Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 3 Day 55
“What is sin? The abuse of freedom. A failure in depth, failure to respond to God’s challenge. The root of sin is callousness, hardness of heart, lack of understanding what is at stake in being alive.” (Essential Writings pg 85)
Rabbi Heschel’s teaching of “the root of sin is callousness, hardness of heart” is so profound and so simple. I am hearing him call out to all of us to “circumcise the foreskin of our heart and be stiff-necked no more” as Moses teaches us in Deuteronomy 10:16. As a Jew, as a human being, I have to hold the horror of innocent casualties of the war against Hamas and terror along with the horror of the evil Hamas did on Oct. 7, the horror of the evil Hamas does by using civilians as human shields, by using schools, hospitals, Mosques as hideouts for their weapons, entrance to their tunnels, etc. When we are unable to hold two seemingly opposing thoughts, ideas, experiences in our being at the same time, we are being hardhearted, we are being callous, and, according to Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above, we are engaged in the “root of sin”!
When our media presents only one side of what is happening, they are being callous and exhibiting a “hardness of heart” as well as promoting the same to us. When we talk about the hostages in the same vein as the prisoners being released we are being insensitive and showing a disregard for the truth. When we go along with negativity, when we support people who want to destroy some one else just because they are Jewish, Muslim, etc, we are exhibiting a “hardness of heart”. Yet, we continue to see ‘good people’ do this all the time. Listening to the rabid antisemites and/or anti-arabs without any pushback is another example of being callous because there is a blatant disregard for truth, for seeking solution where there is strife, for seeing every one as a human being. It doesn’t matter what ‘side’ one is on, when we don’t see the people on ‘the other side’ as human beings, we are being strangled by the “root of sin”.
This experience is not born of the conflict in the Middle East, it is not born in the conflict in Ukraine, it is not born in the conflict of the United States, the root of sin is born in our homes, in our schools, in our workplaces, in our communities, in our society. Callousness is a learned way of being, disregarding what is true and what is the next right thing to do comes from our upbringing, from our despair, from our witnessing callousness in another, from our bastardization of God’s challenge. When the far right believes it can dictate to a women her choices regarding her body, when they believe they can dictate to immigrants like their ancestors that they are less than human, when they follow Donald Trump and the Heritage Foundation who want to end our democracy and say they are constitutionalists, when they want to denigrate the poor, keep their white power and privilege and do it in the name of Christ, we see how powerful and enticing the “root of sin”, “callousness, hardness of heart” truly is. When we cannot see the horror of 3 friends being shot for no apparent reason other than they were wearing traditional Palestinian/Arab garb, we are being blind, we are practicing callousness, we have hardened our hearts. When we cannot see the suffering of the people in Israel over Oct 7, over the 75 years of being at war, fearing the suicide bombers, the rockets, the wars started by other nations/people. When we cannot see the frustration of the numerous times we were close to a 2-State solution only to have our ‘partner’ say no, we have closed our hearts to any other idea than the one we have, misguided, callous as it may be. When we aer unable to circumcise our hearts, when we are unable to end our being stiff-necked, we are not being “progressive” we are actually being regressive. When it comes to anti-semitism, both the far right and the far left are in agreement: It is the fault of the Jews! When we believe “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” we strangle everyone else with the “root of sin” we are perpetrating.
The only solution, as I hear Rabbi Heschel, as I understand the Bible, as I learn from all spiritual texts, is to follow a path of recovery, to join the Recovery Revolution. We all have the opportunity to begin each day with a prayer of gratitude for being alive, a prayer that recognizes the compassion and faithfulness God has towards us and in us. We all have the opportunity during the day to honor the gift of life we have today by being more compassionate towards another and ourselves, being more faithful to our inner life, our souls and the inner life and souls of those we encounter. We have the opportunity to be of service rather than demand we are served, to understand another rather than demand to be understood, to help another up from the pit of despair, from the hell of “callousness”, the strangulation of “hardness of heart”, from the “root of sin”. We can only do this when we are recovering our humanity, when we are recovering our ability to see the whole picture, when we demand of ourselves to engage in truth rather than disregard it, when we take our own inventory before taking another’s, when we rebuke a neighbor from love of their humanity rather than to make ourselves better. We have a choice each and every day: to grow in “callousness, hardness of heart", deepen our “root of sin” or “Choose Life”!
I have experienced and perpetrated “callousness and hardness of heart” even at times in recovery. Upon realizing it, I quickly seek to repair the damage and return to a place of compassion and being faithful. I have remained faithful to the principles of recovery, the “challenge of God” even when I have been unable to fulfill either fully. I also have experienced the “callousness, hardness of heart” of people around me, of ‘friends’, and it is tremendously painful. The “root of sin” grows so deep in some of us we are unaware of it and this is the greatest pain I experience, the people who have hurt me, abandoned me and are ‘righteous’ in their actions. I ask for forgiveness for the my own “callousness”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark