Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 58

There is an evil which most of us condone and are even guilty of: indifference to evil. We remain neutral, impartial, and not easily moved by the wrongs done unto other people. Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself, it is more universal, more contagious, more dangerous.” (Essential Writings pg. 86)

These words of Rabbi Heschel send shivers up my spine. I can hear him calling out to us to change our ways, to wake up, to end our choice to “not differing” between good and evil. The Hebrew phrase for “indifference” I am translating to: “a captive soul”. Isn’t this what “indifference to evil” truly is, a soul that has been taken captive by our inability, our choice, our willful blindness to the evil around us?

We have, as Rabbi Heschel teaches, come to accept evil as an everyday ‘just the way things are’ way of being. We have rejected the fire of the prophets to whom any injustice, any evil perpetrated upon another was cause for alarm and immediate rebuke. Yet, as we can see in our governments, in our business, in our protests even, evil flourishing, evil being called good, evil being celebrated as ‘holy’, as what Jesus taught, as what the Bible says! We are in the midst of a bastardization of the prophets, a rewrite of what history has shown us, a return to ‘the survival of the fittest” mindset that cares only about being “the fittest” evil we can perpetrate. While evil is flourishing, too many of us are fiddling like Nero did as Rome burned.

When Hamas is celebrated as ‘freedom fighters’, when the settlers and right-wing Israelis celebrate the killing of innocent Palestinians, when the Arab Nations decline to stop Hamas, when the world perpetrates anti-semitism, when the Evangelicals rejoice that Israel will cause the Rapture, when the U.S. congress puts conditions on supporting our allies in their war against terrorism and aggression, we are witnessing evil on the part of the perpetrators of course, and, more importantly, we are guilty of, condoning of, and witnessing of the “indifference to evil” Rabbi Heschel is calling us out on. When the Governor of Florida can say that Blacks learned a trade from being slaves, when books on the Holocaust are banned, when LGBTQ+ people are denigrated and legislated against, and the people of the States sit idly by, we are guilty of “indifference to evil”. When a woman has no control over her body, when a male can tell a woman what she can and cannot do, when the Bible supports this and we go along with this travesty, we are participants in the “indifference to evil” that will upend our world.

We stood by in the 1930’s as Hitler and the Nazis came to power, as they perpetrated Kristallnacht, as they invoked the “Nuremberg Laws”, as we learned of the “Wannsee Conference and the “final solution”. We did nothing because we ‘didn’t want to get involved’, we did nothing because ‘it was just the Jews’, we stood idly by the bloods of our brothers because we were engaged in “indifference to evil”. Here in America, we went along with Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, America First, Charles Lindbergh, et al because we didn’t want to ‘fight a war for the Jews’. In the same era, we stood by while Black people were lynched and left hanging on trees, we heard Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” and got caught up in the music and not the message, we did nothing as the rights of every immigrant population were denigrated and our message of “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” was a bumper sticker that most people never paid attention to. This is how we condoned and were guilty of “indifference to evil”.

Today, are we any better for our history? Have we learned any lessons? Rabbi Heschel was not always well received because of his insistence on our waking up, recognizing and repenting for our “indifference to evil”. Immersing my self in his words, thinking about the myriad of ways society wants our souls to be captives of the “indifference to evil” that permeates our world today, I hear his plea, I hear his demand, my conscience is disturbed and I can’t sleep well. Listening to the Republicans in Congress condone their savagery towards the poor, the needy, the stranger, while We, the People, do nothing to stop it, is another example of our complicity, our condoning, our being guilty of “indifference to evil”. Hearing “the squad” blame Israel for Oct. 7, support the evil of taking hostages, the stories of what the captives who have been released have gone through, and still believing the ‘heroism of Hamas’ and supporting these congresspeople is another example of theirs and our “indifference to evil”!

Recovery is freeing our souls from captivity, it is ending our “indifference to evil”, it is being responsible for the evil we have perpetrated and the evil we have been indifferent to. In recovery, as in Judaism, Christianity, Islam and all other spiritual/religious disciplines, we do our own inventory, we open our minds and our hearts up so our souls are no longer imprisoned in our bodies by a thick wall of evil and “indifference to evil”. While we are working on our self, we are also helping another human being, we are students and teachers, we are learners and professors on how to recognize the signs of “indifference to evil”, how we can end our self-centered thinking and acting. The recovery revolution is needed now more than ever, I believe. Adopting and living into Rabbi Hershel’s concern about our “indifference to evil” is more needed today than it was 50+ years ago when he wrote this. It is not popular to shout about this cancer from the rooftops and we must if there is any hope of freeing our souls from the captivity of “indifference to evil”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark