The Prophetic Frame for a Wounded Nation – 3rd

When catastrophe strikes a people, the first instinct is often to reach for explanation—some narrative that might make sense of the senseless. But the prophets of Israel rarely offered explanations in the aftermath of disaster. What they offered instead was orientation: a way to stand inside the rupture without losing one’s moral bearings or one’s soul.

This chapter names the prophetic frame through which Paths to Shalom is written—because the prophetic tradition is the only vocabulary large enough, honest enough, and compassionate enough to carry the weight of this moment.

The Prophetic Tradition as Moral Compass

The prophets were not fortune-tellers. They were truth-tellers. They spoke into moments when the fabric of society had frayed—politically, ethically, spiritually—and they insisted that catastrophe was not the end of the story. They addressed trauma without trivializing it, injustice without excusing it, and despair without surrendering to it.

When I returned from Israel after the October 7 attacks, I carried the same mixture of grief and hope that reverberates through the prophetic books. The grief was immediate: loss of life, shattering of security, the relentless ache of families with missing loved ones. The hope was quieter but unmistakable—a hope rooted not in optimism, but in the same prophetic realism that shaped the Hebrew Bible. It is the hope that God does not abandon a broken people, and that a community capable of justice, mercy, and humility can still rise from ashes.

The prophets teach that the measure of a nation is not its strength alone, but its compassion; not its victories, but its commitments; not its power, but its pursuit of justice.

“What does the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)