Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 25

“God will return to us when we shall be willing to let Him in-into our banks and factories, into our Congress and clubs, not our courts and investigating committees, not our homes and theaters. For God is everywhere or nowhere, the Father of all men or no man, concerned about everything or nothing. Only in His presence shall we learn that the glory of man is not in his will to power but in his power of compassion. Man reflects either the image of His presence or that of a beast.” (Man’s Quest for God pg.150)

Immersing ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above, as with all of his wisdom, demands we look inside of ourselves and do our own Chesbon HaNefesh, our inner and outer accounting of our souls. We have Country Clubs that keep ‘the riffraff’ out, we have clubs that are exclusive, we have so many areas where ‘those’ people are not welcomed. We have nations that believe they are entitled to take the land of another country just because they can. We have a war in the Mideast where countries are negotiating with terrorists because of a hostage crisis, much like the Iran Hostage Crisis and with terrorists and countries that call for all Jews to die. We are in the midst of an internal war in our own country between forces that are for fascism and authoritarianism versus people who believe in democracy and want to grow the U.S. into “a more perfect union”.

Yet, we are confused because these forces of evil, these terrorists, these fascists are proclaiming they are doing evil in the name of God, when they are actually doing these despicable actions in the name of themselves, in the name of power, in the name of idolatry. Rabbi Heschel’s call to us is to say NO to the lies, the mendacity, the deceptions of the charlatans, and to our own self-deceptions. Rabbi Heschel is calling to us to end our discriminatory ways of exclusivity, of blaming the poor, the needy for being poor and needy, to help the stranger who is homeless and stateless, to recognize and live into the will of God, not the will of our evil urges, not the will of our blood thirstiness.

I hear Rabbi Heschel reminding us that God doesn’t leave us, it is us who leaves God and God’s ways. His wisdom above refers to the ways we have left God, the ways we separate from one another, the ways we practice power and greed rather than compassion and kindness. We use the words of the Bible, the New Testament, the Koran, etc to validate our “will to power” rather than God’s will. We pick out phrases and sentences that are meant for prophecy and use them to call God “vengeful”, etc and we bastardize the words of the prophets to validate the very actions the prophets called out about the priests, the rulers, the wealthy! We keep trying to ‘put God in chains’, relegate the teachings and will of God to our desires and destructive natures and deeds. We are unwilling to accept Rabbi Heschel’s truthful reminders of the nature of God, the demands of God, the desires of God all the while wrapping ourselves in the garment of ‘religion and piety’.

We are in the midst of a crisis, globally, in our country, and in our homes and personal lives. The foundation of our inner and outer crisis’ is to be found in Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance above: “Only in His presence” will humanity find and live “the power of compassion”. We are not compassionate towards ourselves because we demand some straw man of perfection. We are not compassionate towards another because we see in them the weakness, errors, every human being possesses. We are not compassionate towards ourselves nor another because we are unwilling to “let Him in” to our lives, to our minds, to our spirits. Instead, we are worshiping at the altar of idolatry, the altar of mendacity and this is how we are reflecting the image “of a beast” rather than the “image of His presence.”

Recovering our faith, our being “willing to let Him in”, our basking in “His presence” is the essence of recovery. In our recovery movement we “came to believe a power greater than ourselves would restore us to sanity” is the second step in our path to freedom, just as “this is my God” was the second step in the Israelites path out of the grasp of the Egyptians after they crossed the Red Sea. In recovery, after we cross the threshold of truth and awareness-our powerlessness- we seek God because we know we are unable to move forward in freedom, compassion, kindness, truth without being in “His presence”.

I struggle with mendacity-my own and the worlds-knowing that any engagement in lying does not “let Him in” and I am alone and bereft. When I “let Him in”, I am not alone, I am not lost, I am not wandering, I am reflecting God’s image and overwhelming the “beast” inside of me with compassion, love, kindness and truth. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark