#466: What is a Prophet?

“The prophet is a person who suffers from a profound maladjustment to the spirit of society, with its conventional lies, with its concessions to man’s weakness. Compromise is an attitude the prophet abhors. This seems to be the implication of his thinking: Compromise has corrupted the human species. All elements within his soul are insurgent against indifference to aberrations. The prophet’s maladaptation to his environment may be characterized as moral madness (as distinguished from madness in a psychological sense).

“The mind of the prophet, like the mind of a psychotic, seems to live in a realm different from the world which most of us inhabit. Yet what distinguishes the two psychologically is most essential. The prophet claims to sense, to hear, and to see in a way totally removed from a normal perception, to pass from the actual world into a mysterious realm, and still be able to return properly oriented to reality and to apply the content of his perception to it. While his mode of perception may differ sharply from the perceptions of all other human beings, the ideas he brings back to reality become a source of illumination of supreme significance to all other human beings.”

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Heschel, Abraham Joshua. The Prophets (pp. 521-522). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Abraham Joshua Heschel  (January 11, 1907 – December 23, 1972) was a Polish-American rabbi and one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century. Heschel, a professor of Jewish mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, authored a number of widely read books on Jewish philosophy and was a leader in the civil rights movement. |  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Joshua_Heschel