Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 58
“Even more frustrating than the fact that evil is real, mighty and tempting is the fact that it thrives so well in the disguise of the good, that it can draw its nutriment from the life of the holy. In this world, it seems, the holy and the unholy do not exist apart, but are mixed, interrelated and confounded. It is a world where idols may be rich in beauty, and where the worship of God may be tinged with wickedness.”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)
The last sentence of this piece of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom may be the most chilling of the entire paragraph. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us of the biggest challenge to our humanity, to our living a life that is compatible with being a partner of God. How do we live in “a world where idols may be rich in beauty” and still stay faithful to God, to truth, to love, to kindness, to justice, to compassion?
We are being confronted, as we have always been confronted, with idols that disguise themselves as being holy, that confound us by looking so beautiful, so rich in meaning, and so appealing in their seductiveness. We are constantly being bombarded by the messages our minds want to hear, that our conform to our hearts’ desires and they lure us into actions that are antithetical to God’s will, to decency, to equality, to freedom.
We have put people and ideas on pedestals and come to worship them rather than find ways to fulfill the ideas/paths of ethical living that comes from our Holy Books, be it Torah, New Testament, Koran, Eastern Philosophy, etc. We live the words of the philosopher Tevya in Fiddler on the Roof: “when you’re rich they think you really know”. We are no longer following God, spirit, higher consciousness, we are following the idols of wealth, power, prestige and beauty. Look at how many ‘stars’, celebrities have been born because of instagram, Facebook, tiktok, and other social media sites. We no longer are interested in following the great minds of our time, the wisdom of our ancestors, we are too engaged in following the idols of wealth and beauty, the idols of power and prestige. We are so interested in following and becoming these idols that we sell our souls to get our “five minutes of fame”.
We are so obsessed with beauty, with riches, with power, with idolatry that we seek to deny and defy truth when it is spoken. We are willing, as we see each and every day, to follow what is shiny and fun rather than focus on what is good and needs to be enhanced. Our media follows the flashy news of negativity rather than the dull news of decency. Our schools teach us how to get ahead and be successful through money and fame, not how to be successful at being human. We have let go of the seeking to separate the holy and the unholy, we have let go of discerning the evil from the good. We are more interested in what is ‘cool’ than in what is right. This is not a new problem, as I stated before, it has, however, reached a level where our freedoms are in grave danger. We are so blinded by the beauty and the riches of today’s idols that we see good where there is horror, we defend evil in the face of kindness, we care for the rich and the mighty rather than the poor and the stranger. We are so deaf as to be unable to hear the call of the needy and instead hear the call of mendacity and deception. We are so engaged with the idolatry of worshiping beauty, riches, power and prestige we step on the people who we need to do the work we are unwilling to, we trample on the freedoms of anyone who gets in our way and defend our actions by saying we believe in a god that rewards beauty, riches, power and prestige otherwise ‘those people’ wouldn’t be in such straits. We continue to worship at the altars of the idols who believe anti-semitism is good, racism is just, white christian nationalism is the only way!
The major way of being that we recover in our recovery is truth, justice, kindness, love, compassion. We are acutely aware of our need to believe in a power greater than ourselves in order to live in recovery. We know our best thinking got us to a depth of despair and deception where we were engaged in life-taking rather than life-giving. We were living as animals thinking of our self only and what we wanted/thought was good for us. We worshiped at the altar of self and followed the idols we made and called this faith and godliness. Our recovery is based on the principles above and God is whom we worship. We keep removing blinders and ear wax that block us from hearing and seeing what truly is and what we can/need to do to serve a power greater than our self.
I sit here writing this and am guilty of being part of the “world idols may be rich in beauty”! There have been times, in my recovery, where I participated in worshiping the idols of beauty and riches, power and prestige. I even see the lies and self-deceptions I used to do this, I do T’Shuvah for this every day. I know most of my recovery is rejecting these idols, most of my recovery/daily living and teaching is about stripping away the lies and self-deceptions, uncovering the deceptions of another(s) so we all can see truth and I have not whitewash my idol worship by saying they were for the greater good. One can never sell out to idolatry for the greater good, in fact this is exactly the type of message we give our selves so we can practice this idolatry. I am stopping and I pray everyone else does also. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark