In the 1976 film Network, a washed-up news anchor named Howard Beale tells America to open its windows and shout into the night that they are “mad as hell” and not going to take this anymore.
Fifty years on, we have become fluent in outrage. Anger has become our common tongue, and courtesy of our mobile phones, we don’t even need to open a window anymore.
But Beale is not just an angry man. In an important sense, he is also a prophet.
Parshat Shoftim describes the navi, the prophet, the one into whose mouth God promises to put His words. The prophet is the conscience of the nation: fury at what is, spoken in the name of what ought to be.
But the prophet has limits. His fire is genuine, yet it has nowhere to go. A prophet can name what is broken. He cannot, on his own, build what would mend it.
That, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks argued, is why the Sages made an astonishing claim about the era that followed prophecy. The Talmud says prophecy passed to the sages, and that a sage is greater than a prophet.
The prophet hears the word of God; the sage pores over a text. The sage then interprets those texts and translates them into systems and rules by which ordinary people can live. The sages thus did what the prophets could not: they took a “burning vision” and turned it into a way of life.
Take delivering rebuke. The prophet conveys God’s word, and his duty is discharged whether a single soul listens or not. The sages made rebuke a universal obligation, requiring that it be offered patiently wherever there was a chance of being heard, while ruling that where it would not be heeded, silence too is a commandment.
Or take peace. Isaiah dreamed of the wolf lying down with the lamb; the sages built what they called the ways of peace: feed the non-Jewish poor, visit their sick, bury their dead. One is a vision that lifts the heart. The other is an infrastructure that holds a society together on a Monday morning.
Prophecy endures, Rabbi Sacks wrote, only when it is “translated from utopian ideals into practical policies.” The sage is the one who, warmed by the prophet’s fire but no longer ruled by it, works out how to get from here to there.
The Talmud describes a heavenly voice as a bat kol. Beale’s shout is a bat kol of its own: righteous truth thundering down from a screen, certain and loud. But a world is not mended by a louder voice. It is mended the way the sages mended it: by people who stop waiting for the voice from above, sit down together, and argue their way toward something they can build and own—the slow, human work of mending the world together.
Rabbi Matt Marks is Executive Head of Tribe UK, the youth arm of the United Synagogue, and a PhD researcher specialising in the thought of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. He lives in Brighton & Hove with his wife and their four daughters, where he also serves as a Strategic Adviser for Jewish Life and works with the UK Jewish Chaplaincy team.
This essay was written as part of our collaboration with The Rabbi Sacks Legacy Sacks Scholars.
