What follows, in the grand prophetic tradition, is a litany of complaints. Again we see the Israelites grumbling and scheming, comically disobedient and deeply corrupted. And again the prophet concludes with an exhortation for the errant people to mend their ways and find a path back to God. But Jeremiah never answers his own question: What wrong did God’s Chosen People find in their divine benefactor that led them astray?

For hints of an answer, don’t ask a prophet. Ask a parent.

In a gargantuan piece in New York magazine, Jennifer Senior plumbed reams of social science studies to try and explain why parenting, as the article’s headline poignantly put it, was all joy and no fun: why, in other words, so many parents are reportedly thrilled with having had children and yet driven to despair by the daily machinations associated with raising these very same tots. Senior’s finding is unsurprising—parenting, she writes, is one of those thoroughly satisfying yet frequently unenjoyable activities that give us little immediate pleasure but much by way of meaning and a sense of purpose.

Herein lies the solution to poor Jeremiah’s conundrum. Senior writes of the disappointment common to many new parents—the slow, sinking realization, after years of living as independent and carefree adults, that raising a child is an emotionally draining undertaking demanding of all manners of sacrifice. It’s not hard to imagine the Israelites feeling the same way. There they were, after all, a band of wanderers, chained in the house of bondage but never without their bit of meat and other earthly delights. Then, suddenly, midwife Moses delivers them a newborn covenant, and all of the sudden there are so many things they just can’t do anymore, like nibble on a ham and cheese sandwich or spend their Saturdays doing whatever they please. And just like so many contemporary moms and dads who ponder the value of parenthood, the Israelites start wondering whether this whole business of having a God is even worth it.

Whether we realize it or not, it’s a question that has become a staple of modern life. We may not always put it in such epic terms, but the decisions we make often force us to choose between two irreconcilable drives: the theistic and the solipsistic. The first suggests to us that there is a God up or out there and that even if we don’t follow a particular religion we’re at least obliged to acknowledge that some things are more worthy than our mere selves. The second argues the opposite, claiming that since we can’t really know for sure the true nature of anything that exists outside of our own minds, we may as well not worry about it too much.

These, of course, are profound and complex philosophical positions, but they’re frequently the engine behind simple, earthly behaviors. Greed, for example, is inherently solipsistic. Think of BP carelessly operating its drilling site just to save a few dollars and leading to the worst ecological disaster in the nation’s history, or of corporations seeking unrealistic profit margins and bleeding dry entire industries as a result. Fear-mongering is solipsistic as well, as are most of the dark urges that have come to power our politics, our economy, and so much of our personal lives.

Luckily for us, Jeremiah has an answer at the ready. The prophet never doubts that worshipping Ba’al is a kick—the Canaanite deity’s followers, after all, believed that the best way to make the earth fertile is to fornicate in the temples—but he also knows that kicks, by their very nature, don’t last very long. By worshipping God, he promises his people nothing but blood, sweat, and tears, a heavily regulated life burdened by restrictions and controlled by commandments. But he also promises them the much deeper joy that comes with doing not what feels right but what is right to do.

If we are ever to grow—as individuals and as communities alike—we would do well to follow Jeremiah’s example. This would likely mean setting aside our obsession with happiness, too often understood as the pursuit of gratification, and focusing instead on righteousness, the bleaker but more substantive quest for truth, love, and justice.

And if you have any qualms concerning what it’s like to give up so much by way of instant pleasure for something else, something more important, something bigger than yourself—hey, just call your mother.

An Israeli journalist, Hammerman befriended a teenage Palestinian girl and was heartbroken to learn that, like most Palestinians in the West Bank, the girl—writing about the encounter in Haaretz, Hammerman called the girl Aya to protect her identity—was confined to her village by a Byzantine system of roadblocks and restrictions that renders travel virtually impossible. Unable to drive even to the nearest large Palestinian town without spending hours in blazing corrugated-metal kennels, subjected to searches and sometimes denied entry just because, Aya was preparing for a summer filled with idle days, confined to her village, succumbing to boredom.

It wasn’t the most horrid story one can hear in the West Bank, but it touched Hammerman deeply. If Aya’s childhood wasn’t allowed to transcend the thicket of politics and prejudice that entangles everyone in the region, she thought, then all was hopelessly bleak. Hammerman made a suggestion: She would smuggle Aya and two of her cousins into Israel, drive them to Tel Aviv, and show them what life was like in the big city, just an hour’s drive away but beyond their imagination.

This, Hammerman was well aware, was against the law. To get Aya and her relatives into the country, she would have to lie to soldiers and policemen. And the border, she realized perfectly well, was heavily guarded for very good reasons. Still, the thought of young girls under siege struck Hammerman as categorically evil. The Israeli law book, she reasoned, also included the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Freedom, enacted in 1994 and promising every man and woman, regardless of his or her ethnicity, “no deprivation or restriction of the liberty of a person by imprisonment, arrest, extradition or otherwise.”

“All of these rights,” Hammerman wrote in a recent article in Haaretz, “are denied the civilian Palestinian population living in the occupied territories under Israeli military control: Their lives, dignity and property are violated; their privacy and intimacy is not respected; and their private premises are entered without their consent. But, above all, their liberty is restricted: They are not free to leave their country, to move within it or to choose their place of residence at will. They are denied their liberty by arrest and imprisonment. Indeed, since 1967, approximately 800,000 Palestinians have been arrested and imprisoned for various periods of time by the Israeli military jurisdiction to which they are subject.”

With Israeli law pitted against Israeli law, Hammerman chose to err on the side of dignity and freedom. In May, she loaded Aya and her cousins into her car, drove to a checkpoint she thought would be more lenient, blurted out a few words in Hebrew to the soldier standing guard, and sighed with relief when she was waved right through. Once she hit Tel Aviv, she took her young charges to a museum and a mall, watched with delight as they frolicked on the lawn of Tel Aviv University and sprinted on the beach, bought them each some ice cream. It was two in the morning by the time she drove them back home; a few days later, reading Hammerman’s account of the day in Haaretz, a settler organization began a campaign for her arrest.

As Hammerman’s self-appointed prosecutors are self-described religious Jews, they may want to spend this Shabbat pondering the weekly haftorah. Awarded his divine mandate, the prophet Jeremiah is warned not to expect an easy ride.

“And I will utter My judgments against them concerning all their evil, that they left Me and offered up burnt-offerings to other gods and they prostrated themselves to the work of their hands,” God tells Jeremiah, preparing his servant for the coming calumny he’s sure to face. “And you shall gird your loins and arise and speak to them all that I command you; be not dismayed by them, lest I break you before them. And I, behold I have made you today into a fortified city and into an iron pillar, and into copper walls against the entire land, against the kings of Judah, against its princes, against its priests, and against the people of the land. And they shall fight against you but they shall not prevail against you, for I am with you, says the Lord, to save you.”

It is unlikely, of course, that those modern-day Israelites who still prostrate themselves to the work of their hands—the separation walls and the checkpoints and the armaments they firmly believe to be their sole measure of protection—would summon the wherewithal to take in a touch of prophecy. Now, as in Jeremiah’s time, they would likely adopt an imperious tone and talk about security and its neverending demands, or ragingly recite all of the evils, great and small, perpetrated by the nations who criticize Israel, or find a thousand and one excuses with which to extenuate the senseless brutality of the occupation.

Never mind: Now, like then, we still have women and men who are wise enough to understand that sometimes the path to righteousness leads straight to an ice cream parlor in a nearby-faraway town and who are courageous enough to drive there, roadblocks be damned.

There’s nothing like a good countdown to get ready for Tisha B’Av, the day we grieve the destruction of the Temple. To get in a mournful mood, the three weeks prior to Tisha B’Av—known as Bein Ha’Metzarim, or the period between the straits—are marked by a series of fasts and abstinences designed to induce somber reflection. The timing isn’t random: A fast begins on Shiv’ah Asar B’Tammuz, the 17th of Tammuz, the day the walls of the Second Temple were breached by the Romans in 70 C.E. Also, as the 17th of Tammuz occurs exactly 40 days after Shavuot, tradition suggests that it was on this day that Moses descended from Mount Sinai, saw the Golden Calf, and smashed the tablets. While customs vary, it is common to observe the restrictions of the period more stringently the nearer one gets to Tisha B’Av. The final nine days preceding Tisha B’Av are the period of greatest observance.

ANY DOS AND DON’TS?

The three weeks begin with Shiv’ah Asar B’Tammuz, a minor fast day which begins at dawn and ends shortly after dusk. (By contrast, the Tisha B’Av fast day lasts from sundown to sundown.) Throughout the three-week period that follows, Jews refrain from holding weddings and bar mitzvahs, as well as from having other public celebrations, and from buying new clothes. It is also prohibited to play or listen to music, or to get a haircut.

During the nine final days, many Jews refrain from eating meat or poultry, drinking wine, taking hot baths, or wearing freshly laundered clothes. This corresponds neatly with the spirit of the Mishneh, which commands, “From the beginning of Av, happiness is decreased.”

ANYTHING GOOD TO READ?

Special haftarot are chanted during each of the three weeks. Known as the “three of affliction,” these portions from the Hebrew prophets do not correspond to the weekly Torah portions, but instead contain the prophecies of Jeremiah and Isaiah warning of the fall of Jerusalem.

FIVE MORE THINGS YOU CAN DO:

• Take a textual tour of the Temple.
• Relive Moses’ smashing of the tablets.
• Enjoy a healthy diet with some vegetarian recipes.
• Get serious with the prophet Jeremiah.
• Ponder the state of modern-day Jerusalem.

I’d like to think that the many targets of my ire—Israel’s cruel and senseless immigration policy, Republican lawmakers who lie and obfuscate, mirthless moralists who refuse to partake in cheerful gossip—are deserving. But I’d be no better than the ninnies whose missteps I’m paid to decry if I failed to look at the mirror and find a big, fat target there, ready for scrutiny, inviting heat.

Here goes.

In this week’s haftorah, Jeremiah reveals the key to a fulfilling life. “So says the Lord,” he proclaims, “Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his arm, and whose heart turns away from the Lord. He shall be like a lone tree in the plain, and will not see when good comes, and will dwell on parched land in the desert, on salt-sodden soil that is not habitable.”

I, dear reader, am very much a man who trusts in man, and my deep belief in everything related to flesh and arms accounts for the National Rifle Association lifetime membership card I carry proudly in my wallet. But before this week, I never thought of myself as a lone tree, nor of my comfortable apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side as salt-sodden, one recent plumbing crisis notwithstanding. Am I, to put it plainly, doomed?

Like all of life’s worthwhile questions, this one is difficult to resolve, but any attempt at an answer must begin with absolute candor. Like most Israelis, I, too, was reared on the theology of Do-It-Yourself, a deep-seated faith that can scream out, say, against the travesty of Jewish settlements in the West Bank even as it sometimes can’t help but admire the temerity of establishing facts on the ground. And if I ever start a religion of my own—and what entrepreneurial chap hasn’t given this, the ultimate revenue stream, a lick of thought?—it’ll be called GOI, an acronym for Get Over It. Services will be short: adherents will walk in and tell me their problems, and I’ll smack them as hard as I can and suggest that they stop whining and take charge. As my liturgy, I’ll offer Faust’s cri de coeur:

‘In the beginning was the Word’: why, now
I’m stuck already! I must change that; how?
Is then ‘the word’ so great and high a thing?
There is some other rendering,
Which with the spirit’s guidance I must find.
We read: ‘In the beginning was the Mind.’
Before you write this first phrase, think again;
Good sense eludes the overhasty pen.
Does ‘mind’ set worlds on their creative course?
It means: ‘In the beginning was the Force.’
So it should be—but as I write this too,
Some instinct warns me that it will not do.
The spirit speaks! I see how it must read,
And boldly write: ‘In the beginning was the Deed!’

Jeremiah, one suspects, would be none too pleased. By definition, we consecrators of the Deed have no choice but to trust ourselves first, others second, and any additional forces—divine or otherwise—thereafter. Are we heretics? And, conversely, are those who are faithful but inert blessed? I have always refused to believe that was the case. When I was growing up in Israel during the first Gulf War, some prominent rabbis distributed little books of psalms with the catchy title tehilim neged tillim, or psalms against rockets. It made me laugh: King David’s ancient poetry of devotion was lovely, I thought, but if you wanted to stop rockets you might want to try bigger rockets instead.

And yet, Jeremiah wasn’t entirely wrong. He’s well aware that a thin line separates self-reliance and arrogance and that those who trust in man may speed past independence and dart all the way down to delusion. This is what happened to Jeremiah’s Israelites, and it’s what happens to so many of us, states and individuals alike. Capable of acting, we come to believe that our actions are the only forces that shape our world. Possessing of power, we come to see power as a sine qua non.

Or, at the very least, I do, and I struggle not to let the demons of the Deed drive me far away from the spirit of the Lord. I have many wise counselors, thinkers who caution me that power yielded for its own sake is a dark thing and that a life is worth living when we’re graceful enough to strike a balance between the deed and the word, between power and piety, between what we’re capable of doing and what we choose to do.

Martin Buber is one such guide. Eulogizing the anarchist philosopher Gustav Landauer—stoned to death by right-wing goons in Munich in 1919—Buber wrote the following words: “Gustav Landauer fought in the revolution against the revolution for the sake of the revolution. The revolution will not thank him for it. But those will thank him for it who have fought as he fought and perhaps some day those will thank him for whose sake he fought.” Amen to that.

Make that the patron saint of Passover, too: Of all of Jesus’s entourage, only John and Peter were permitted to ride into town and start making preparations for the seder, and when the big night came—it was, after all, Christ’s Last Supper—it was only natural that John would snag the seat right next to the Boss.

But of his many charms, John may be best remembered for the following pronouncement: “God,” he said, “is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him.”

Too often, this sweet bit is presented in counterpoint to Judaism; the old religion, goes the trope, is the religion of law, the new one the religion of love.

John, meet Jeremiah. In this week’s haftorah, the prophet has a message from God that might resonate with the loving crowd.

“So says the Lord of Hosts,” quoth Jeremiah, “the God of Israel; Add your burnt offerings upon your sacrifices and eat flesh. For neither did I speak with your forefathers nor did I command them on the day I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning a burnt offering or a sacrifice. But this thing did I command them, saying: Obey Me so that I am your God and you are My people, and you walk in all the ways that I command you, so that it may be well with you. But they did not obey nor did they incline their ear, but walked according to their own counsels and in the view of their evil heart, and they went backwards and not forwards.”

The implications of this divine rant are vast. Those who perceive religion to be nothing more than the laws governing the mechanics of ritual are sharply rebuked: What matters most, the Lord thunders, is not the system but the spirit. Spend too much time on practices and observances, and you risk losing sight of your true goals. Dive freely and joyfully into the ocean of compassion and meaning that is God and His commandments, and you’re swimming in the right direction.

The word of God, you would think, would resonate with those who declare themselves his ardent followers. This week, alas, Israeli politics provided us with two searing examples of the self-professed faithful walking backwards and choosing the law over love.

It began with Yaakov Katz, a religious member of Knesset from the right-wing National Union Party and the chairman of a committee convened to address the crisis of illegal immigration to Israel. With thousands of African and Asian laborers—many seeking refuge from bloody civil wars—illegally entering Israel in search of service or construction jobs, Katz searched his soul and came up with a solution to stem the tide. Israel, he argued, should declare martial law and shoot on sight any unlucky immigrant caught sneaking into its territory. Those who’d already made it in, Katz continued, should be arrested, placed in labor camps, and forced to work on major, arduous infrastructure projects. When he reclines at his seder table next week, Katz may do well to remember the part of the haggadah that reminds us that the Israelites, too, were once strangers in a strange land.

But Katz’s wicked statement was soon eclipsed by an even grander bout of benightedness, this one involving Deputy Health Minister Yaakov Litzman. Despite the demanding nature of his position, this member of the United Torah Judaism party has received little by way of a secular, scientific education, the sort of education you’d like the man who is the de facto overseer of the nation’s health care system to have. When his underlings, the doctors and professionals who run Israel’s hospitals and clinics, strove to care for the living, Litzman was looking out for the dead. Last week, he urged the government to delay the construction of a new fortified emergency room in Ashkelon’s Barzilai hospital. The new emergency room, he argued, is slated to be built over what may very well be an ancient Jewish gravesite. A master in the arithmetic of precarious political coalitions, Litzman managed to have his way, forcing his fellow ministers to order that the project be relocated to a nearby site. That the hospital is located just a few kilometers from the Gazan border, and as such is often the destination for Israelis wounded by the Qassam rockets lobbed by Hamas, mattered little to Litzman. That the new plan will cost hundreds of millions of dollars more and take at least three more years to complete—leaving doctors and patients alike with no adequate protection in the meantime—barely registered. Let the ancestors rest in peace, Litzman decreed; everybody else, run for your lives.

The wounded weep, the foreigners cower, but the strictures of orthodoxy at their narrowest are zealously observed. It’s a good thing Moses isn’t around any more; had he celebrated Passover in Israel of 2010, with Litzman and Katz and their ilk, he might’ve been devastated to know just how much the Promised Land had come to resemble Egypt.

At most, prophet was Jeremiah’s day job, the conventional mask he put on in order to voice his poetry more effectively. “It is hardly different today when it comes to the profession of the poet,” Rosenberg writes. “Sometimes he or she is a college professor, but we still call him or her a poet, not even a poet-professor.” He draws a comparison with the contemporary American poet John Ashbery, who has been a professor and an art critic. Still, “Ashbery wasn’t called an art critic-poet, and neither were the poets of Jeremiah called prophet-poets, as far as we know.”

To almost any reader—Jewish or non-Jewish, pious or skeptical—this redescription of Jeremiah cannot help sounding like a demotion. John Ashbery may or may not be, as Rosenberg writes, “the most eminent English-language poet alive,” but such eminence looks rather meager when compared to the distinction Jeremiah claims for himself (in the words of the New JPS translation):

The LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth, and the LORD said to me: Herewith I put My words into your mouth.
See, I appoint you this day
Over nations and kingdoms;
To uproot and to pull down,
To destroy and to overthrow,
To build and to plant.

For almost all readers until modern times, reading these lines meant taking their claim at face value. Jews, and Christians, listened to Jeremiah not because he was a good writer, but because he was chosen by God to deliver a message of the utmost urgency.

David Rosenberg knows, however, that we are living in a period when the Bible’s only claims on the attention of many readers is literary. That is why, in titling his book A Literary Bible, he is performing a clever dialectical maneuver. Yes, the title tells us, this Bible is literature, and not even canonical literature: it is a highly selective anthology of stories and verses, rendered into deliberately anachronistic, 21st-century English. Yet Rosenberg believes that literature can and should possess the same kind of moral force and spiritual insight once reserved for Scripture. For him, poetry is the only really sacred speech. It follows that to call Jeremiah a poet is actually a promotion, replacing the doubtful miracle of divine inspiration with the genuine miracle of poetic inspiration.

Here is how Rosenberg renders the famous passage from Chapter 31 of Jeremiah, in which the Lord comforts Rachel:

…these are the Lord’s words:
your voice will cease its weeping

your eyes brighten behind the tears
that dissolve into crystal-clear vision
of the children alive

returning home
from the lands of enemies
from beyond anguish to hope revived

vision is your reward
there is new life for your labor, remembrance
in the presence of children, eyes wide open

turning to the future
that is also yours
within the borders of a reality

and beyond them your descendants
are walking freely
by the strength of an unfailing imagination

an unbroken integrity
a listening dedicated
to the words that bade them live.

When Rosenberg translates Jeremiah, it is plain, he is not just translating Hebrew into English, or biblical idiom into contemporary concepts like “reality” and “imagination.” More profoundly, he is translating the concrete and pragmatic faith of the Hebrew Bible into the abstract and metaphorical faith that is all he, like many of us, can really believe in.

Rosenberg’s God promises to give Rachel, the mourning mother, a “vision” of her children, a “remembrance” of them, a future vaguely “within the borders of a reality.” It is all a little wordy and elusive, and at bottom it feels like a description of closure—a contemporary, secular understanding of renewal within the harsh limits of loss and grief. That is all Jeremiah the poet can conscientiously offer. It is different with Jeremiah the prophet, as we hear him in the new JPS transaltion:

Thus saith the LORD:
Restrain your voice from weeping,
Your eyes from shedding tears;
For there is a reward for your labor.

—declares the LORD:
They shall return from the enemy’s land.
And there is hope for your future
—declares the LORD:
Your children shall return to their country.

This is what a grieving mother would want to hear, a simple promise—your children are still alive and they are coming back. Jeremiah can make this promise because he believes in an actual God who is all-powerful. What we meet with in the best, most moving passages of A Literary Bible, on other hand, is a literary God, who has both the power of literature—since poetry can move, inspire, provoke—and the weakness of literature—since poetry is always hypothetical, a matter of thought and feeling rather than history and covenant.

Rosenberg, in his fervor for the power and privileges of poetry, does not always make this distinction as clear as it should be. In his notes and his afterword, Rosenberg is oddly abusive towards biblical scholars like Robert Alter and James Kugel, whom he casts as dullards and pedants, deaf to the Bible’s poetic genius. As a poet himself, he claims a privileged access to the biblical writers’ minds, which allows him to make sweeping and unsubstantiated claims about their intentions—for instance, that “the writers of the Hebrew Bible did not consider themselves divine.” This kind of certainty is characteristic of poets like Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell, whose translations of foreign poetry were imperially bold, and Rosenberg places himself in their tradition: “My apprenticeship in reclaiming biblical authors began, at nineteen, when I was Robert Lowell’s student in New York,” he writes.

But translating Rilke, or even Aeschylus, as Lowell did, is fundamentally different from translating the Bible. A text that claims to be the Word of God makes existential demands on us that a human text, even an ancient and prestigious one, does not. Robert Alter’s translations (which Rosenberg insults) respect the absolute and alien nature of the sacred imagination; Rosenberg, in his very passion to make the Bible communicate, turns it into something more domesticated and acceptable.

In part this is simply a matter of omission. To Rosenberg, the God we meet in the book of Job is “a caricature of God as a representation for conventional religion…. He lacks a human range of emotions.” For this reason, A Literary Bible only gives us Job’s long speech of complaint, which Rosenberg renders with convincing empathy:

why should someone have to walk around
blinded by the daylight
he can’t wave off

that God throws on him
waiting at every exit
in front of me…

every horror I imagined
walks right up to me
no privacy no solitude

and my pain
with my mind
pushes rest aside.

Rosenberg’s translation ends with chapter 31 of Job: “and here for now is ended/the poem/Job speaks.” The beginning of the next chapter, in the JPS edition, reads: “These three men ceased replying to Job, for he considered himself right”; and by restricting himself to Job’s complaining voice, Rosenberg compels the reader to share that conviction of self-righteousness. But the Book of Job ends in just the opposite spirit, as God himself replies to Job “out of the tempest” and brutally, majestically sweeps aside all his protests:

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?
Speak if you have understanding.
Do you know who fixed its dimensions
Or who measured it with a line?
Onto what were its bases sunk?
Who set its cornerstone
When the morning stars sang together
And all the divine beings shouted for joy?

Here, as so often in the Bible, we are reminded that we do not “have understanding” of God, which is why his actions so often appear evil and inexplicable to us. It is precisely because God is God that he lacks “a human range of emotions”—and that is what makes him ungraspable in the terms of literature, which is a humane art. Perhaps it takes a prophet, rather than a poet, to make us see God face to face.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.

In Jeremiah, Ohio, poet Adam Sol seeks to engage this legacy. Sol calls his book a novel and, although it is a bit thin on action, it is indeed a narrative. In it, Sol describes a road trip from Ohio to New York and back again taken by a reconceived, contemporary version of Jeremiah, the fierce prophet who, in the age of the later Jewish kings, preached against the dangers presented by the Babylonian empire. Sol’s Jeremiah is joined on the trip by an alienated ex-graduate student named Bruce, who—by serving as the addled Jeremiah’s companion, secretary, and guardian—embodies a version of the Baruch who was said to have recorded the biblical Jeremiah’s words. After passing through the malls, truck stops, and industrial waste of Pennsylvania, they end up in New York with Jeremiah in jail and Bruce reciting Jeremiah’s words at Ground Zero.

By casting his book as a story, Sol has worked to avoid the essentially tedious part of prophecy: its sheer repetitiveness. After all, the Book of Jeremiah is really a compendium of the prophet’s warnings and expressions of consolation. It covers the same ground in slightly different ways for 52 books. But because Bruce narrates the story-line, and Jeremiah provides the verbal fireworks, Bruce’s travelogue provides relief from the prophet’s exhortations. And by turning his prophet into a fictional character and embedding that character in a traveler’s tale, Sol can have his prophecy and disclaim it too. Jeremiah castigates and cajoles, not Sol. And, what’s more, Sol makes sure that we understand that Jeremiah is indeed out of his mind.

The storyline is maintained by Bruce, a matter-of-fact fellow who keeps things moving along:

I went out and bought a bag of carrots,
something good he could eat without his hands,
which were swollen, raw, and shiny with lymph.
I popped them in his mouth two at a time
while we worked our way back to the highway.

Jeremiah, on the other hand, is allowed to rant, but it turns out that in the early 21st century, prophecy doesn’t sound like it did in days of old. A contemporary poet just can’t get away with “the children of Noph and Tahpanhes will break your crown.” And so Sol retrofits his imagery and work his cadences: “Hear me while I call out my affliction/up in the smelly belly of this Greyhound Express.” Jeremiah goes on to offer up this peroration:

Therefore must we rake
our fingers across the vinyl seats, my friends,
and readjust the rearview mirrors.
Let us align
the tires and cancel our plans for the afternoon.

The mixture of biblical diction (“Hear me while I call out my affliction”) with the incongruously contemporary is intentionally odd, and has more than a touch of the hipster about it. It is reminiscent of Allen Ginsberg’s classic “Supermarket in California,” in which the poet has a vision of Walt Whitman interrogating the stock-boys: “Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?” Like Lord Buckley—another Beat hero who was famous for telling the story of Jesus in a jiving form of bohemian scat (“The Nazz never did nothin’ simple/When He laid it, He laid it.”)—Sol is not really kidding.

Sol’s Jeremiah might be crazy, but he is no fool. His sections of the book inveigh against the kind of mindless devastation that has produced our aging and ailing Rust Belt, against the loss of community, against consumerism. And it is hard to say that he is wrong. But perhaps he is too easily right. In spite of his verbal surprises, Sol’s Jeremiah’s tirades and injunctions are too friendly to the reader and too easy on the community. This Jeremiah does not attack the nation for its harlotry and its backsliding, but instead tries to cajole it. Biblical prophets reprimand us, remind us of the hard duties we are supposed to perform. What use is a prophet that most people would agree with? What fun is a prophet you actually like from the get-go?

All this does not mean that a poetry of community conscience is impossible, that it cannot arise, as so much of our poetry does, from the first person. It will just have to use the plural. It will not only talk about “I.” It will have to speak not about “you,” but about us.

The work of Joseph Lease , author of two well-received books, is a case in point. In his recent poem “America,” he reminds readers that “the sin most insistently called abhorrent to God is the failure of generosity, the neglect of the widow and the orphan, the oppression of strangers and the poor.” And he ends the poem like this:

We’re going back home to every vote
counts we’re changing the rules we’re
expecting disaster funding the nightmare
sure starve the poor try our new prayer try
our new blue Sunday try our new football
game turn off the shooting try our new
daydream and
try our

new rights

What is striking is the ambiguity here. Is Lease resorting to an indignant satire to attack us for the self-delusions that creep into our finer sentiments (“sure starve the poor”)? Or is he indeed saying that we can and perhaps will return to the better angels of our American Jewish natures? Perhaps we can actually make sure that every vote counts, that we can “turn off the shooting,” that we can actually change the rules and exert new/old rights.

Lease is doing both at the same time. He is both berating us and exhorting us while not claiming to be any different from us. By juxtaposing our Jewish ideals with our performance as Americans, he asserts that we can be a coherent community, one whose Judaism makes real demands on us as citizens and whose citizenship makes demands on us as Jews. “America” assails our blindness and our contradictions but it avoids the sweeping rhetorical gestures of prophecy.

This is probably just as well. Lacking the confidence of all assurances, we might just want to settle for such humility.