The man of no

We meet uncomfortable, tiring people in life, who seem to make criticism and rejection the axis of their lives.
People of the no. Taming them is a desperate undertaking. Smarter than the others, it is often not possible to snatch a half from them, not even by taking their cross on themselves, not even by loving them with all their corrosive criticism: which is perhaps just a cry of anguish, a desperate call for help.

Of the same race was Jeremiah, prophet of no, with the difference that he spoke with God. He listened to what God was saying to him, to him and only to him. Uncomfortable words, which God entrusted to him precisely because Jeremiah was a man of no, knowing that he was able to carry them. And to pass them on, with the risk it entailed. If the prophets have a difficult life, Jeremiah has the heaviest burden of all. His book is an incessant questioning of what is taken for granted. The constant attempt to awaken those who doze off in the blissful feeling of having understood and doing well, says André Neher, a great Jewish biblical scholar and thinker, who died in Jerusalem in 1988. Is the Temple the house of God? Yes, but it is simultaneously elsewhere ... Is the Torah the rule of human existence? Yes, but it is the intersection of the infinite roads of an adventure that leads to dizzying heights ...

Is the Covenant with the house of David the messianic promise? Yes, but at each stage the Alliance is doubt, crisis, choice between life and death.
Each verse of Jeremiah's prophecy wants to teach that easy answers are false and blasphemous, precisely because they are easy.
If it were easy to grasp God in a precise moment ... but God is in the passing hurricane, he is an unrepentant Nomad who abandons his territory, leaves it to others to go to the desert, to a refuge for travelers (9,1), and even if the footsteps of those who seek it find it, it maintains its jealous anonymity of Clandestino who runs away. Eyn- Shalom! There is no Peace !, is Jeremiah's key word to define the general instability that does not allow anyone to truly settle in any certainty.

Yet for Jeremiah God is not hidden, on the contrary, unlike other prophets, there are no mediating Angels between the man Jeremiah and therefore between every man and the Face of God.
One can look directly at him, because he is Living and therefore knowable, but only if the human gaze accepts to immerse himself in his distance. God is far away and in his departure he is near. The small house of man and the infinite abode of the Other are mutually accessible, but only if man accepts tireless and profound explorations, a tireless journey as a nomad, an anonymous traveler like Him. Escaped the sword, let's go, on the march , never stop (50,50): only interior exile, to which it even becomes indifferent to be or not exiled in History, is the creator of Presence and Salvation. Here it is yes.

Flaminia Morandi
NP April 2016