Principle #6: How Prophecy Works
The reality of prophecy is a direct connection with God without any intermediary. The Jewish
people since the time of the 1 st Beit HaMikdash, the Temple, had the ability to read and write,
many thousands of years before the general population of the world learned how to read and
write. In Europe the masses only learned how to read a write over 200 years ago, yet the
Jewish people have always been known as the “People of the Book”
However, there is a strange phenomenon that since the times of the 2 nd Temple the Jewish
people have not coherently or extensively written down history until modern times, aside
from Josephus, who was hired by Rome to write the chronicles of history. If the Jewish
people are in fact people of the book, why did we stop writing our own history, an essential
part of each nation’s story? The answer to that is the fact that prophecy ceased during the
2 nd Temple, since the times of Esther and Mordechai. Therefore, recording history for the
Jewish people was always dependent on having prophecy in the world, a deep
understanding of the essence of reality and what will develop from the current reality. That is
the true depiction of history, and without prophecy history is tainted, and not accurate, rather
completely subjective.
Prophecy is not a gift given to specific individuals, where in other cultures and faiths is
depicted as a connection from the Divine to any man, regardless of their moral stature or
intellectual ability. In contrast, the prophecy in the Torah is a partnership between man and
God, a development of man’s moral achievements and progress.
There are 12 levels of prophecy, the highest level is when the person envisions an
experience communicating with a Malach, and the lowest level of prophecy is when a person
gets filled with a desire and a will to do something good for the Jewish People, and acts
upon in and God grants him the wisdom to implement it. An example of the higher level is
Yehoshua meeting the Malach before battling his first battle in Jericho, and an example of
the lowest level of prophecy is that of Samson, who God gave him strength and insight to
combat the Phillistines whom ruled Israel at the time.
The second level is understanding how prophecy is achieved. Prophecy is, in fact, a gift, but
it is only given to those who earn the spiritual status worthy of receiving prophecy, not to the
masses. There are many levels for achieving the spiritual level of prophecy –