Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 72

“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)

Immersing ourselves in the second sentence above, hopefully, causes us to look at the ways we are living. While Rabbi Heschel’s words above are in themselves an indictment of humanity, I am not certain that “the exploitation of the poor is to us a misdemeanor” at all. Throughout history we have witnessed this “exploitation” and most of us have done nothing about it! Watching and hearing the different debates going on in the Congress about “entitlement” programs and the constant onslaught against the rights of women, people of color, the ways we are treating “the stranger, the needy, the poor” in light of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, should cause us to review our actions, change our thinking and act in accordance with God’s will-not the will the idolators and charlatans, the will of the ‘humanists’.

We have acted unjustly towards the poor because we can, we have exploited minorities because we can, we have turned “a misdemeanor” into felonies and disasters all the while extolling our allegiance to God, claiming to do this in the name of Jesus, because of the teachings of Moses, in accordance with Mohammed’s words. This is the disaster we have created, it is not God doing anything mean to us, it is not God’s wrath that caused 9/11, it is not the call of Allah that made Oct.7th into another “Day of Infamy”. These disasters are the logical consequences of our not taking seriously what is just and what is right in ‘the eyes’ of God. It is us not using the teachings, the wisdom, the experiences of our ancestors to learn, to grow, to repair, to “do justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God”.

We are, once again, watching as people in power, elected officials wrap themselves in the warped understandings and bastardizations of the Torah, the New Testament, the Koran to satisfy and defend their actions of injustice. Be it the Holy Roman Empire and the Spanish Inquisition, the progroms of Eastern Europe, the killing of Indigenous People in North America, the enslavement of Black people from Africa, the killing of priests and ministers because they spoke out against the kings off their country; we know from our history of our desire to act unjustly and make excuses and spread mendacities to make it seem like we “do justly”.

This is a prime example of the war within, the battle between what our soul knows and our mind says, what our heart desires and our inner life calls out to us. Be it Mike Johnson or Mark Borovitz, this war is constantly being waged inside and the true “people of faith” are the ones who follow the call of their souls, who seek to grow and mature their inner lives so they can overcome the urge to “scout out after our heart and our eyes and whore after them” as it says in the 3rd prayer after the Shema in Jewish daily prayers. In Judaism, prayer is not petitionary, it is a look inside of ourselves, it is to discern what is happening in our inner life, it is, in Rabbi Heschel’s words, “to praise, to sing, to chant. Because the essence of prayer is a song and man cannot live without a song”(Interview with Carl Stern). We each get the opportunity to sing our unique, particular song-the one God has placed in us- each and every day. Yet, so many people use prayer, use ‘faith’, misuse the words of God to stifle the song of another human being, to crush the windpipe of another group, to deny even the God-given, necessary song of justice of another human being. This is, perhaps, the greatest “misdemeanor” we commit towards one another as it leads to a belief that we can do injustice to one another with impunity.

In recovery, we revolt against the ‘status quo’ of injustice. We are so attuned to our own acts of injustice because of our doing a “thorough and fearless moral inventory”, we have reversed our way of being desensitized to injustice. We have changed courses, we go against the grain of societal norms which tell us it is okay to ‘cheat on our taxes’ to ‘let the buyer beware’, etc. Instead, we return to a way of being that is promoted in the Bible-the seller is responsible to disclose defects, cheating anyone is cheating everyone, injustice towards one is injustice towards all. Rev Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech describes the change that occurs in recovery: (my children) “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” In recovery, we seek to improve “the content of our character” and grow our commitment to “do justly”, our review of our day each evening, keeps us current and allows us to spot the beginnings of injustice, the beginnings of prejudice, the beginnings of immoral actions.

Rabbi Heschel’s teachings over these past 35 years have caused me great disturbance, they upset me each and every day-in a good way. I am sorry for the times I have acted like the people I describe above-not doing justly and trying to make like I was. I am sorry for the moments when I didn’t call out injustice louder and demand different actions from a place of fear of losing support/funding for Beit T’Shuvah. I am sorry for not hearing the rebukes of people who were trying to help me sing my song better and encourage another to sing theirs stronger. I am grateful for the myriad of people whom I helped to learn and sing their own songs, I am grateful for Rabbi Heschel constantly being in my ear and my soul to push me to “do the next right thing”. I am grateful that injustice is a disaster to me, not just a “misdemeanor”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark