I loathe, I spurn your festivals,
I am not appeased by your solemn assemblies
If you offer Me burnt offerings—or your meal offerings—
I will not accept them;
I will pay no heed
To your gifts of fatlings.
Spare Me the sound of your hymns,
And let Me not hear the music of your lutes.
But let justice well up like water,
Righteousness like an unfailing stream.
—Amos 5:21–24
Amos, the first of the literary prophets, sets the tone for much that follows. He proclaims that God will not tolerate injustice or religious hypocrisy, that God will exact a terrible punishment if the people do not change their ways, and yet that eventually God will relent, restore the Davidic dynasty, and rebuild Israel.1
We can learn much about Amos’s thought by looking at the times in which he lived. His prophecy took place in the eighth century BCE, when the Israelite people were divided between a Northern and a Southern Kingdom. Although Amos came from Tekoa, a small town in the South, his message was addressed to the people of the North. Exactly why is unclear. History records that in Amos’s day, the Northern Kingdom had expanded its territory, which implies that the economy must have been thriving. In chapter 6, Amos refers to richly adorned summer and winter houses, lavish furnishings, sumptuous meals, ample quantities of wine, and the choicest of oils. Furthermore, we know from chapters 4 and 7 that there was a shrine at Bethel presided over by a priest, that sacrifices were offered there, and that festivals were observed.
In other words, these were times of happiness and prosperity. And therein lies a lesson for us. It may be easy for us to understand how God can be angry with people when times are rough. Who has not looked to heaven and asked “What have I done wrong?” when faced with misfortune? In good times, though, there is an equally powerful tendency to think that God must be pleased. If, then, the Northern Kingdom was prospering, and the sacrifices and the festivals were being observed, the priest and the rest of the nation must have thought that they were doing something right.
Against this presumption, the crux of Amos’s message is that the pride that comes with good fortune is illusory unless it is supported by moral conduct. It is illusory because God is not impressed by finely adorned houses if the poor are not cared for and because the prosperity that people enjoy today may vanish tomorrow. In short, Amos is warning us that human happiness is not an infallible guide to divine judgment. God may be close to those who suffer and indignant with those who prosper (as we shall see throughout this book). Rather than happiness, the true guide to divine judgment is morality. Hence the words quoted in the opening of the chapter: “Let justice well up like water / Righteousness like an unfailing stream.”2
Amos begins his prophecy with stinging criticisms of the neighbors of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms. In their quest for political power, they have broken treaties, sent whole populations into exile, shown no mercy to their victims, and committed a host of other atrocities. For example, Amos (1:6) predicts that God will smite the Philistines with fire. Buber would later write that the interesting thing about God’s criticism of the other nations is not that God is displeased with their offenses against the Divine, but at their offenses against each other.3 In any event, Amos’s audience was likely delighted to hear about the sins of their neighbors and how God would punish them.
At the very least, the indictment of other nations shows that God is concerned with more than just the fortunes of Israel but insists on moral standards that are valid for everyone. Later, Amos emphasizes the universality of God’s reach in even stronger terms:
To Me, O Israelites, you are
Just like the Ethiopians—declares the LORD.
True, I brought Israel up
From the Land of Egypt.
But also the Philistines from Caphor
And the Arameans from Kir. (9:7)
In short, Israel is not the only nation to have experienced an exodus. God also liberated the Philistines and Arameans. And yet, for all that, God has a special relationship with Israel (3:2): “You alone have I singled out / Of all the families of the earth.”
This not does mean that Israel will get off lightly. After the indictment of other nations in the opening chapter, Amos makes clear that God is just as angry with Israel—perhaps more so. In fact, the passage that begins “You alone have I singled out” finishes with: “That is why I will call you to account / For all your iniquities.” If Israel has been chosen among all the nations of the earth, God expects more from it, not less.
What exactly is the problem? Amos does not mince words. The people defraud the poor and rob the needy. They take bribes and use false weights and measures in the marketplace. They impose high taxes on the poor. Although they take off from work on the Sabbath and festivals, instead of focusing on the religious significance of these days, all they can think about is getting back to the marketplace and continuing to cheat people. The references to excessive eating and drinking suggest that decadence was common. Worse, the people think they can get away with anything as long as they offer sacrifices to God. So biting is Amos’s criticism, he is not above using sarcasm to make his point:
Come to Bethel [location of a holy shrine] and transgress;
To Gilgal [another shrine], and transgress even more:
Present your sacrifices the next morning
And your tithes on the third day;
And burn a thank offering of leavened bread,
And proclaim freewill offerings loudly.
For you love that sort of thing, O Israelites. (4:4–5)
Religious practice, then, has become a sham, an outward display of piety that does nothing to motivate better behavior, and therefore is hateful to God. People who have sinned cannot put themselves in God’s good graces merely by slaughtering an animal, even if the slaughtering is done according to accepted rules of sacrifice.
How was the message received? When Amos confronts Amaziah, the priest at Bethel, he hears that his message is subversive and that he must leave the Northern Kingdom immediately (7:10–11). The reason given for the banishment is Amos’s prediction: God is about to judge the Northern Kingdom and see through its hypocrisy, at which point the king will die by the sword, and the people will be conquered by a foreign power. We should keep in mind that Amaziah served the king, and his authority was being challenged by an outsider with no recognizable credentials. And yet for all this, it is Amos, the cattle breeder, who earns an important place in history; Amaziah, the priest, is all but forgotten.
There is no evidence that Amos wanted to eliminate the sacrificial cult altogether, or do away with other forms of religious observance. However distasteful animal sacrifice may be to us today, we should not forget that it had deep spiritual significance to our ancestors. It was their chief way of establishing closeness to God—either by seeking atonement or expressing thanksgiving. As Maimonides pointed out, a religion without sacrifice would have seemed as empty to them as a religion without prayer does to us.4
What Amos objects to is not sacrifice as such but the belief that it can atone for cruelty and injustice all by itself—that all one has to do to stay in God’s good graces is show up for the festivals, bring an animal to be slaughtered, and sing the usual hymns. His point is that God wants more than this. If you want to please a God who insists on justice, then you have to insist on it as well. If you turn a blind eye to the treatment of the poor, then all the sacrifices in the world will not accomplish anything.
From a philosophic perspective, Amos is saying that sacrifice is not an end in itself. One cannot say, “I have offered my sacrifice and now I can return to business as usual.” Rather, sacrifice is valuable to the degree that it leads to or is combined with a sincere desire to serve God—or, as the Bible says in several places, to walk in the ways of God.5 To be sure, God goes to great lengths to describe the proper way to conduct worship and is not pleased when the rules are broken.6 But above and beyond the rules of worship, God does not like hypocritical religion, which is to say religion that is not combined with moral behavior. The problem for the people, of course, is that sacrificing an animal is a relatively simple act, whereas improving one’s behavior takes considerable effort.
To bring this point up to date, the same perspective applies to prayer. Just as God is not satisfied with sacrifice that is not combined with moral behavior, so God is not satisfied with moving one’s lips as the sole way of atoning for sin. This is true even if the words one utters are full of praise for God and beg God for mercy. Whether we are talking about sacrifice, prayer, or some other form of religious observance, the only way to reinstate oneself with God is to make a concerted effort to become a better person. Prayer can help if one enters into it in a spirit of contrition, but in no sense can it be a shortcut or a substitute for turning one’s behavior around.
A basic rule of jurisprudence is that the severity of the punishment should match the severity of the crime. As Amos sees it, the crime is no small matter. Rather than accuse the people of procedural violations in their religious practice, he charges them with perverting the cause of justice:
They have sold for silver
Those whose cause is just,
And the needy for [the price of] a pair of sandals.
[Ah,] you who trample the heads of the poor
Into the dust of the ground,
And make the humble walk a twisted course! (2:6–7)
As normally understood, justice has two dimensions. The first involves honesty in dealings with other people; thus, one is not to engage in bribery, fraudulent business practices, and the like. The second involves an equitable distribution of society’s resources; thus, one must steer clear of excessive taxation, selling people into slavery for failing to pay trivial sums of money, and facilitating conditions that contribute to vast differences between rich and poor. Having offended God on both counts, the people deserve considerably more than the proverbial slap on the wrist.
It should be understood that the punishment Amos is talking about is not like that handed out to a criminal after the jury returns a guilty verdict. God is not seeking revenge, but reform. Once again, the punishment should be understood along the lines of an exhortation: This is what will happen to you unless you alter your conduct. As the prophet Ezekiel (18:23) put it years later, God does not desire the death of sinners, only that they change their ways.
So understood, Amos’s prediction of what will happen is contingent on the people’s not heeding God’s warning:
I will make the sun set at noon,
I will darken the earth on a sunny day.
I will turn your festivals into mourning
And your songs into dirges;
I will put sackcloth on all loins
And tonsures on every head.
I will make it [the earth] mourn as for an only child,
All of it as on a bitter day. (8:9–10)
In addition to its severity, Amos’s vision of divine retribution is noteworthy for the cosmic nature of its scope. In an environment where people worshiped multiple gods, each god or goddess had a particular area over which he or she held sway, for instance, a river, a mountain, or a forest. In Greek mythology, for example, Hades ruled the underworld, Poseidon the sea, and Zeus the sky. To be sure, the acceptance of monotheism did not occur all at once, but proceeded in stages (see chapter 7). But when it finally took hold, what emerged is the idea that one God is responsible for all of creation, and therefore rules over every nation and geographic region. In Amos’s words:
If they burrow down to Sheol [the netherworld]
From there My hand shall take them;
And if they ascend to heaven,
From there I will bring them down.
If they hide on the top of Carmel,
There I will search them out and seize them;
And if they conceal themselves from My sight
At the bottom of the sea,
There I will command
The serpent to bite them. (9:2–4)
As Jonah learned, it is impossible to flee from such a God. And, we might add, it is equally impossible to deceive God. In another passage (3:6), Amos goes so far as to say that the people’s entire fortunes are in the hands of God: “Does disaster befall a city, / unless God has done it?” If this is true, it makes no difference whether the city is destroyed by an earthquake or a foreign power; in either case, God is responsible.
For modern readers, the tendency to see the hand of God behind every misfortune creates a serious problem (see the fuller discussion in chapter 3). For the present, it is enough to realize that when we move from polytheism to monotheism, we give up the possibility that there is any force in the universe that can prevent God’s will from being realized. One can ask God for leniency, as Moses does after the people turn to the Golden Calf and Amos does twice at 7:1–4 (“How will Jacob survive? He is so small”). But once God has reached a decision, as happens at 7:7–9 (“I will pardon them no more”), nothing can stand in the way.
As is the rule in prophetic literature, the severity of the punishment is tempered by the vision of a better future:
But, I will not wholly wipe out
The House of Jacob—declares the LORD. . . .
I will restore My people Israel.
They shall rebuild ruined cities and inhabit them;
They shall plant vineyards and drink their wine;
They shall till gardens and eat their fruits.
And I will plant them upon their soil,
Nevermore to be uprooted
From the soil I have given them. (9:8–15)7
These lines would make no sense unless they implied that there were enough righteous people in Israel—a holy remnant—for God to maintain the special relationship with the nation. Elsewhere (5:3), Amos suggests that the number of the righteous amounts to 10 percent of the population. In time, the belief that God would uphold the covenant if even a small percentage of Israel upheld its part would sustain the Jewish people through multiple periods of crisis.
One does not have to dig very deeply to see that Amos’s indictment raises an important question. According to his account, the Northern Kingdom had reached a state of almost total depravity. The prophet Hosea, a contemporary of Amos, made a similar appraisal:
There is no honesty and no goodness
And no obedience to God in the land.
[False] swearing, dishonesty, and murder,
And theft and adultery are rife;
Crime follows upon crime! (Hosea 4:1–2)
Was this true? Was the Northern Kingdom any worse than its neighbors, than other Jewish communities before and afterward, or, for that matter, any society for which we have historical records? Isaiah (1:10) compares the Southern Kingdom to Sodom and Gomorrah. Jeremiah (23:11) says that both the priests and prophets of Jerusalem are godless and that their wickedness extends even to the Temple. Ezekiel (16:47–52) maintains that, next to Jerusalem, Sodom does not seem all that bad.
Here, one is inclined to ask: Where is the society that has completely eliminated bribery, dishonesty, and murder? Where are the poor and powerless given the respect they deserve? In what community do worshipers or even priests serve God with complete sincerity? As Yehezkel Kaufmann notes, these shortcomings are found everywhere and in every age.8 Furthermore, where is the evidence that the Northern and Southern Kingdoms were any worse than the other nations that eventually conquered them?
To my mind, Heschel is right to say that if the situation were as bad as the prophets would have us believe, other sources, for example, the books of Kings, would have pointed it out.9 Rather than Israel having hit a low point in the history of the ancient Near East, it is more likely that when it comes to the prophets, we are dealing with people of pronounced moral sensitivity, people who believe that if Israel is to be a light unto the other nations, it must be judged by a higher standard. By their own admission, the prophets are tasked with carrying out the words of God. It is not surprising, then, that injustices that some of us would brush off on the grounds that no one is perfect set them ablaze.
At bottom, the prophets claim that any injustice is intolerable, and, no doubt they are right. When interpreting their messages, however, we cannot lose sight of what is humanly possible and what is not. Who has ever come to God with completely pure hands or a completely pure heart? If the answer is no one, why should we judge society by insurmountable standards? Why should we not set standards which, though not perfect, are at least attainable?
The answer, as Heschel goes on to say, is that the prophets are not comfortable with a middle-of-the-road approach.10 This much is clear from the force of their rhetoric and the dire nature of their warnings. The question raised by the severity of Amos’s words has to do with how we establish moral standards. One view is that it is unrealistic to establish such standards without taking existing behavior into consideration.
Behind this view is the claim that if moral standards expect too much of people, if they ask for unachievable behavior, then people are likely to disregard them. Suppose people in your community, gathered in a public space, heard a modern-day prophet exhort them to give away most of their possessions, refrain from eating elaborate meals, and contribute half of their income to charity. Although one or two people in the crowd might follow such advice, in all likelihood, wouldn’t most of them ignore it? In view of this, would it not be more prudent to offer advice in keeping with what has some chance of success?
In the Torah, there is a marked difference in the environments in which Moses and his brother, Aaron, serve God. Moses speaks to God alone on a mountaintop, without special clothing, gold, jewels, or an elaborately constructed place of worship. As the High Priest, Aaron makes use of all these things. Although one could argue that Moses was closer to God and therefore represents the highest form of worship, the number of people capable of serving God without such accoutrements is extremely limited. Most of us need the beauty and solemnity provided by special clothes and luxuriously constructed surroundings. As Maimonides speculates, the Israelites may not have been ready for an austere form of religion and needed something closer to the kind of religion they observed in Egypt.11 So rather than asking people to ascend a mountain and go without food or water, God commanded the construction of a Tabernacle and joyous festivals.
Even when it comes to the specifics of a legal code—whether secular or religious—there is a question of whether the law should set an ideal standard or reflect the attitudes and practices already in place. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary seems to recognize both. It defines law as “a binding custom or practice of a community” but then offers as an alternative definition: “a rule of conduct or action prescribed [my italics] or formally recognized as binding.”
In many ways, the ancient Rabbis were realists. When they could not resolve a dispute among themselves, they sometimes decided the matter by looking at existing behavior.12 Hillel does this in the aforementioned passage where he says that we are the children of prophets. In other contexts, the Rabbis invoked a principle according to which one should not make a decree unless the majority of the public are able to observe it.13 They reasoned that if the law were too far ahead of the people, it would turn large numbers of them into sinners. On the other hand, there is no denying that some commandments, for example, love of God, fear of God, and love of one’s neighbor, set standards that only the most pious can approach.
Philosophers have debated this question as well. On the side of those who ask for realistic standards are Aristotle (484–322 BCE) and, in a later age, Hegel (1770–1831). Aristotle insisted that we cannot understand what justice is without looking at the constitutions of existing states and asking how they conduct their business. Needless to say, the culture in which he lived was infused with aristocratic values. At one place in his ethical writings, he asks whether it is possible, or at least not easy, to live a completely successful life without external goods such as friends, wealth, political power, high birth, and good looks.14 His answer is no, even though, as he surely knew, Socrates was deficient in almost all of these things. But, Aristotle thought, it is hard to say that a person who lacks these things has the same chance of living a successful life as a person who has them.
Although many people today would disagree, Aristotle was only reflecting the standards that were prevalent in his day. A person without the external goods he mentions would have been unlikely to lead armies into battle, erect public monuments at his own expense, or decide important matters of state. If those were the achievements people at that time thought mattered in life, why pretend that someone who could not accomplish them could be successful? No doubt, our own culture looks at things differently. But then, Aristotle would contend, it is our job to express the values we live by and the kinds of things we think separate a successful life from an unsuccessful one. Behind this approach is the conviction that it does no one any good to hold society to standards that are out of reach for all but a select few.
Along similar lines, Hegel rejected the idea that moral standards can be determined by rational thought independent of the practices of real people. He protested that morality cannot be a set of abstract principles imposed by philosophers on the rest of the population or even by a God issuing orders from heaven. Thus, the only way to investigate a society is to examine “the present and the actual, not the erection of a beyond supposed to exist, God knows where.”15
To his point, it would be just as wrong to hold us to the standards of ancient Israelite society as it would be to hold ancient Israelite society to ours. Our ancestors accepted slavery and polygamy; we do not. We accept freedom of expression and religious toleration; they would not. In view of these differences, it would be folly to think that our understanding of terms like “freedom,” “justice,” or “democracy” would have made sense to them.
By this, Hegel did not mean that every society lives up to the standards it sets for itself. Some societies were failures even if judged by their own standards. Some made no contribution to what Hegel considered the march of history toward its final end: the achievement of human freedom. In fact, Hegel was not entirely satisfied with his own society.16 His point was, it is wrong to hold any society to standards taken out of their cultural and historical context.
To take an obvious example, Hegel thought that the idea of a League of Nations that would secure perpetual peace was unrealistic.17 Because there is no moral authority above individual states, if a conflict breaks out, the only way to settle it would be through war. To be sure, war in Hegel’s day was more contained and more humane than anything we have seen in the past 150 years; but it was war nonetheless. Should a political leader hold out for an ideal that has little chance of working or take the necessary action to protect the homeland? For many the answer is obvious.
The other side of the picture is occupied by Plato (ca. 428–347 BCE) and Kant (1724–1804). In one of his dialogues, Plato has a character say to Socrates that if he is serious about what he is arguing, then human life would have to be turned upside down because most people are doing the opposite of what they should do.18 The answer is, of course, that Socrates was serious and that he pointed to a way of living well beyond anything his fellow Athenians could have imagined—a life that placed little if any importance on wealth, high birth, political power, or physical beauty. Socrates himself was fat, bald, snub-nosed, and had no appetite for political office.
In the eighteenth century, Kant sounded like a prophet himself when he said that to be legitimate, morality must be “stern, unindulgent, and truly commanding.”19 In other words, he thought that morality must impose the highest standards regardless of whether people actually live up to them. If lying is immoral, then, according to his way of thinking, it is always wrong to lie, even if one is telling a white lie or just trying to avoid an unpleasant social situation. To “indulge” in lying would be to rob the commandment “Though shall not lie” of its moral purity.
Kant would have acknowledged the existence of differences between ancient Israelite society and our own. His point was that, whatever the differences might be, and whatever social context we are in, it is still wrong to lie, oppress the poor, or use false weights and measures in the marketplace. In a nutshell, we cannot lower the standards of morality to bring them into conformity with human behavior as we observe it, because human behavior as we observe it leaves much to be desired.
Consider an example. The U.S. Constitution guarantees every citizen equal protection under the law. Although this is a worthy goal, it is doubtful whether the United States or any other country has ever lived up to it. Should we respond to this by saying that no country is perfect and therefore all we can do is proceed as we have been with mixed results, or should we say that the goal of equal protection is so important that we must keep it before our minds at all times? Kant comes down on the side of the latter. The fact that that no society in history has ever lived up to the standard of perfect justice is not a justification for modifying that standard.20 History, as Heschel pointed out, and as Kant would agree, is a nightmare, the realm where greed and power hold sway.21
What worried Kant about lowering the standards of morality to take account of existing behavior was the prospect of society succumbing to moral backsliding. People with fewer scruples than Aristotle or Hegel might say, “Sure, there is cheating in the marketplace; but let’s face it, that’s how people are.” In addition to being a dubious argument, this sentiment is likely to have more appeal to the cheaters than to their victims. Again, from Heschel: “Man must live on the summit to avoid the abyss.”22 The great Jewish Neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) would amend this to say that man must aim for the summit to avoid the abyss. In other words, if we cannot attain perfect justice, we can strive for it in the hope that our efforts will give us something better than what we now have. Were we to give up the goal of perfect justice, not only would we not attain it, we would not even be moving in the right direction.
We do not have to probe very deeply to see that while Amos did not have Plato and Kant’s theoretical sophistication, he was on their side—or, rather, they were on his side. We saw that when Amos says that God has singled out Israel of all the families of the earth (3:2), he follows it with: “That is why I will call you to account / For all your iniquities.” Again, this implies that God expects more, not less, from Israel.23 The fact that the nation has not yet lived up to the expectations God set for it does not show that these expectations are invalid. On the contrary, the expectations apply to every age and every place where Jews find themselves.
If this is right, then Amos would have resisted any suggestion that by insisting on justice for the poor, he was being unrealistic. If the society in which he lived failed to abide by the standards he put forth, then he was perfectly willing to say that his society was at fault and needed to alter its ways. As Kaufmann puts it, the prophets were religious and moral idealists who were deeply disappointed by the gulf that separated the ideal from reality.24 Isaiah, for example, longed for the day when people would put more trust in the word of God than in horses and chariots (see chapter 3). All in all, the prophets believed that desperate measures were needed to correct existing conditions. In their own ways, then, Amos and Plato and Kant were disturbed by the prevailing attitudes of their era and looked forward to a time when humanity would undergo a moral and spiritual awakening that would set things right.
Still, the similarities between a prophet and two philosophers should not prevent us from recognizing the differences between them. Unlike the philosophers, Amos did not offer anything in the way of sustained argument. His technique for effectuating a moral and spiritual awakening was to shame his audience and force it to take a close look at itself. If that did not work, he appealed to the people’s sense of self-preservation by warning of impending disaster.
Not only did Amos not offer sustained arguments; he never offered specific proposals for how to reform society. He never recommended abolishing the priesthood or the monarchy, nor did he call for organized resistance to the way either one was being administered. Add to this that he never displays any readiness to sit down at a table and work through concrete proposals.25 To some, this exemplifies the whole problem with moral idealism: by insisting on absolute standards of right and wrong, it overlooks the possibility of making incremental change.
Rather than incremental change, Amos wanted substantial change. His mission was to call people’s attention to the problem, convey God’s utter displeasure with their behavior, and urge them to act before it is too late. He was successful to the degree that he called attention to the social ills that needed changing. Even today it is hard to read him without feeling a measure of the indignation he felt at the way people treated the poor. But he was not successful in effectuating the moral awakening he hoped for. The people ignored him and continued to act as they had before.
In modern parlance, Amos was a muckraker. Today, we might view him as the patron saint of all those who believe that religious observance must be combined with social action. Martin Luther King Jr., for one, quoted Amos in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. For Amos, religion cannot be a closed environment where prayers are said and ceremonies enacted. The distinction we moderns generally make between secular and religious life would not have made sense to him. Nor did he set his sights on a mystical world far removed from this one. His message to us is all-encompassing and rooted in the present: a person who wants to serve God must be concerned with what is happening at this moment in this world, which is to say with schools, social welfare agencies, orphanages, prisons, law courts, marketplaces, and more. In the end, Amos’s message is astonishingly simple: You cannot serve a just and merciful God unless you are just and merciful yourself.