Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 3 Day 70
“God is always concerned. He is personally affected by what man does to man. He is a God of pathos. This is one of the meanings of the anger of God: the end of indifference!” (Essential Writings pg. 86)
The word “pathos” comes from the Latin meaning “suffering, grief” and the English definition is “something that evokes pity, sadness”. As I immerse myself in the last two sentences above, I hear Rabbi Heschel calling out to us to live into the suffering and grief God experiences from our actions towards one another. I hear him demand from us an end to our indifference, an end to our inability to treat one another as Divine Needs, Divine Reminders!
Our indifference to the ways people are treated, the ways we seek to ‘win’ at all costs, our indulgence in mendacity and deceptions, our inability to have rachmones, compassionate pity, for one another provokes “the anger of God”. Not an anger that is like ours, where we want to ‘get even’, not an anger that blinds us to what is, rather an anger that gets our attention, an anger that comes from a deep love of humanity, a righteous anger. Just as the “prophet’s angry words cry”, so too is God’s anger a cry out to us to change, to care, to be concerned, to end our indifference, end our attraction and engagement in the “evil of indifference”.
How do we bring about “the end of indifference”? This is the question that has haunted humankind forever. How do we end our misbelief that we are not our brother’s keeper? How do end our love of deception and enslavement of another person, people? How do we cure the deafness of the call of those in need, the people who feel like “strangers in a strange land”? The solution begins with prayer, with T’Shuvah, with a serious look in the mirror.
I have been studying the Morning Blessings with Rabbi J.B.Sacks for the past several months. We have yet to finish the 15 prayers we say each morning and I believe in these verses, in these prayers is a solution to “the anger of God”! The first prayer is gratitude for the rooster being able to discern the difference between day and night. This discernment is also granted to us, yet we seem to lack the ability to apply discernment to our daily lives. We continue to mix up what is good and what is not good, we continue to mix up what is holy with what is profane, we continue to mix up what is concern and what is indifference, we continue to mix up what is Godlike and what isn’t. We mix these things up because we refuse to take our proper place in life, we forget that we are divine needs, we are here to make our corner of the world a little better than when we found it, we are not here to puff ourselves up, we are not here to lord over another, we are not here to control and dominate another human being. We are not here to call evil good, destruction creation, being off-key harmony, ignoring the poor, the needy, the stranger as Godly! These and so many other ways we take are paths of indifference and this provokes God’s care, God’s love and God’s concern.
When God’s care, love and concern are provoked by our actions, “the anger of God” is not to punish as I hear Rabbi Heschel this morning, rather it is to wake us up! It is God’s call to us for us to participate in “the end of indifference!” This “anger of God” is a call of love for us to return to the call of our soul, to end our total reliance on our mind’s rationalizations, to stop our buying into the ‘logic’ of societal norms, to look inside of ourselves and heal the “evil of indifference” that has overtaken our inner lives. One of the greatest experiences of love is being able to say NO, to ask ‘are you aware of what you are doing’, to demand that one lives decently and kindly. These questions, our ability to say NO, comes from love even though they are delivered, at times, in anger. This anger is not personal, rather it is an anger that comes from love, from fear of another person losing their humanity, maybe even losing their lives.
The solution to our indifference and to God’s anger is to hear the call of our souls, to heed the call of God, to end our need to be #1 and to accept our proper place in the world. We need to end our search for Nirvana, for Utopia and live lives that are meaningful, that are helpful, lives which exude gratitude for being alive as the Modeh Ani prayer expresses, lives wherein we continue to take our own inventory and see where we have done well and not done well each and every day, make our amends where needed, end our reliance on false status and stature, return to the words of the prophets, the words of Torah, the words of Bible expressed in the stories of how our archetypes did well and where and when they screwed up. The solution is to join the Recovery Revolution! In recovery, we are not recovering sobriety, we are recovering our essential humanity. We welcome the stranger, we help the needy, we feed the poor, we extend dignity to all. In recovery, we imperfectly live by spiritual principles and seek to discern God’s will for us and not give into our selfish desires. We embrace one another with love, we embrace humanity with concern, with truth, with kindness, with justice. We know we are neither better nor worse than any other human being and we “suffer” with those who are still stuck in old ways and we have compassion and concern for them.
My anger, as I have said, over the years of my recovery, has not been selfish for the most part. My anger was/is not about my needs it is about the indifference of human beings towards one another and towards truth. I can’t “stand idly by” and I have expressed my anger in ways that put off a lot of people-because of my fears, my rage at indifference, at evil. For the inappropriate ways, I am sorry-I am not sorry for not being indifferent. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark