Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 71

“Man’s sense of injustice is a poor analogy to God’s sense of injustice. The exploitation of the poor is to us a misdemeanor; to God, it is a disaster. Our reaction is disapproval, God’s reaction is something no language can convey.” (Essential Writings pgs 86-87)

Rabbi Heschel’s first sentence above shatters the sense of ‘righteousness’, our sense of ‘holier than thou’, our sense of ‘being faithful’ that so many people wrap themselves in because of their attendance at a house of worship, their ‘adherence’ to the commandments, their ‘pious’ way of being and their ‘using' the Bible as the basis of their way of living. I put these words in quotes because the people who claim to be so ‘god-fearing’, so ‘pious’, actually believe they are equal to God or Christ, Moses or Mohammed, in the ways they mistreat the poor, the myriad of ways they promote injustice, the use of their power to close the door on the stranger, ignore the needy and make being poor a crime rather than an opportunity to aid and to serve.

We are witnessing the loss of “man’s sense of injustice”, we are watching, some of us in horror, as our inhumanity towards one another is creeping up to the standards of Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and the evil of the Axis powers. Yet, we make excuses for these old ways of being that we have freshened up with perfume and new make-up. When aid to Ukraine and Israel, who are in fights for their existence, is held up by Mike Johnson’s sense of ‘biblical justice’, his belief he is ‘doing what God wants’, we are seeing injustice. When 6 Supreme Court Justices with no oversight, no recourse, can decide that a woman’s health is to be decided by the State instead of the woman herself, a blow to the woman’s personal freedom, and use the Bible that never speaks of abortion, this injustice is considered just by the majority of the Court and the Anti-Abortion faction. Yet, when the government decided to give relief to the poor students in the form of forgiveness of their Student Loans, this same Court ruled in unjust! How insane is this, the Anti-Abortion who are ‘pro-life’ believe a person who, after their trial is adjudicated, and new evidence points to their innocence, should still be put to death, because as the late Justice Scalia said, he had due process and his innocence has no bearing on the punishment!!

The injustice of Oct. 7th seems to have been forgotten by so many, in fact on Oct.8th, the demonstrations were calling the savagery, the rape, the killing of children and women, the parachuting into a music festival celebrating peace and love, all were done by ‘freedom fighters’, by martyrs and heroes of the ‘Palestinian people’. Since then, the deaths from the war that Hamas declared upon Israel on Oct.7th are horrific, they are so sad-the innocent ones because the totals given by the ‘most truthful’ Hamas health Authority, don’t differentiate between Hamas terrorists and innocent Palestinians. Yet, the world doesn’t seem to accept the injustice of Hamas, the injustice of Iran, the injustice of Hezbollah, the injustice of the Houthis in Yemen. Rather, they focus on the injustice of war, the injustice of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, which to be truthful, Bibi and his gang have been unjust towards our cousins, the Palestinians. The Israeli government has not followed the commands of the Torah that the far-right religious zealots claim to adhere to. I ask the people who chant “from the river to the sea” how is this justice for Israelis?

We are in grave danger of losing our “sense of injustice” and it worries me. We have come up with so many ‘clean-ups’ for our actions, so many defenses for our ‘bad behavior’, so many delays in ‘doing the next right thing’, so many distractions from holding the perpetrators of injustice accountable, it is scary and it is dangerous. What we continue to call God’s wrath, what we continue to say is “the angry God of the Old Testament” is, in actuality, “God’s sense of injustice” being revealed, I believe. Moses breaks the tablets, Jesus points the finger at those who belittle the lepers and the poor he breaks bread with, Mohammed speaks of the infidel, could all be manifestations of God’s trying to get us to pay attention to the injustice we commit, the injustice we ignore and the injustice we are indifferent to. Isn’t it time for us to actually live into the principles of justice? Isn’t it time for us to be a nation that acts on the phrase “Liberty and Justice for all”?

Acting in ways that are just, that are decent, that are caring is the only way most of us are able to stay in sobriety and the only way to be in recovery! We regain our sense of right and wrong, we “turn our lives over to the care of God”, we seek to discern God’s will for us and we know that any and every act of injustice is another affront to our souls, to our recovery and to God. Hence we do an inventory each day, a 10th step, so we can be aware sooner of our unjust actions, repair the damage before it becomes overwhelming and change our ways and our thinking that took us down the path of injustice. Service, caring for the needy and the poor, welcoming the stranger are crucial to our recovery and invaluable in our climb out of being unjust to a new sense of what justice truly is.

After 20+ years of being unjust, these past 35 years have been dedicated to acting in ways that are just, that are compatible with being a partner of God, and I haven’t always gotten it right. My grandparents had a ‘spidey sense’ of injustice-probably because of their experiences in Ukraine and Poland, my father was loud and argumentative with anyone he perceived as being unjust, my brothers and sister have stood for the poor, the needy and the stranger all their lives and, for the past 35 years, I have done the same. Today is 35 years of continuous recovery and I am grateful for the sense of justice and injustice I have been imbued with. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark