
the sins against religion are at the end. The priority of social justice over cultic
propriety is the lesson that the people need to learn:

Out of a human community He wills to make His kingdom; community there

must be in order that His kingdom shall come; therefore here... man’s claim

upon man takes precedence of God’s claim.... It is as if he, standing at the

gate of the temple, put forth his hand into the innermost room and took from

the ark the tablets in order to show them in a changed order to the people. Op-

posite the self-reliant, spirit-forsaken civilization religion there stands here for

all to see God’s ancient instruction of the nomad tribes.^106

Jeremiah, true heir to Moses and Samuel, urges that YHVH will be wherever he
will be and that the people cannot “have” him. Just as Moses conceded the ark
only as a pedagogical tool, and just as Samuel failed to teach the people that they
could experience God’s leadership without it, Jeremiah prophesies that “they shall
say no more: the Ark of the Covenant of YHVH; neither shall it come to mind;
neither shall they make mention of it; neither shall they miss it; neither shall it
be made any more” (3:6). Jeremiah, for Buber, is the last “pure” prophet, the last
to speak to a specific historical situation and convince his hearers that they must
make a decision. “After this the prophetic ‘if ’ ceases.”^107 The destruction comes,
and with it the despair of alternatives: Jeremiah prophesies a new covenant that
will be “written on the hearts” of the people (31:32)—blessedly relieving them of
the necessity to choose it.