Another week and another mass shooting with its own brand of phobia connected. We so very much need prophetic voices with clear expressions for love and unity and sturdy backbones for leadership.  Right now, our world needs these voices, these people, this leadership to offset the rising tide of hate and lack of compassion for one another both individually and corporately.  But sometimes it is as if there is no clear vision or any imagination to create a vision for a different future where these kinds of atrocities don’t go on normalized. 

Quakers have stood in the forefront for many movements such as abolition and been very active in the background of others such as the Civil Rights Movement. The quote attributed to the Quaker tradition is “Let your life speak”. It is an expression of the core Quaker belief that actions and integrity are a powerful form of communication, embodying one’s values more deeply than mere words. “Don’t listen to what they say unless they practice it in what they do” is a concept steeped in calls to live in alignment with our highest principles and “the light” within. It is only part of our Integrity distinctive, but a very important one. We are to act as an example to others. 

We are dedicated to this tradition of letting our life do the preaching and to also speaking truth to power.  Quakers have never shied away from taking stances rooted in deeply held compassion and enormous amounts of goodwill. Hopefully a Quaker will rise to the occasion in this desperate time that we are in now.  Someone must model unrelenting compassion and unstoppable goodwill.

A Jewish word for this extreme form of compassion and goodwill is Hesed. It is H-E-S-E-D and is found 248 times in the Old Testament, mostly describing God’s love for us — steadfast and unwavering.  In the Hebrew Scriptures, hesed is not merely sentiment or emotion; rather, it is relational, concrete, and enacted form of love. Hesed is the glue of relationships, the mercy that endures, and the loyalty that persists in spite of failure or betrayal.  It embodies fidelity.  It is a deep, persistent, and active compassion that reflects not only God’s nature but also the expected posture of God’s people. The full realization, both in the ancient world and in contemporary spiritual practice, requires more than simple human benevolence. It is the willingness to stand up to power and to make changes in the system when they do not reflect God’s steadfast love.  It is a love that we as humans rarely personally reach, but it is what we all imagine when we want to be loved.  It is our vision of a better world and the fuel to get there.

To speak to this is to be a prophet.  A prophet is one who discerns, challenges, and calls forth justice.  Without this prophetic voice and this dedication to live out our values of integrity and peace and equality, we lose our transformative power in this world.

For hesed to be true to its purpose, it relies on a prophetic voice.  It relies on our ability to exam our hearts and our intentions. We need to constantly be using hesed as the gold standard as we critique our own lives.  How does what I am involved in show this love?  How does this love transform the world to make it more compassionate, more aware, more dedicated to the good in all people?

The prophetic voice is not simply about people who were foretelling future events. It is a voice that speaks truth into the present—a voice that critiques, inspires, and convicts. Prophets are interpreters of God’s will, calling people to account, challenging injustice, and articulating the demands of life.

The Hebrew prophets were persistent in their call for hesed as the heart of true religion. Consider the words of Micah 6:8: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness (hesed), and to walk humbly with your God?” Here, hesed is paired with justice and humility—a triad that grounds integrity of spirit with both what is practical and what is ethical. 

We are not required to love God for God to love us.  God’s hesed is true hesed — unconditional.  Yet justice is demanded of all recipients of hesed, or God’s steadfast love. God does not want ritual to prove that we love God.  God requires that the love of God is to be shown broadly in all the earth.  God’s compassion encourages us to help heal the world of all of its ways of hurting others. To be a prophetic voice is to speak to a new truth, a different vision of the world, that is kinder, gentler, more honorable and trustworthy.  To get there we must be able to imagine a new world with a new way of interacting with one another. The prophetic voice insists that hesed is not merely a private virtue but a public mandate.  It is one of love and not religiosity.

It takes imagination and inspiration. Moses saw his people in slavery and imagined a whole new promised land, free of the trappings of slavery and oppression, and something new, something completely different but all based on hesed.

In every era, the prevailing winds of culture, politics, and personal ambition threaten to erode the practice of hesed. Societies drift toward self-interest, exclusion, and the marginalization of the vulnerable. Hesed, in contrast, calls for radical inclusion—welcome for the stranger, provision for the poor, protection for the oppressed.

This radical orientation is always in tension with the status quo, and it is here that the prophetic voice becomes indispensable. The prophet speaks what others cannot or will not see. They name the failures of the community, expose the hypocrisy of religion that does not show real compassion, and ignite imagination for a different world. Hesed without this prophetic impulse risks becoming complacency—goodwill that never challenges injustice or seeks transformation and feel-good religious experience that does not enhance our deep, internal need to love and to be loved.

Walter Brueggemann, the noted Old Testament scholar, describes the prophetic imagination as the ability to envision and articulate alternatives to the dominant culture.  He writes in the book Prophetic Imagination: “We also are children of the royal consciousness (his phrase for status quo and dominant culture). All of us, in one way or another, have deep commitments to it. So the first question is: How can we have enough freedom to imagine and articulate a real historical newness in our situation? That is not to ask, as Israel’s prophets ever asked, if this freedom is realistic or politically practical or economically viable.  To begin with such questions is to concede everything to the royal consciousness (or status quo, or dominant culture) even before we begin.  We need to ask not whether it is realistic or practical or viable but whether it is imaginable.  We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and co-opted by the royal consciousness that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought.”

We have to commit to envisioning Hesed, in its biblical fullness.  It requires imagination. It needs to be continually renewed, re-envisioned, and energized by the prophetic witness, lest it become sentimental, safe, or irrelevant.

Throughout history, moments of profound hesed and the ability to imagine a loving and caring world are often precipitated or catalyzed by prophetic voices. Consider the abolitionist movement, led by individuals who, some compelled by a Quaker vision of an equal world for all, challenged the prevailing norms of their societies and risked their lives for the liberation of others. Their hesed was not passive; it was a fierce and costly love, animated by prophetic critique of injustice.  Many were hung, beaten and incarcerated, yet the Underground Railroad prevailed and set a path to freedom.

Similarly, modern civil rights movements have been deeply shaped by leaders (Martin Luther King Jr) whose prophetic voices called communities to enact hesed in the face of oppression. Their words and actions wove together compassion and truth-telling, mercy and justice, love and accountability.

These figures remind us that the power of hesed is most transformative when it is animated by those willing to speak the truth, challenge injustice, and imagine a world reordered by real love.

When weakened hesed is practiced without a prophetic edge, it can devolve into charity without justice—a benevolence that soothes the conscience but leaves systems of oppression intact. The Hebrew prophets warn against such distortions. Isaiah 1:17 calls for both mercy and reform: “Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.”

Without the prophetic voice, hesed risks becoming transactional—an episodic kindness that never asks why suffering persists. It may comfort but not confront. It may help the needy without questioning the structures that create the need. In so doing, it falls short of  a vision which demands not only mercy but also the transformation of people, communities, and societies.

For faith communities, the interdependence of hesed and the prophetic voice is a call to holistic practice. It is not enough to be kind; one must also be courageous. Not enough to show mercy; one must also demand justice. The nurturing of hesed requires listening for—and sometimes becoming—the prophetic voice that calls forth new possibilities.

Hesed is a transformative force, a love that persists, creates, and redeems. Yet, in a world weighed down by injustice and inertia, hesed alone is not enough. It must be paired with the prophetic voice, which gives it direction, urgency, and power. The prophet calls the community to account and ignite the imagination for a world reshaping it into a place with more, not less, love. In this way, hesed and the prophetic voice together become instruments of change, justice, and hope—not only for individuals but for societies.

May this community who seeks to embody hesed never lose their prophetic voice and may those who speak prophetically do so always with hearts full of lovingkindness. Only then can the covenantal dream of hesed find its full and radiant expression in the world today and tomorrow.

Queries:

• How does what I am involved in show this hesed love? 
• How does this hesed love transform the world to make it more compassionate, more aware, more dedicated to the good in all people?
• How am I being called to be a prophetic voice in this time of hate and self-centeredness?