Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 46

“The outbreak of war was no surprise. It came as a long expected sequel to a spiritual disaster. Instilled with the gospel that truth is a mere advantage and reverence weakness, people succumbed to the bigger advantage of a lie-“the Jew is our misfortune”-and to the power of arrogance-“tomorrow the whole world shall be ours”, “the peoples’ democracies must depend upon force.” (Man’s Quest for God pg. 149).

Reading Rabbi Heschel’s words from 1938 in light of today’s events is eerie and scary. We have not, it seems, learned from our history, distant and immediate, we have continued to promote “a spiritual disaster” in our everyday living, in our homes, in our communities, in our halls of justice and in our seats of government. This moment is not a call to theocracy by Rabbi Heschel, it is a call to all of us to heal our individual, group, national and global spiritual wounds, spiritual needs, connection to a power greater than ourselves/God/higher consciousness. We are in desperate need of spiritual healing, as I hear Rabbi Heschel’s call today, in order to end the truth he speaks; “the outbreak of war was no surprise.”

It is no wonder, given Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above, that Israel is not believed in the current political extremist climate! While Israel has made many errors in its young political life, while powerful people in Israel have “succumbed to the bigger advantage of a lie”, they have also been under the constant bombardment of not only rockets and suicide bombers, they have been subjected to “the Jew is our misfortune” since they became a state! Jews all over the globe have been subjected to the lie “the Jew is our misfortune” for millennia and in recent years this lie has been promoted louder and louder.

It is a wonder to me that Hamas, a terrorist group known for evil, for lying, for treachery, is to be believed more than Israel, a democracy where protests against the government were happening just a shore 45 days ago. I cannot remember protests against Hamas happening nor being tolerated in Gaza, I cannot remember protests against Siri in Egypt being tolerated nor making change possible, the Arab Spring was a short-lived moment and, yet, we believe Hamas over Israel. We believe the lies and the propaganda being churned out by Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Russia, and suspect anything and everything that comes out of Israel.

We are living in a time where the big lies overwhelm the truth, where and when the “truth is a mere advantage” not something to revere, when Elon Musk, the Henry Ford of our time, wants to determine what is truth, when Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, et al have convinced half of the United States to believe their lies and follow their evil ways to the detriment of the very people they are claiming to be “their retribution”. People who graduated from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and other elite schools, like Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley are deriding people like Joe Biden as elites, when Biden went to the University of Delaware and Syracuse Law School! We are living in a world where the lie is better than the truth and, as in Germany of the 1930’s and America of the 1930’s, people are willing to believe Musk, Trump, Bannon, DeSantis, et al as they were to believe Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, Charles Lindbergh, et al!

Being a person who seeks truth, who knows one has to see the whole picture, distinguish nuances is considered weak. People like Joe Biden, like Rabbi Heschel, like Dr. King, are not welcome in today’s polarized world-just ask Rashida Tliab, who calls Israel out for genocide(which is not at all what is happening), believes everything the terrorists Hamas say, threatens to defeat the leader of her own party and, along with Ocasio-Cortez, Omar and others want to see the destruction of the state of Israel, want Israel to live with terrorists 200 yards from their borders, and, want Jews to donate to their campaigns.

We are in a precarious state right now, we are in need of a revolution! We, the People, have to join the Revolution of Recovery. We are being called by the moment, by Rabbi Heschel’s teachings, his experiences, to stand up against the lies. We are being called to heal our spiritual maladies, to end our dependence on lies, on power, on polarization, on mendacity. We are needed to grow into “the souls we were created to be” as Thomas Merton teaches. God is demanding we end our drunken stupors of power, of mendacity, of blaming, of scapegoating, of denial. In an article for the Jewish Heritage in 1971, Rabbi Heschel wrote about the “epidemic of drug addiction” and “perhaps this will wake us up to discover we have gone the wrong way”(Jewish Heritage, vol.13 no. 3 (Fall 1971)). The Recovery Revolution is a celebration of finding our way again, it is recovering our spiritual corpus callosum, the bringing together of our inclinations to serve something greater than ourselves; TRUTH. We are members of a ‘tribe’ that seeks to be of service rather than being served, people who seek spiritual growth rather than ‘getting over’, we enjoy a renaissance of belonging rather than fitting in. We seek truth because we are acutely aware of the destruction that our lies bring, we are healing the “eye disease, cancer of the soul” of prejudices and we welcome everyone into our revolution. We know we are not perfect and never will be, we know we can be one grain of sand better today than we were yesterday, we know that love, connection, truth, reverence are our weapons against the scourge that almost killed us and has killed so many people. We are aware of “the wrong way” we have gone in the past and we seek new roads to freedom, to kindness, to fulfillment of our spirits. Please join Rabbi Heschel and the rest of us. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark