Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 59
“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)
Immersing oneself in these words, hopefully, causes all of us a great deal of angst. The prophets railed against the truth of the last sentence above. Yet, even today, we are not horrified by our the fact that our “worship of God may be tinged with wickedness”. We celebrate this truth, unfortunately, and we are either oblivious to this truth or willfully blind to this truth.
Being a student of history, Rabbi Heschel is telling us to, as God told Abraham, “lift up your eyes and see”. He is speaking to everyone who wants to believe that they are pure in their worship of God, pure in their religious behaviorism, pure in their self-righteousness. Rabbi Heschel is reminding all of us to not be so sure of ourselves, not be so quick to pat ourselves on the back for standing with God and take a serious inventory of our actions, our motives and our self-deceptions.
We are in a grave crisis of faith today, as we have been throughout the ages. Yet, it seems as if we haven’t learned from our history nor have we grown closer to what God is demanding of us, to be human. We are worshiping lies, deceptions, wickedness in so many ways, they are too many to count. We are believing that God wants us to punish people who are different than we are, we are believing God wants us to spread rumors and innuendos about people who are not of ‘our tribe’. We are believing the deceptions of another(s) as permission to treat people who are, supposedly, different than us like the Egyptians did, like the Romans did, like the Tzars did, like the Nazis did. We are worshiping authoritarians and following their leads and calling it godly.
There is no place in the worship of God for not caring for the stranger, for not helping the needy and for treating people as less than human. The founding fathers of the US knew this and went against their truth when they decided that Blacks were 3/5’s of a person. Peter Stuyvesant went against this truth when he discriminated against Jews, our government went against this truth with their immigration quotas and we, the people, continue to deny this truth with our treatment of immigrants on an inhumane level. Yet, we continue to wrap ourselves in Flag, Country and God all the while tinging our worship with wickedness and being willfully blind and/or oblivious to this truth.
Watching what is happening in the world and in our country brings great sorrow and anguish to people of faith who work hard to not tinge their worship of God with wickedness. It is heartbreaking to see the lies, the cruelty with which we treat one another and pass this off as being ‘good christians, good jews, good muslims’! Yet we continue to do this. In fact, the people whose “worship of God may be tinged with wickedness” are the loudest at pointing out everyone else’s flaws, they accuse everyone not like them, not of their ‘tribe’ of the very crimes they engage in daily. For all of our ‘advancement’, for all of our technological and scientific progress, we are woefully stunted in our spiritual life. We seem to be unable to end our idol worship, we seem to be unwilling to stop tinging our worship with wickedness, we seem to revel in our thirst for power and are unashamed to use God’s name and bastardize God’s way for our own aggrandizement.
In recovery, we let go of our need to be sure of our selves. We become WHO we are meant to be: willing, honest and openminded to new ideas, to the truth of spirit and to living the principles of faith and the principles of God. We are so aware of our willful blindness and our obliviousness through our inventory and our daily practice of spiritual growth. We know we have to let go of our need to control and our need to force another(s) to our way of thinking. We have to pray for the clarity and the compassion to greet all people with kindness and love.
Living with this wisdom of Rabbi Heschel causes me great angst and great hope. I know how easy it is for my “worship of God to be tinged with wickedness” and I strive each day to remove a little more wickedness from me. I will never be 100% pure in what I do each day, I will never be free of ego and my negative inclination. I have and continue to use both of these powerful energies to serve God more than to serve me a little more each and every day. I do not see another(s) as less than me nor here to serve me, I am aware that each and every human being has infinite worth and dignity and is different than me, by design. This truth allows me to celebrate the differences and join with another(s) to make our corner of the world a little better today than it was yesterday. It allows me to rise above my horror and sadness, my helplessness and powerlessness to make changes in me, assist another(s) to make changes in themselves so we can all “worship God” with a little less wickedness. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark