ceasing to look to the numbed and dull empire that never intended to answer in the first place

Beginning with the whole paragraph I ended with last time from The Prophetic Imagination:

That cry which is the primal criticism is articulated again in 8:12. Moses and Aaron now know that serious intervention and intercession must be made to Yahweh the God of freedom and not to the no-gods of Egypt. In 5:8 

[And the tale of the bricks, which they did make heretofore, ye shall lay upon them; ye shall not diminish aught thereof; for they are idle; therefore they cry, saying: Let us go and sacrifice to our God.  JPS 1917]*

and 15 

[Then the officers of the children of Israel came and cried unto Pharaoh, saying: ‘Wherefore dealest thou thus with thy servants?  JPS 1917]

there is still a cry to the Pharaoh, still a looking to the empire for help and relief. “Therefore they cry, let us go and offer sacrifice to our God.  Then the foreman of the people of Israel came and cried to Pharaoh.  . . .

By the middle of the plague cycle Israel has disengaged from the empire,  cries no more to it, expects nothing of it, acknowledges it  in no way, knows it cannot keep its promises, and knows that nothing is either owed it or expected of it.  That is the ultimate criticism which leads to dismantling.  

In the narrative criticism moves and builds.  The grieving cry learns to turn away from false listeners and turn toward the one who can help.  Prophetic criticism, as Dorothee Soell has suggested, consists in mobilizing people to their real restless grief and in nurturing them away from cry-hearers who are inept at listening and indifferent in response.  Surely history consists primarily in speaking and being answered, in crying and being heard.  If that is true it means there can be no history in the empire because the cries are never heard and the speaking is never answered.  And if the task of prophesy is to empower people to engage in history, then it means evoking cries that expect answers, learning to address them where they will be taken seriously, and ceasing to look to the numbed and dull empire that never intended to answer in the first place. 

The radicalism of this passage, its depth of reading of the text to find things in it I certainly never noticed or read anyone else pointing out is  

astonishing and, for me at least, inspiring.  In the last several years of re-engagement with the Jewish-Christian Scriptures I am constantly struck at the depth of understanding of human consciousness, human society, human history and the nature of human evil and what has worked to overcome it.   Compared to this the most radical of secular articulation of the world is pathetically partial, incomplete and inadequate, even when it goes somewhat deeper than the typical discourse on these things.

Of course, my purpose in advocating the reading of Brueggemann’s great work and the texts and scholars he cites is to address our own oppression under the cartoon Pharaoh-Herod-Nero who is piddling as the world burns and his like in the world in the age of Billionaires and how to end it.  I am a political blogger who knows through long experience and study of the failure of secular politics that politics isn’t enough.  Not nearly enough. 

What the American left, other lefts, need to do is not only to stop expecting that capitalism, markets, the economic and other elites will ever address our vital needs and legitimate grievances, in the forms those are most explicitly manifested and most commonly conceived, we must also face the fact that the other no-gods of our idolatry, the Constitution, the “enlightenment”, Marxism, socialism, the social sciences, economic theory, “theory”, the unnamed meta-god of ideology the ism-ism is not going do it either because they and academia and the media are, in fact, largely the agents of the same power that has produced the series of gangsters and their goons for the past century and a half who we are oppressed by.

The radicalism of the Mosaic accounts is beyond all of that. It is well for a contemporary leftist to consider that that definitively failed no-god of Marxism.  The radicalism of the book of Exodus is, I have come to believe, is a more radical departure from the capitalistic-industrial-modernist Pharaoh than the  academically-journalistically led, secular, materialistic, scientistic left can imagine because it is, in fact, not in radical opposition to the “right” it opposes but which it is just the other face of the Janus of never-ending sameness that goes on year, after year, after year.  In the meantime, people live and die lives of misery, here, and slavery and terror under the "alternative". 

* I have decided to set the imposition of some of the cited passages not included in Walter Brueggemann’s text in this way from an online edition of the 1917 Jewish Publications Society version.  That may change as this continues, obviously any future New Testament passages won’t be found in that source.  I’m not sure which version Brueggemann used in the passages he included in his text.  Just to be clear what I’m doing here as opposed to how he did it.