Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 99
“Important as they may be, they do not reach the heart of the problem. Religion, therefore, with its demands and vision is not a luxury but a matter of life and death. True, its message is often diluted and distorted by pedantry, externalization, ceremonialism, and superstition. But, this precisely is our task: to recall the urgencies, the perpetual emergencies of human existence, the rare cravings of the spirit, the eternal voice of God, to which the demands of religion are an answer.” (God in Search of Man pg. 372)
Religion is one of the main reasons we are where we are, both holy and unholy, good and evil, I believe. When we are engaged with religion in a pedantic manner-worrying about the minutia, so intent on showing how smart we are by expounding on issues that are so obscure no one cares about, we are pushing people away from the wonder, awe and beauty of religion, from the life saving and soul enhancing teachings and actions of religion. Caring about the outer actions of religion as well as making religion about the ceremonies and rituals is another way of hiding from the life-saving force that religion is and, along with superstitions, is a bastardization of a way of being that is meant to enhance our being human.
I am struck by Rabbi Heschel’s words above particularly because we haven’t heeded them, we haven’t used them to move out of the morass of “pedantry, externalization, ceremonialism, and superstition.” Actually, we have leaned into these soul crushing and bastardizing ways even more since he wrote these words some 58 years ago! Humans love the pomp and circumstance of the religious holidays, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, Christmas, Easter, state weddings and funerals, etc. Yet, instead of hearing what the words are, instead of taking in the meaning of these events, we are wowed by the external beauty, etc of the event, we go to some of them ‘to hedge our bet’ in case there is God and our parents, grandparents were right-we go out of superstitious duty. For others, they use their pedantry to take control of the religion they ‘practice’. We hear all the time about the ‘real Jews’, usually meaning the ultra-orthodox, the real Christians, usually referring to the evangelicals, many of whom spend their time showing off how much they know, accosting people on the street for them to wrap Tefillin(phylacteries) and/or “Come to Jesus”, they bastardize the spirit of religion even when following the law of religion. For the rest of us, rather than standing up for the spirit, most of us now believe Rabbi Heschel’s words about religion becoming dull, insipid, oppressive, etc. from the beginning chapter of his book above.
We are missing and forgetting how religion saved us in prior times and does everyday. The most amazing fact about the Bible, aka Old Testament, is that it was written by the losers! It was written by the Jews who lost their country, who put it together after the destruction of the 2nd Temple, while under Roman occupation and it still is the moral compass that guides us all. It is the manual of connection to God and to our humanness, it is a prophecy of what will and does happen when we stray from the wisdom, truth and love of its teachings. It is the story of how humanity operates and how we can change, how we can ruin, how we can return to the holy and good and what happens when we go further into the unholy and evil. It is not a guidebook for the faint-hearted. It is a life-saver to those of us who have lost our way, who have strayed from the path of living, who are on the doorstep of spiritual death. The same is true, I believe, with all spiritual disciplines, all religions at their core-CHOOSE LIFE!
This is the situation we face now, whether the truth and life-saving, life-affirming principles of religion will guide us or the power hungry, self-seeking, bastards of religious principles will overpower God’s will and our freedom. This is a situation that we have faced many times before, whether religion’s life-affirming principles will endure or they will fall prey to the mendacity, the deceptions, the bastardizations of the charlatans who we see on Fox, OAN, Newsmax, like Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rick Scott, Ted Cruz, etc. We are in, as we always have been, a struggle for life-affirming, life-saving, life-giving principles and pathways and the pathway of hatred, dominance, racism, anti-semitism, life-taking, etc. For all the worry about the the debt-ceiling, these charlatans are the cause of 1/4 of the debt because the wealthy are more deserving of tax cuts than the poorest are of living wages!
In recovery, we have participated in and promoted pedantry, externalization, ceremonialism and played on as well as to superstitions of another(s) as well as our own prior to being in recovery. Now we see religion, spiritual disciplines as lifelines that we hold onto dearly and loosely. We know that without hearing and responding to the demands of faith, decency, Good Orderly Direction, we will fall back into the abyss of ruin, hatred, life taking and soul crushing behaviors we used to engage in.
Religion/spirituality saved my life! It gives me a life worth living, it brought me to recovery and AA, it helped me find my calling and purpose, my partner, gives me a way of living that allows my daughter to have reverence for me, it gives me Rabbi Heschel and a community where I belong. I am blessed beyond words, beyond my deserving because I live in a State of Grace through spirituality/religion. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark