Daily Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 77
“The dreadful confusion, the fact that there is nothing in this world that is not a mixture of good and evil, of holy and unholy, of silver and dross, is, according to Jewish mysticism, the central problem of history and the ultimate issue of redemption.”(God in Search of Man pg. 371)
Harriet Rossetto disagrees with Churchill’s statement: “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” She believes we do learn from history and learn to repeat it. Putting Harriet’s wisdom together with Rabbi Heschel’s words above regarding “the central problem of history” seem appropriate. When we add in God’s statement in Genesis that “the inclinations of the hearts humankind are evil from their youth” denoting that evil is learned, we see how this problem, though very old, studied and debated from time immemorial, continues to confound humankind. We are witnesses to the evil that has been perpetrated on one another for the millennia and, yet, we seem to be unable to stop ourselves from mixing good and evil, holy and unholy, silver and dross. When we buy silver we see it is .975% silver and 18 karat gold is 75% gold, yet we speak of them in absolutes. When we speak of holy in our churches, temples, mosques, we speak of it in terms of exclusive to “our kind”. When we celebrate our victories and call us the greatest of all time; when we idolize a sports figure, a politician, a musician, a celebrity, anyone as the best; we forget their foibles. In Baseball we are in awe of someone who hits .400, while forgetting they missed getting a hit 60% of the time. In business we speak in hushed tones of the ‘great ones’ ignoring the help they received to be successful, ignoring the flaws and the injustices they committed to achieve their successes.
Anti-semitism has been with us forever and many people, including Jews seem to accept this as normal and a phase that comes and goes. Racism has been with us forever as well and we accept this as ‘normal’. Prejudice and biases are a part of every human being and our inability to recognize, admit, and change these ways of being is what perpetuates our “dreadful confusion”. The real issue, I believe, is how many of us are either willfully blind to our “dreadful confusion” or purposely engage in making a “mixture of good and evil, of holy and unholy” so we can get the power, the money, the prestige we believe will make us feel good about ourselves and continue our historical precedents.
We are witness’ and perpetrators of in our daily living and, so many people have no idea of the evil their “dreadful confusion” brings. The House of Representatives is being taken over by many of the same Republicans who did not vote to uphold the free and fair election of 2020 and did not want to uphold the will of the American people. Supreme Court Justices are voting their politics rather than the law, we had our first insurrection since the Civil War and, those same Republicans were blaming Antifa, Jews, Blacks, etc rather than their own supporters who truly stormed the Capital. We are seeing the erosion of freedom, of democracy and too many people are going along with these authoritarian, minority rule ways of being.
We have to teach our children differently, we have to give them a spiritual and moral foundation that helps them separate the silver from the dross, the gold from the metal and the only way to do this is by teaching them truth and truthfully. Rather than banning books on the Holocaust, books on racism, books on anything the authoritarians do not want our children to question us about, we should be teaching history from the viewpoint of the winners and losers, we should teach them how the Hebrew Bible, which is the foundation of the 3 major Western Religions and is the basis from our morality, was written by the losers in history. The Prophets who we have records of were not truly listened to as they ranted, begged, cajoled the powers that be in Ancient Israel and Judea to stop the evil inclinations of their hearts that led to their destruction. Each generation has the opportunity, the gift and the power to hearken to these lessons from our history, each of us alive today have the power to say NO to the “evil inclinations of our hearts” that we have learned since our youth. Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above is calling us to “face our own music” and change our ways.
In recovery, we are so aware of how we continue to engage in this “dreadful confusion”. It is the reason we are constantly making “ a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him”. We follow a regimen of seeking the next right action to take, admitting when we have been wrong, ie followed the evil inclinations of our hearts, and learn anew how to stop mixing up what is good from what is evil, what is holy from what is unholy. We are masters at concocting this mixture and we no longer seek to do this, which is why we are in recovery-to learn/re-learn how to live in the good, the holy, the light more each day.
I am still learning how I mix things up, the evil inclinations that my heart learned as a youth, how to leave the “dreadful confusion” Rabbi Heschel is speaking of. It is, I know, a lifelong journey that I will never get totally right and moving away from the confusion and the mixing up a little each day is the best I can do and that is good enough, not matter what anyone else says/thinks. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark