Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 74
“Thus there is a holy spark of God even in the dark recesses of evil. If not for that spark, evil would lose its power and reality, and would turn to nothingness.”(God in Search of Man pg. 370)
Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above cautions us to be aware of and on guard for our inclination to be self-righteous and, I believe, to think that we can be pure in our thoughts and actions. While it is imperative to strive to do good, we are called to do and be good, we have to be aware that we are not all good. We have to be aware that even our best intentions and actions have a tinge of evil in them, in us. We are born with both the good inclination and the evil inclination. Jewish wisdom tells us that the evil inclination is very good, which I understand to mean that it is the engine that drives us and, when subject to our good inclination, pushes us to be better human beings, just not totally pure human beings.
Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above is very disturbing, as are all of his brilliance for me. It disturbs our sense of righteousness, it disturbs our sense of superiority over ‘those people’, it disturbs our prejudices and extremes. It disturbs our view of our clarity of vision and our ‘knowing’. He is teaching us to be careful of our stands, to be careful of people who are so certain in their ‘rightness’. He is demanding we see the “holy spark of God’ in the evil we are calling out so we can transform what we are calling ‘evil’ into something that can be used for good.
It is hard to tease out the “holy spark of God even in the dark recesses of evil” because it entails us to immerse our self in the truth of what is going on rather than just hate evil and hate the person doing evil. It is even more difficult because we have to distinguish the evil we are doing when we wrap ourselves in self-righteousness. While we celebrate the victory, the bravery, the miracles of Hanukkah, we also need to be aware of the ruin that the Hasmoneans brought to Judea, how they became corrupt, how they made a deal with the Romans which eventually destroyed the 2nd Temple. And they fought for freedom for the Jews and, unfortunately, their version of how Jews should act. They were zealots for God and for their beliefs, for living Jewishly in their fashion rather than remembering there are 70 faces to Torah, there are many paths and ways to live well in the Bible, not just one way.
We see how the “holy spark of God even in the dark recesses of evil” fool us into believing we are ‘the ones’ who know God’s will, we are the ‘true believers’ and how good people can do bad things. We are experiencing what happens when people become so sure of their ‘acting for the sake of heaven’ and how they try to impose their beliefs onto everyone and set themselves up as the only interpreters of God’s will and the only ones who truly know God’s will. They anoint themselves as the arbiters of what is right and what isn’t right. They engage in hateful, violent speech and actions, they refuse to be accountable for their actions using their self-proclaimed status as ‘the anointed of God’ to defend, validate and promote themselves and their unholy ways. Misogyny, Racism, Anti-Semitism, Either/Or, the unawareness of the truth of Rabbi Herschel’s teachings, are hallmarks of the charlatans. Yet, they seem to be running the world now and have been for so long.
I hear Rabbi Heschel calling us to account, for us to find the evil that is within us and to gravitate to the “holy spark of God even in the dark recesses of evil” so we can transform our negativity, our need to be right, our need for power, our need to deceive ourselves into goodness, learning, leading where we can and following another when it is their expertise, taking the blinders of deception off and seeing truth. It is a hard task, one that we will never do completely or fully. Yet, as Jewish wisdom teaches, “it is not our task to finish the work and neither can we desist from doing the work”. We are in desperate need, both as a people and as an individual, as Americans and as citizens of the world to distinguish between what is profane and what is good and mundane. I hear Rabbi Heschel ringing in my ears to stop our duplicitous nature and ways, stop hiding from the truth of our souls, stop using the “holy spark of God” to make evil good and goodness evil. Cure our own “eye disease” of prejudice that is “a cancer of our soul” as he teaches elsewhere. This is an important path to be able to truly serve God and another(s) which also serves our self.
I continue to engage in attempting to distinguish the “holy spark of God” that is in me and in everyone from the evil/negative leanings of my desires and my mind. It is hard and I engage in T’Shuvah each day, continuing to take personal inventory, so I can distinguish what is good and not good in my actions. I am acutely aware of the times I have used “for the sake of heaven” as an excuse to validate my own negative behaviors. I am also aware of how often I have been blinded by the “holy spark of God” that I see in another(s) to the evil/negative intent and actions they are engaging in towards themselves and towards me. Remembering the wisdom above helps me see the whole picture, rather than just the part I want to, it stops me from living in ‘all good/all bad’ in the either/or and I can engage in the both/and of my living and yours. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark