Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 61
“It was not the lack of religion but the perversion of it that the prophets of Israel denounced. “Many an altar has Ephraim raise, alters that only serve for sin”(Hosea 8:11).”(God in Search of Man pg. 369)
Living with Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom disturbs my conscience and, I hope, yours. The truth of his brilliance is unassailable and, when we take it seriously, we get to constantly see our actions, our inner life in the light of these truths. The sentence above is haunting because we are forced to see our actions in light of the perversions of action by ourselves and another(s).
Listening to the questions and statements of some of the Supreme Court Justices in yesterdays arguments about an anti-discrimination law in Colorado is an upsetting experience. I thought of Rabbi Heschel’s dismay when a professor from Berkeley said “the “natural population increase in Vietnam is larger than the number of people killed.”(Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, Appendix II). He used this as an example of the dehumanization of humankind and Justices Alito and Gorsuch also used dehumanizing phrases to speak about humans and laws to ensure that there is not discrimination based on race, creed, religion, sexual orientation, etc. These Justices were trying to ‘be funny’ in comparing teaching about the laws of anti-discrimination to the ‘re-education camps’ of Communist China and speaking about black children wearing Ku Klux Klan outfits! What a perversion of our Constitution and the Bill of Rights!
One of the former Presidents of the United States calls for terminating the Constitution and members of his party are afraid to criticize him soundly and loudly. These same people speak about their love of flag and country, they call themselves conservatives who want to conserve and preserve the old status quo. They want to preserve white rule, they want to continue to ensure that white people have the power even though they are not in the majority, sound familiar? Again, these so-called libertarians are perverting the Constitution and Amendments that have formed this amazing experiment called democracy for their own gain.
It is not the lack of the rule of law that we are facing, but the perversion of it in our country and across the globe. Putin has tried to use ‘the rule of law’ to validate his invasion of Ukraine, Hitler tried to do the same with Austria and Czechoslovakia, we used it to decimate the native American population. We seem to be able to pervert so many of the good and holy foundations that are at the base of our existence with no apparent awareness of what we are doing.
The human need to validate doing the wrong thing is so powerful, it is blinding us to truth and to make the changes that Rabbi Heschel calls for in our inner and outer living. We pervert healing through Big Pharma’s need to make more and more profits. We prevent helping the poor and the needy through business’ belief that they serve their shareholders and not the public. We pervert politics through our belief that winning is all that matters. We pervert communal living by discriminating against ‘people not like us’. We pervert the words and brilliance of the Hebrew Bible by trying to clean up the bad actions of our heroes. We prevent the Gospels of Jesus by extolling power rather than kindness and compassion. We pervert the will of God by taking advantage of the stranger, the poor and the needy. We pervert our higher consciousness by using our rationalizations to assuage our bad actions. We are perverts in so many aspects of our living and we point the finger at another without realizing that three fingers are pointing back at us!
In recovery, we are constantly striving to stop perverting truth, kindness, compassion, mercy, and love. We are quite aware of our prior bad acts and how we did and/or tried to pervert everything we did to make ourselves right and not have to change. In our recovery, we seek to “practice these principles in all our affairs” and we know that recovery is not about a substance or process, it is about how we live in concert with our higher consciousness, our higher ideals, with our higher power.
For the past 34 years I have strived to not pervert that which is holy and good. I have stood up for the stranger and the needy, the poor and the orphan and I still know that perversion seeped into my actions whenever I got too full of myself. For this I am so sorry and I have spent these years working to sift out the dross of my being. I realized early on in my recovery and in my studies, the truth and wisdom of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching about “immersing ourselves in the thoughts of the Bible” which has led me to put myself in each and every chapter, see each and every character of the Bible in my reflection of my self and understand viscerally the ways the Bible gives us to rise out of the quicksand of perversion, selfishness, greed, mendacity and self-deception. This is how I am able to recognize and repair the perversions I still, unwittingly at the time, commit. This is the way I am able to use religion to enhance my living rather than use it to pervert my life and the lives of those around me. God Bless and Stay safe, Rabbi Mark