Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 3 Day 38
“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)
I shudder to think of what Rabbi Heschel would be thinking and saying about our world today! Rabbi Heschel, in my opinion and in the opinion of many, was a prophet for us, just as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a prophet. While we quote their words, we invoke their memories, we seem to distrust their words and actions by not heeding them, by not imitating their actions. Rabbi Heschel’s words above, are as true and urgent today as they ever been.
We have worked so hard “to perfect our engines”, be they our cars, our tools, our filmmaking, our music, our printings, our internet, etc, while we “let our inner life go to wreck.” We continue to externalize our living, we continue to seek to achieve wealth, power, perfection, while we allow our inner life to go to rot, to go to seed. It is so depressing, so despairing to witness the myriad of ways Fascism, Christian Nationalism, Fundamentalist Religious Zealotry, have overtaken our political system. It is infuriating to witness the myriad of ways mendacity and deception have overtaken truth, overtaken the words, the deeds of the Bible, the prophets of old, the teachings and actions of Rabbi Heschel, Dr. King, the teachings and actions of people like Father Gregory Boyle of Homeboy Industries and John Pavlovitz. Our medical system, in its drive to perfection, has lost the personal touch of our family doctor knowing each of her/his patients giving way to impersonal referring out; our spiritual leaders are taught to refer people to ‘professional therapists’ rather than help congregants and seekers to find the answer to our basic questions: “what is the meaning and purpose of my life?”
Rather than engage in the work of our inner life, rather than “recover our passion, discover our purpose” as Harriet Rossetto changed the motto of Beit T’Shuvah to, we have been bombarded with negativity, told that our jobs, status, money, power, define us. Rather than take seriously that all of us stood at Sinai, all of us are created in the Image of God, all of us have infinite dignity, we seem to be repeating the errors of our ancestors who built The Tower of Babel. We use language to confuse one another, we use the Internet to spread disinformation, to support racism, anti-semitism, hatred of Muslims, LGBTQ+, Asians, and to spread hatred and anger.
Isn’t it time for us to stop our reliance on our new “evidenced-based” solutions and return to the lessons and teachings of the basis for our morality, our systems of justice: The Bible, the Prophets, their disciples like Dr. King and Rabbi Heschel? Isn’t it time for us to call out the so-called ‘religious people’ who preach hatred, who preach a hierarchy of holiness, live like they are the best and only people who ‘know what God wants’ while actually engaging in idolatry, while bastardizing the words of Jesus, Moses, Mohammed? Isn’t it time to return to a way of being that grows our inner life, that helps us deal with the issues of our time respecting the infinite dignity and worth of every human being? Isn’t it time for us to end our dancing with terrorism on every level; in our politics, in our religious institutions, in our business, in our homes Isn’t it time for us to end the mendacity of hate political advertising? Isn’t it time for us to end the deception of the religious charlatans who claim ‘my religion is the only true one’? Isn’t it time for us to end our self-deception of believing ‘we(me and my people) are the only ones who know the truth’?
We have a path of healing the wreck of our inner lives. We have a way to end our senseless hatreds, our negative self-talk, our mistrust of the prophets of old and the prophets of our time. We have leaders and teachers, we have the power to disobey the “conventional norms” or society. Rabbi Heschel gives us a solution; live in Radical Amazement, “the state of maladjustment to words and notions, is, therefore, a prerequisite for an authentic awareness of that which is.”(Man is Not Alone pg.11). The conventional notions and mental cliches we have bought into, the ways of Henry Ford with his Protocols of Zion, his despicable treatment of the workers who made him wealthy and powerful, the insanity of Elon Musk, Donald Trump, the Federalist Society, the Heritage Society, the Progressive Left, etc, have “let our inner life go to wreck.” It is time for us to revolt, it is time for us to rebel against these lies, these liars, these charlatans! It is past time to hear and live into Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and teachings, it is past time to follow the examples and leadership of Rev. King-“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
The path is recovery! We are in desperate need of recovering our inner lives, recovering our basic goodness of being, recovering our passion for justice, love, kindness, compassion, for spiritual growth. We have the AA steps, the Bible, the mitzvot, the Koran, the Gospels, the Eastern spiritual disciplines which all lead us to a rich, vibrant, inner life, a ‘resurrection’ of living from the inside out, of hearing and heeding the call of our souls. While we will never “arrive”, we can keep growing and making progress along spiritual lines. We can do this. This is my daily challenge and I keep moving one grain of sand towards this goal each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark