Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 3 Day 41
“The conscience of the world was destroyed by those who were wont to blame others rather than themselves. Let us remember. We revered the instincts but distrusted the prophets. We labored to perfect engines and let our inner life go to wreck. We ridiculed superstition until we lost our ability to believe. We have helped to extinguish the light our fathers had winded. We have bartered holiness for convenience, loyalty for success, love for power, wisdom for information, tradition for fashion.” (Man’s Quest for God pg. 150)
The last three phrases above are very disturbing to me, and I hope everyone! Rabbi Heschel, like the prophets, is a very disturbing human being to me. He disturbs complacency, he disturbs societal norms, he disturbs our consciousness and our conscience. His words and teachings, in the tradition of the prophet Amos: “let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream”(Amos 5:24). We, the People, have to decide if we are going to heed his wisdom, his tradition, his love or are we going to continue to barter these away?
We are so stuck in our own needs, our own self-importance, our own need to be right, that most of us are unaware of how we barter “love for power, wisdom for information, tradition for fashion.” We have become so willfully blind that we cannot see the differences, we refuse to see the nuances, we have polarized our world, our faith to such an extent it would be unrecognizable to the prophets, to the Rabbis, to the Desert Fathers, to Moses, to Jesus, to Mohammed. Yet, we continue to declare the ‘rightness’ of our actions in their names! How sad it is that we are so lost, so blind, so ensconced in mendacity that we are unable to engage in love, wisdom, and tradition.
We are in the midst of a war in the Middle East, in the Ukraine, and the war is for the survival of all of us. It is not a war about territory, even though it is made out to be, it is not a regional war, even though people want to make it out to be so they can stand back while the world comes apart. It is a war for the survival of freedom, for the survival of imperfect goodness over terrorism and power. It is a war for the primacy of wisdom and the end of believing information from tainted sources and the end of believing in the lies of those who proclaim their ‘love of the people’ when their endgame is power over these same people and riches for themselves. The war in the Middle East, the war in Ukraine is a call to stop bartering away our spiritual principles, to end our insatiable desire for power, for information, for the latest fad, to stand up for what is right and true-freedom to be who we were created to be, freedom to fight terrorism and mendacity, freedom to distinguish between truth and fiction, to distinguish between evil and the tragedies of war, to distinguish between standing with and for Godliness and standing with the myriad of terrorists like Putin, Hamas, Iran, and those in our own country and across the globe who use their power to treat the poor, the needy, as “less than human” and bar the stranger rather than welcome them. Instead of ransoming for the captives, those in power who proclaim their love of their neighbors, who claim to be cruel in the name of their idols which they call god, all terrorists try to take everyone who is not them, everyone who is not ‘in the club’ captive with their wars-figurative wars with their powers to legislate, and literal wars as we see how Putin and Hamas/Iran have done in Ukraine and Israel.
We, the People, have to call out our elected officials to stop bartering away our declarations we made in 1776, end our bartering away of the love of country and people we made in 1787 when we wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as well as the introduced the idea that more amendments were going to be needed. We, the People, have to call out to our religious leaders to stop their oneupmanship, to end their beating of their chests and their “fire and brimstone”, “God will punish you”, “we are doing God’s will” when they are only instigating and promoting prejudice, mendacity, and spreading these cancers of the soul. We, the People, have to end our reliance on bartering and get back to our basic goodness of being.
While AA wants to remain above the fray as to opinions on outside issues, which is a good idea, recovery is the answer as I am hearing Rabbi Heschel today. In order to end our bartering, we have to recover the essence of tradition-a dynamic path of living that holds dear the basic principles of love, kindness, compassion, rebuke, justice, freedom, welcoming the stranger, caring for the poor, the needy, ransoming the captive, etc and never doing it in the same exact manner as has been done before. We have to recover our basic need to be loved and to love, our search for wisdom not just regurgitate information and call them facts. Recovery is the revolution we all need to join! In recovery, we love the newcomer(stranger) until they can love themselves, we all interpret and engage with the Big Book in our own understanding (ala 70 faces of Torah), we all work with one another to be one grain of sand better today than we were yesterday, many of us begin our days with gratitude for being alive, like prayer. We are constantly seeking to return to our authentic self and live along spiritual principles.
When I stopped bartering love, loyalty, holiness, wisdom, tradition for my self-centered needs, I began my recovery. I still fall prey to bartering on occasion and I am blessed to be rebuked by another, disturbed by Rabbi Heschel, and/or called to account by a power greater than me(sometimes my wife and/or my daughter). Living a life disturbed by Rabbi Heschel gives me the gift of living a life of love, kindness, justice, no more bartering and truth. I am a rebel and have joined Rabbi Heschel’s revolution! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.