Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 49
“Modern man may be characterized as a being who is callous to catastrophes. A victim of enforced brutalization, his sensibility is being increasingly reduced; his sense of horror is on the wane. The distinction between right and wrong is becoming blurred. All that is left to us is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror.”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)
Sensibility comes from the Latin meaning “that can be perceived by the senses”, horror comes from the Latin meaning “tremble/shudder” and wane comes from the Latin meaning “vain”. Using these definitions, the last two phrases of the second sentence make me shudder!
Rabbi Heschel is calling us to account, I hear him demanding we take notice and stock of where we are and who we are as human beings, as partners with God in making our corner of the world a little better than how we found it. He is calling us to reawaken our senses, to stop using them as validations for our unspiritual, our immoral behaviors. He is, to me, reminding us of the Divine command to care for the world and all of God’s creations that are in it! Rather than being sensitive to the slights and the put-downs, rather than allowing ourselves to be victims, duped or tricked, into believing we have to be callous/hard-skinned, Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom informs us that we can use our senses to perceive what is and how we can make it better! Paraphrasing President John F. Kennedy: ask not what life can do for you, ask what you can do for life. We cannot enhance our life nor the lives of anyone else when our sensibility is reduced, lessened, when our sensibility is used to perceive slights and how to ‘win’, how to control, how to be brutes, how to enforce our will rather than promote God’s will. Yet, we continue to engage in actions that reduce our sensibility to what is good, what is holy and what is needed.
Indeed, we shudder less and less with each passing day. We are becoming more and more indifferent to the evil, to the negative, to the harms we inflict, to the moral injuries we suffer and we inflict on another(s), to our reduced sensibility and to the horror of our vanities. This is not a Jewish problem, a Christian problem, a Muslim problem, a Buddhist problem, an American problem, an Asian problem, etc, it is a human problem and we are either willfully blind to what is happening to and within each of us or we are wearing blinders and surrendering to callousness, to being a victim, to going along with the brutalizations of another(s), to being dictated to. We are losing our ability to be horrified a little more each day. Remembering these words were published in 1955 and this was 10 years after the fall of Nazi Germany, we were in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, Civil Rights movement had begun, anti-semitism was alive and well with College Quotas on Jews, etc, we can see how progressive, how cunning and baffling a situation we find ourselves in today.
It is time for all of us, human beings, to take off our hard skin, to stop duping ourselves and allowing our self-deception to rule us. It is time for us to stop being ruled by dull and stupid people and be dull and stupid our self. It is time for us to awake our senses to what is and how to make it better, rather than sense how we can exploit the vulnerabilities of another(s) person. It is time for us to shudder more, to tremble more because we are accountable for what is going on and one day our actions will be shown to us and we will have to face our self. We do this by not buying into the lies we tell ourselves and the lies another tells us. We do this by seeing the divinity in each and every person. We do this by remembering that when we stand before another human being, we stand before an Image of God. We do this by letting go of our vanity and care more about what we do rather than how we look. We do this by being grateful for all the wisdom and kindness we have been shown throughout our life, we do this by honoring the wisdom of our different spiritual paths and living their principles in all of our affairs.
In recovery, we regain our ability to shudder and tremble, we regain our ability to perceive what is right and good. We regain our ability to be human again, to love, to be kind, to be just, to practice mercy, to be in truth. We take our own inventory and we answer to God, to another person and to the myriad of people we have brutalized. We are able to take off our hard skin and be callous no more. In recovery, we let go of our need to make another(s) bend to our will, to make another(s) serve our desires and we bend to the will of decency, goodness, love, kindness, ie to the will of God.
I took off the hard skin a long time ago and everything that happens in life impacts me deeply and greatly-be it dull and stupid, kind and loving, be it callousness, be it truth and mercy. I don’t always show it and I am vulnerable to the actions of those around me, to the actions that go on in the world at large and I get frustrated and impatient with people who want to continue to harm someone else just because they can. I did this in my pre-recovery days and every time I see someone doing this to someone else, I want to (and often do) scream WTF! I resonate to Rabbi Heschel’s words above (and just about all of them) because he is speaking the words of my soul and, I believe, the words that are in everyone’s soul. I still get dull and stupid at times, I still am inappropriate when my sensibilities are offended and I am getting one grain of sand better each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark