It’s not always feasible to embellish things. Taking a balanced system over the edge does not help it. Enter the problem of canonization.

Sadducees—the Temple priests and fierce opponents of rabbis—only accepted the Torah as divine; by some accounts they rejected even Deuteronomy. The Essenes, an old—possibly the oldest—ultra-fundamentalist sect took considerable liberties with prophetic texts. Only pharisaic rabbis pushed the entire Tanakh into the canon.

The move should have led to the radicalization of Judaism, because the historical writings are really militant. If they are a legal guide for us on par with the Torah, then Jews must follow King David’s precepts, such as washing our feet in the blood of the wicked. Rabbis, the leftists in ancient Jewish religious establishment, took a typically leftist approach: if facts contradict the theory, to hell with the facts. They just ignored the historical political examples.

A bigger problem appeared with the prophets. The priests did not recognize them as such for a reason: in Torah law, a prophet is recognized when his prophecies are fulfilled. If he prophecies something which does not happen, he is liar at best. The prophecies must be clear, commonly intelligible—basically, they must be verifiable. Tanakhic prophecies do not pass that test. Even if we ignore biblical minimalists who argue that some prophecies actually described past events, by far the majority of prophecies relate to the end of days. They have not been verified, and in the Torah’s legal system, cannot be called prophecies.

Now, the Tanakhic prophecies may well be true, and indeed we have observed them being fulfilled all around us in the past few decades, but their canonization was baseless, a matter of arbitrary belief.

The canonization was a tremendous disservice to Jewish people because it divided our history into two periods: with prophets and without them. That is entirely mistaken. There were prophets with us all the time. Well before the major prophets, Tanakh speaks matter-of-factly about “sons of prophets,” apparently in large numbers. Even Hagar the pagan concubine was a prophetess, as she met an angel. Common Israelites such as Samson’s father Manoah encountered prophetic visions. Prophecy was common.

And it remained common past the Tanakhic times. Scores of rabbinical and Kabbalah scholars as well as devout Jews had verifiable prophetic revelations. In our time, verifiable prophecy abounds, Bava Salia and Rav Kaduri being some of the obvious examples. When Naser, Rabin, and Sharon died within days of being cursed, there was little room left for doubt; a prominent atheist named Ben Gurion remarked that in this land utter realists have to believe in miracles.

Rabbis postulated themselves as the sole interpreters of law after the prophetic window closed. But it did not. Nor, in a sense, has it ever been there. We learn nothing of practical importance from Isaiah’s writings. Nor can we be sure that Ezekiel Temple’s description is an accurate prophecy rather than delusional mumbo-jumbo which would lead us to construct an impractically small building.
There is no transcendental gap between our times and those of the patriarchs. We are similar: Judah, who habitually befriended road prostitutes, would feel himself at home in North Tel Aviv bars. Prophecy is similar: a lot of practically significant revelations which would never make it into the annals, clear divine answer to certain supplications, and many attempts at claiming unverifiable end-of-times mega-prophecies.

There is no need to wait for every oddity the prophets have described. Honest rabbis recognized that tacitly. Rambam, for example, relegated the “lion will lie down with the lamb” prophecy to mere metaphor.

One, we have prophecy with us: God did not leave his people. Two, we don’t need major prophecy: the Torah is neither high in the heaven, nor deep in the sea; it is with us, clear and mandatory.

God did his part of the deal: we are gathered from all corners of earth into the Land of Israel and have defeated our enemies against all odds. We must follow through with our part: annex our land, expel our enemies, and build the Temple. God might not descend into the non-existent Ark, but our life would surely be more comfortable.