Think not that it’s escaped me, the haunting parallels between Pope Leo’s lung surgery and mine. It made me weep, quite frankly, stirred a looping reel of picture frames, the not-so-long-ago hours: awaking to the news that cancer was the demon anchored in my lung, the tidal wave of fear that took months and months to quell (and still arises in advance of every scan). I wish that fate on no one.
Turns out, only 22 out of 100,000 Americans are diagnosed with pulmonary adenocarcinoma each year, putting Il Papa and me in a rather rare camp (my particular subtype is even rarer, with only 2.78 cases for every 100,000 Americans; the pope’s subtype isn’t yet known). Winnowing those numbers further, the odds of two unrelated people both being diagnosed with pulmonary adenocarcinoma is 1 in 2,270; and the odds that those two unrelated people would both be diagnosed with adenocarcinoma and undergo either a lobectomy or segmentectomy is 1 in 113,500, according to the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program.
No surprise, I put words to what rumbled in my heart, something of a letter to Il Papa, from one lung-cancer kid to another. It’s an essay that might be running elsewhere online, and while I await the verdict on that, I turn my attentions to other matters in the news….
***
The prophet’s ear perceives the silent sigh.
—Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (1962)
I happen to have picked up what I’d consider a juicy read, though you might not: Abraham Joshua Heschel’s plainly titled, The Prophets, oft considered a flat-out masterpiece of biblical scholarship. It’s a tome that redefines prophecy not as fortune-telling on some ecstatic order, but rather “an intimate, agonizing sharing in divine pathos”—namely, God’s grief over human injustice. It’s a book sure to get your blood running.
And it so happened that as I was leafing through its 522 riveting pages along came word that those blunderbusters Hegseth & Trump were seriously considering the live-stream of not just any execution but of execution by firing squad. Of an old guy in a wheelchair. An old guy who admittedly committed an abhorrent, brutal, awful act, fatally shooting 13 unarmed U.S. soldiers at the Fort Hood military base in 2009, and leaving another 33 injured and scarred for life. Is not life behind bars, in a concrete cell with no sunlight and faint stale air, merciless enough? (Late-breaking news: Trump at last has ditched the gruesome plan.)
Were we meant to sit down in front of our tellies and watch a bullet-riddled body fall limp to the ground?
Bring me the airsick bag.
Maybe it was the confluence of circumstance, or maybe a red line truly had been crossed, but I looked up from the page, and realized I’ve been lacking—vehemently lacking—in the call-to-justice department incumbent on every one of us with a voice, a keyboard, a microphone, or a soul.
Heschel set me squarely in my place. Left me no room for squirming or escape. Though the register of the prophet might be somewhat above my norm.
“What manner of [hu]man is the prophet?” the late, great rabbi asks in the opening of his landmark critique of prophecy. He had me but two pages in as he laid out his take on prophets, those who rant and rave, those who “speak and act as if the sky were about to collapse,” in Heschel’s words.
He’s not done: “The prophet is a [hu]man who feels fiercely. God has thrust a burden upon his soul, and he is bowed and stunned at man’s fierce greed. Frightful is the agony of man; no human voice can convey its full terror. Prophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profaned riches of the world. It is a form of living, a crossing point of God and man. God is raging in the prophet’s words.”
We need more prophets, people.
We need be less afraid to put breath to our outrage, to call out the sins we see. And there are plenty.
Heschel has more to say: “[T]heir breathless impatience may strike us as hysteria,” he writes of those pained souls who cannot turn a blind eye to impertinences we lesser ones might brush off. To the prophet, the world “reels in confusion,” “is sleepless and grave,” and “the frankincense of charity fails to sweeten cruelties.”
In other words, it’s bleak. Bleak, bleak, bleak out there.
And just think—Amos and Isaiah, Jeremiah and Micah, they all stalked the sun-baked wilderness long before there was a Hegseth, Musk, or Trump.
God’s grief over human injustice. . .
God, I tell you, is weeping.
Bring on the prophets. Blunt they might be, but imperative they are. And we are a people in dire need.
Forgive me for being blunter here than is my usual way, and do not mistake me for playing at prophecy. But I’ve held back for too, too long. I’ve feared offending, yes; was intent on making this a place where humanity in all its quirks and wonders is embraced. I believe in making this a refuge from the cacophonies of the self-absorbed public square. Didn’t want to add my screeds to the noise. Who am I anyway, but a silver-haired sexagenarian (note: that means someone in her 60s; read nothing else into it) who sits in the dark of her predawn kitchen often pouring her heart and her soul onto the page?
Yet in my failings I’ve failed the moral imperative.
Oh, I’ve privately ranted and raved, and dropped a motherlode of f-bombs. Years ago (2016, to be precise), our secondborn gave me for Christmas a “dammit doll,” a ragdoll likeness of the unfortunate holder of 45th and 47th presidential terms, a totem meant to be thwacked sharply against a coffee table’s edge whene’er the furies froth. And, believe you me, I’ve thwacked it plenty, but what we witness now far exceeds the outrage a stuffed rag might absorb. And the time to speak up is more than upon us.
Consider this list of recent, real-time atrocities:
Trump literally cheered on a man who was beating a female protester at a rally in Youngstown, Ohio, the other night. “For good measure,” added political commentator Cliff Schecter, writing for BlueAmp Media, Trump mocked the victim as “fat” and a “guy” as she—not her assailants—was being escorted out of the rally by the police.
Then there’s Pete the secretary of the so-dubbed Department of War salivating over the live-streaming of that firing-squad execution, an abomination called out by the Vatican as “truly incomprehensible,” by the U.S. Catholic bishops as a “barbaric promotion of the culture of death.”
Pope Leo himself, in the days before he succumbed to lung surgery, took to X to post: “The death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person. The common good can be safeguarded and the requirements of justice can be met without recourse to capital punishment: effective systems of detention have been developed that protect citizens while at the same time do not completely deprive those who are guilty of the possibility of redemption.” And being social media savvy, Il Papa capped that off with one clear hashtag: “#NoDeathPenalty.”
The litany of mortal sins goes on: We bomb countries. Cut lifesaving aid. Betray longtime allies; cozy up to thugs. Gut the CDC, while ICE tackles to the ground—or shoots at point-blank range—ICU nurses, substitute teachers, landscape crews, roofers, line cooks, fathers with babies in the back seat, mothers trying to drop their kids at school. It’s been written that our president (who for reasons unknown fancies Vladimir Putin) “cheers the Russian roulette of our republic—as he encourages government not by ballot, but billy club. Or bullet.”
In a nutshell, it’s some ring of hell here in America these days, and if that offends you then I am at a loss. Because in no Book of Justice, of Moral Order, of Plain Old Human Decency do any of these sins pass muster. To not call them out is to partake of sin itself, the sin of looking the other way, the sin of silently biding our time, letting others take the heat—and the hit.
I cannot claim to be a soldier in the army of the Good if I cower in fear of ruffling feathers, of staking my claim in solid ground.
I weep for this country and the discordant song it sends from within its border walls. We the people are not a people out to get the other guy. I am not here to take away your dreams. To empty your medicine chest, your gas tank, your pantry shelves. I cannot abide the graft and double-dealing. I do not want my White House bulldozed, and a hyper-bloated gilded ballroom raised. I wholeheartedly detest the re-writing of history, the erasure of injustices and sins this nation too long endorsed.
To me, as Heschel put it, the moral state of affairs is dreadful, and the world reels in confusion. I am sleepless, and grave are my concerns. The frankincense of faux charity—$100 health care checks for Medicare Part B enrollees or $500 refund checks for Affordable Care Act enrollees—fails to sweeten cruelties.
For the past seventeen months, the one singular voice that rose above the din was that of the pope now momentarily sidelined by that cancer in his lungs. All the more reason we need cease our silence, let our outrage out.
Micah gets the last word: “It has been told to you, O man, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”
Speak up. Be bold. Or else, listen for the weeping: God’s grief over human injustice—another name for the many, many ways we screw things up here on this holy, holy earth.
Just last week, Anne Carson, the Canadian poet, novelist, and former classics professor, won the Nobel Prize for Literature: “For her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.”
This gem seemed more than fitting for my screed above….
“GOD’S JUSTICE”
In the beginning there were days set aside for various tasks.
On the day He was to create justice
God got involved in making a dragonfly
and lost track of time.
It was about two inches long
with turquoise dots all down its back like Lauren Bacall.
God watched it bend its tiny wire elbows
as it set about cleaning the transparent case of its head.
The eye globes mounted on the case
rotated this way and that
as it polished every angle.
Inside the case
which was glassy black like the windows of a downtown bank
God could see the machinery humming
and He watched the hum
travel all the way down turquoise dots to the end of the tail
and breathe off as light.
Its black wings vibrated in and out.
—Anne Carson, Winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature
What’s the outrage of the week (moral or otherwise) that you’re ready, willing, and able to speak up about? Feel free to let it rip here…
