From The Mouths Of Babes Poem by gershon hepner

From the mouths of babes we hear
the prophets babble. Jeremiah
would surely say each self-styled seer
was not a prophet but a liar,
but listeners usually can’t tell
the difference between truth’s that vatic
and nonsense casting its dark spell
because its phrases sound emphatic,
The Talmud, Babylonian,
says prophets take a baby’s path,
and every one’s a phony ’un
which should be thrown out with the bath.
I say that since it is so hard
distinguishing the truth from lies
when prophets speak, we should choose bards
to show the way to paradise,


Leon Wieseltier discussing Barack Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, in The New Republic,
May 28,2008 (“Jeremiads”) invokes the Babylonian Talmud to redress the fallacies of Wright’s denigration of Babylon:
Anyway, Wright's tribute to Farrakhan's service to black literacy is vitiated by an extraordinary riff in another sermon in the series, called 'Faith in a Foreign Land, ' in which he denounces the usurpation of African traditions by 'Babylonian, ' or Western, traditions in the education of 'exiles, ' or African Americans: “These exiles became schooled in Babylonian literature, from Beowulf to Virginia Wolfe [sic], and their heritage was wickedly wiped away from the tissues of their memory banks. They became skilled in Babylonian philosophy from Descartes to Meister Eckhart, from Immanuel Kant to Jean Paul Sartre, from existentialism to nihilism, from the dialectical materialism of Karl Marx to the wissenschaftlichkeit [sic] of Martin Heidegger.” This whole passage is a little sic. To mock Shakespeare, in a black church in Chicago, as 'Babylonian Shakespearean literature'-that is nihilism. To exclude young African Americans from the mental ambition represented by such books is to defeat them. I first heard the preaching of Jeremiah Wright in 1989. The sermon was called 'Premature Autopsies, ' it was written by Stanley Crouch, and it appeared on a powerful record by Wynton Marsalis called The Majesty of the Blues. In that sermon Wright lauded 'the slow, painful development demanded of serious study.' They were sterling words, but they were not the reverend's own. But I have the pulpit now, so quiet down, brothers and sisters, and listen up. Our text for this morning's homily is the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Baba Bathra 12a, wherein it is stated: 'Rabbi Yohanan said: From the day the Temple was destroyed, prophecy was taken away from prophets and given to children and to fools.' And there is more in the same unenraptured vein: 'words of prophecy' is a rabbinical euphemism for nonsense, and in the age after prophecy, which is our age, 'a wise man is preferable to a prophet.' I cite these counsels of downward metaphysical adjustment because I am weary of being told that fevered demagogues such as Wright are 'prophetic.' If he is a prophet then I am a sibyl. There is no more empty or abused word in contemporary American theology than 'prophetic.' It hallows all kinds of absurdities and calumnies. Is it prophetic to proclaim that the government loosed aids upon the black community? If so, it is false
prophecy.


5/14/08