G-d is raging in the prophet's words

We are the only animal to conjure fire. We are the only creatures in the history of this planet to punish with flame.

Aboriginal cultures have observed birds of prey fanning wildfires to route prey into the open. Chimpanzees appear to understand how flames spread, and can reason how to best avoid them. Deer often flock to recently scorched land, indicating an awareness of the new plant growth that sprouts from soil enriched by ash.

But it’s just us that truly know fire’s intricacies. We turn it into symbology. We are the ones who can direct it in such a way as to inflict hurt beyond the physical. We are living things capable of orchestrating such an otherwise natural, objectively mundane release of energy so that it sears the soul.

US Air Force active duty member Aaron Bushnell knew this when he distilled humanity’s cumulative knowledge of fire—our reverence, fear, need, and abuse of it—into an act of singular, prophetic desperation on February 25, 2024, when he disavowed his part in our complicity in Palestinian genocide before setting himself aflame.

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Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote “G-d is raging in the prophet’s words.” Where we see everyday acts of injustice, selfishness, or even outright evil, a prophet sees every wrong take on “cosmic proportions.”

“Their breathless impatience with injustice may strike us as hysteria,” says Heschel. “But if such deep sensitivity to evil is to be called hysterical, what name should be given to the abysmal indifference to evil which the prophet bewails?”

Free Palestine, Aaron Bushnell proclaimed on Sunday until he physically couldn’t.

Free Palestine, Aaron Bushnell declared on Sunday while a cop stood nearby, gun drawn and aimed at the officer’s smoldering antithesis.

Exodus includes the story of G-d manifesting to Moses in the form of a burning bush that would not be consumed. In the form of a living thing that could withstand fire. Aaron Bushnell was a living thing, and yet he still conjured G-d onto himself knowing he would be destroyed.

“G-d is raging in the prophet’s words,” said Heschel.

“Free Palestine,” Aaron Bushnell raged until humanity’s fires consumed him entirely.

(((EC)))