Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 65
“The greater the man, the more he is exposed to sin. Piety is at times evil in disguise,, an instrument in the pursuit of power.” (God in Search of Man pg. 370)
In Iran, a man who was protesting against the Iranian Morality Police and their killing of Mahsa Amini was executed for “enmity against God”. In Israel, an orthodox person killed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for making peace which made him a traitor to God. In Saudi Arabia, Jamal Khashoggi was killed and dismembered because he wanted more freedoms and decency in the Kingdom. In America, mass shootings, bombings happen because people are defending the Bible. A woman’s right to choose is a sin against God, murder according to some religious people. All across the globe, religion is used to do evil, “piety is at times evil in disguise”!
I am fascinated as to how this has happened, I know it goes back to Greek mythology, to Hammurabi, continues through he Crusades and was a cover-up for the killing of Indigenous People in the New World because they were, after all, savages. Pious Christians believed it was within their purview to kill Jews because of the lie that Jews killed Christ. They would search out Jews to kill around Easter time so they could get revenge? Piety and power are a folio a deus, a lethal combination, as we have witnessed throughout our history and in our present day.
We have all witnessed ‘pious’ people who do the most unGodly actions, like lacking mercy, perverting justice and walking in their own paths rather than God’s. We have all watched in anger, horror, disgust as pious people like Pat Robertson blames 9/11 on the LGBTQ community, on ensuring equal rights for people of color and women, etc. We have witnessed the crowning of politicians by The Fellowship Foundation as a means of promoting Christ is a Lion, their own version of Prosperity Gospel, into the Government of the United States. We are watching a tremendous rise in Congresspeople who are supporting making the US a Christian Nation and Christian Nationalism is on the rise, as is White Supremacists philosophy.
All of these horrors are done under the cloak of religion. All of this lies and subterfuges are done under the guise of piety, with religious fervor and led by some of the biggest promotors of ‘the good book’, like Jerry Falwell Jr. who has been exposed as a charlatan, a liar, a man who has issues. We have witnessed the downfall of so many or these pious men like Jimmy Swaggart, James Baker and his wife Tammy Faye, et al. And still, people are willing to cede religious teachings and interpretations to these ‘pious’ people who practice evil in their disguise of Godly. We are in grave danger, as we have been for millennia, of allowing these pious saboteurs sabotage our Holy Teachings, blow up our pathway to Higher Consciousness, explode our hearing the call and demand of truth, love, kindness, mercy, justice and compassion that is constantly being sent from Mount Sinai, is the constant refrain of God daily.
We are not powerless over the “piety that at times is evil in disguise”. We do not, as many have, turn away from religion. We do not have to worship the evil that these pious people are spewing, we are not at the mercy of evil piety. We can and must stand up for what is right and good in our religious teachings, what is right and good in the philosophical teachings of Eastern Religions, what is right and good in the teachings of Higher Consciousness. We are able to stand up and reject the Christian Nationalists and the White Supremacists, we are able to vote these treasonous people out of office and impeach them from our courts. We are able to stand up and with the truly pious people who seek togetherness, who seek rapprochement, who seek to fulfill the words of the prophet: they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks (Isaiah 2:4); we are able make these things happen once we realize these ‘pious’ charlatans do not speak for God, do not speak in the name of religion, only speak in the name of their own power, their own greed, their own narcissism.
In recovery, we are well aware of the dangers of being too pious, too fundamentalist, too extreme in either direction when approaching life. We know we have to have a discipline to follow, a routine to live by and never engage in living routinely, never follow blindly our discipline. We are witnesses to the call of a power greater than ourselves and the response of the human spirit to be more than we ever believed possible. We testify to the wonder and awe of “living these principles in all of our affairs”.
I am in awe of truly pious people, people who live the principles of faith everyday. These people are not necessarily ‘religious’ and they are pious. They immerse themselves in the morality and decency from the Bible that has been adopted by societal norms and live into them. I am also aware of the people who hide behind their piety, to do evil. I have experienced both and, of course, been both. Each day, I am more and more aware of how I have used piety to be evil in disguise less and less over the years and how I have enhanced my using my piety to do good, to help, to serve. Very few of us are pious all the time without a tinge of evil, our challenge is to lessen those times and increase the times and ways we use religious teachings/higher consciousness to serve other than to be served. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark