Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 69
“Indeed the most horrible manifestation of evil is when it acts in the guise of good. “Such monstrous evil deeds could religion urge man to commit” (Lucretius). (God in Search of Man pg.370)
The wisdom of Rabbi Heschel’s words above are undeniably true, yet, they go unheeded and ignored by so many of us! We are in a constant state of struggle between what is good and what is evil and we are so unaware, so caught up in our ‘need to be right’ that we manifest evil while thinking we are doing what is good, right and what is God’s Will. We have struggled with this way of being for millennia and good triumphs eventually, otherwise we would have destroyed ourselves and the world long ago.
I keep pondering this dilemma daily, both in my own life and in the life of our world. I listen to people who decry the Respect for Marriage Act that was just signed into law for no reason other than they disagree with same-sex marriages as well as inter-racial marriages, even though they will not say the latter. I am listening to these “God-fearing believers” speak as if they are 100% sure of what God wants. We watch with horror the degradation and inhumanity that these “unrighteous believers” show to people who are not like them. Is it really their business whom someone loves and want to share their lives with? What satisfaction do they receive from denying the rights they enjoy to another human being?
While we claim we are just ‘standing up for God’ when we immerse ourselves in the words above, when we search our inner life, we will find that we are really ‘going down’ to our fears of not being in power, our insecurities and uncertainties about how to live. While LGBTQ+ are the main targets in the railing against same-sex marriage, this is no different than Hitler’s wanting to “keep Aryan blood pure”. It is no different than the fear of Black power that people have had in this country since it was founded. It is no different than “Jews killed Christ” and “Jews kill Christians for their blood which they bake into their Matzah”. It is no different than any other trope that has been used against anyone who is not a White Anglo Saxon Protestant. The evangelicals and religious right have taken these old ways of being to new lows and claim they are doing good by this ethnic, gender, racial cleansing they keep attempting to make happen. If this is not a manifestation of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above, I do not know what would be. I am at a loss to understand how people can engage in such hatred, such vitriol while going to Church, Temple, Mosque, Yoga, Meditation, etc. It is beyond me how we can keep looking for ‘bad guys’ outside of us without seeing “most horrible manifestation of evil is when it acts in the guise of good.”
It is time for all of us to get off of our soapboxes, stand down from our pulpits, take off the robes of self-righteousness, and look in the mirror, look into the soul of another human being and truly see what is inside of us. The world is in desperate need of everyone cleansing themselves of the evil that is disguised as good. The most horrible manifestation is how we make hatred of another human being, good. How we forget the terror and the destruction that such evil has brought in generations past is mind-boggling and dangerous. We are still hearing that Covid-19 was a hoax, we are witnessing the Nazi tropes being used over and over again. We see how Goebbels teaching of “if you repeat a lie often enough, people will come to believe it, and you will eventually come to believe it yourself” is alive and well in this moment, in this country, in the lives of so many of us. Our inability to look in the mirror, our inability to see the manifestations of evil we disguise as good is eating us up from the inside and many of us have become homo-sapiens rather than be human.
In recovery our first “searching and fearless moral inventory” is the hardest part of our journey. We come face to face with our self, with our immoral deeds, the lies we have told ourselves to make it okay to do such despicable actions that deny the dignity and humanity of another human being and our self. We begin to see the pattern of how we disguised these “most horrible manifestation of evil” as good and we feel the guilt of our actions. When we read this inventory to our self, God and another human being, we usually experience relief at no longer hiding from the truth, no longer needing to disguise our self, disguise evil nor disguise the good we have done as well. We learn to discern and tease out the evil from the good a little better and grow this skill throughout the rest of our living.
I tremble with awe and gratitude from the Grace God has shown me. Opening my eyes up to the ways I have disguise evil as good early on in my recovery has allowed me to realize when it is happening sooner and sooner. This awareness has even caused me to not disguise evil as well. It also has made me hyper-sensitive to these “most horrible manifestations of evil” and, when I have been loud in my calling it out, I have confused the good I am doing with the evil of the way I am doing it. I am guilty of this confusion and I am grateful that my ability to see these manifestations in my self and in another(s) has allowed me to be of service to people and to respond to God’s call/demand of me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark