Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 3 Day 73
“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)
Again, Rabbi Heschel’s words in the last sentence above should make us question ourselves. In today’s world, in today’s political, social, religious climate, we seem to have no reaction to nor any “sense of injustice”. We have let go of truth as our barometer, we have decided to jettison facts and we seem to have decided to go along with whatever “alternative facts” that meet the narrative we have created. Be it the ways we treat the poor, seeking to cut off the programs that help lift them up, the criminalization of homelessness by arresting the unhoused, putting people seeking entry into the United States by knocking at our borders into detention, we make up stories that ‘those’ people are threats to us and we do it under the ‘cover’ of “law and order”.
In an article in the LA Times yesterday by George Skelton, a survey showed that only 37% of the people in California believed we have a responsibility to do anything about the fighting in Israel, 20% of young Americans believe the Holocaust was a myth and another 30% are not sure whether it is a myth or not! How is this possible? How has our educational system failed us so badly? How has the lies of Holocaust deniers online, through social media overtaken truth and facts so boldly and so corruptly? Where is the outrage about terrorism, where is the outrage regarding “ethnic cleansing”? We can’t even register “disapproval” in today’s world when injustice occurs. Yet, many of these deniers, many of these liars claim to be ‘people of faith’, people ‘who stand for truth’.
Be it Rudy Guiliani, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Roger Stone, Mike Flynn, Donald Trump, they all promote these lies and so many others. They are a cancer on our country, they are a cancer in our system, they are a cancer that spreads and is metastaticizing throughout the body politic, the body religious, the body social in the United States and beyond. Yet, so many people are blasé about this fact, so many people laugh off the calls for authoritarianism, even welcome them and they are people of faith, people of conscience, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Blacks, Latinos, LGBTQ+; so many of the people who will be adversely affected by these charlatans, by these authoritarians!
Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above is so crucial for us right now. We have to change our attitudes, change our belief in the lies we tell ourselves, the deceptions we buy into and end our reliance on mendacity, on the masks we wear, on the false ‘facts’ that are being spread like wildfire. When 50% of young Americans either are not sure the Holocaust happened or sure it didn’t, we are in trouble. When so many people believe that Hamas is an organization that cares about the people of Gaza and/or the Palestinian people while taking the billions of dollars in aid given to them and spending it on weapons, tunnels and to fuel an opulent lifestyle in Qatar, Turkey, etc, we are in trouble. When people believe that Trump, Netanyahu, Orban, Putin, Abbas, et al care about them and want to take care of them, we are in trouble. “God’s reaction is something no language can convey” and we keep ignoring “God’s reaction”. Our ignorance is not in favor of disapproval, rather we seem to be approving of the injustice being done in our name and this is tragic.
Isn’t it time for our elected officials to hear the call from Sinai-“Justice, Justice, your shall pursue” or in another translation, “Righteousness, Righteousness you shall pursue”? Isn’t it time for the Supreme Court to heed this call and stop taking gifts from wealthy people because “bribes blind the eyes of the righteous/wise”? Isn’t it time for Thomas and Alito to leave the Supreme Court because their ‘justice’ is just another name for “exploitation of the poor”? When one has an agenda that has to be served above all facts, all truth, all arguments, one has lost all sense of right and wrong, one has lost all connection “to God’s sense of injustice” and one has lost the qualifications to sit in judgement, I believe. When we, as a country, have so poorly educated our youth so that 50% believe or may believe the Holocaust is a myth, when people are calling terrorists ‘freedom fighters’, when people are unable to see the deaths in Gaza as tragedies, we are in grave danger of losing our ability to be human.
The recovery revolution is antithetical to these lies, to these perversions of truth and facts. It is a way of being that seeks to hear “God’s reaction… that no language can convey”. We seek to hear it with our soul, we listen to the call of God, the call of decency, the call of justice, the call of righteousness with the ears of our souls, of our inner lives. We begin to see the world clearer and better with the help of our “third eye”, the “eyes” of our souls. We are deeply committed to seeing our part in all aspects of life, we seek to “practice these principles in all our affairs” and we are willing to admit our shortcomings, our ‘missing the mark’, and repair the damage so we can change. We are not stuck in some misguided dogma, some artificial facade anymore. We are taking off all of our masks, we are shedding the clothing of mendacity and deception we were living in and we seek truth and stand for righteousness, justice and love.
In these past 35 years, with the help of many teachers and loved ones, I have come to hear God’s cry in a way “that no language can convey” and have often responded with my own cries, my own ‘anger’, my own distress. I refuse to dumb life down, I continue to seek the Both/And of each situation along with the nuances. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark