Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 77

“God is presented to us as a comfort, not a challenge, a rumor, as if it is nice to have Him around. But God means defiance, rejection as well as affirmation. We have relinquished our roles as educators. We surrender, we abandon, we desert, and we forget.” (Essential Writings pg. 87)

Today is Christmas Eve 2023, immersing ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s words above, hopefully makes us shudder with trembling awe. Christ ministered to the poor, the needy, the outcasts, the stranger and today we find so many ‘good christians, Muslims and Jews’ calling for the immigrants to go home, locking up the outcasts, decrying the homeless, seeking to end the governmental helping of the poor and the needy! We hear about God being love, which I believe is true and that God will comfort us, which I also believe is true, and yet, not as a challenge, not as calling to us to do better at being human.

While turning our lives over to the care of God is a tenet of all spiritual disciplines, this doesn’t mean that we are free to desist from doing the work that God calls us to do. God is always challenging us to be human, to stop our selfish actions, to end our disdain for anyone ‘not like us’, to cease and desist in our blaming another human being, another group for the ills of our world. I am hearing Rabbi Heschel call us to account, remind us of our puropose and recapture the meaning of being alive: “do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with God” as both the prophets and Moses teach us.

Yet, relating to God “as a comfort" only, as “a rumor, as if it is nice to have Him around” goes against the foundations of all spiritual disciplines, certainly Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All of these western religions, all of these western spiritual disciplines call for their adherents to be involved, to be helping make our corner of the world a little better. All of these have, at their core, spiritual principles that we are called to live into, to enact in our daily lives, to celebrate and engage in the challenges that God, that life puts in front of us. These challenges are not God-made, they are human made. God gave us the Garden of Eden and we screwed it up, God gave us “the Promised Land” and we abused it, God gave us The Temple and the rich, powerful, famous, priests used it for their own advantage. God gave us free-will and we use it to do what we want, to puff ourselves up and then call ourselves ‘god-fearing people’.

As long as we continue to ‘see’ God as “comfort”, we will not respond to God’s challenge. We are witnessing this phenomenon with all of the fundamentalists who are claiming God for them and only them. We watch, some of us in horror, as fundamentalists in America seek to control women’s bodies, seek to hold onto ‘white power’, engage in actions which demand the poor and the needy, while claiming they are following Christ, Moses, Mohammed! I am hearing Rabbi Heschel call these people out, I am hearing Rabbi Heschel call the rest of us to task for not standing up for Godly actions, for letting this minority run and ruin the lives of so many, bastardize what freedom is, deny the poem on the Statue of Liberty, re-write the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the State of Israel.

Of course we also have among us those who believe God is “a rumor” so there is no need to hear the call of God, to accept and respond to the “challenge” of God. They are so arrogant as to believe their ‘morality’ is based on their humanism, on their own sense of what is right and wrong. They seem to agree with Karl Marx that religion is the opiate of the masses. While they might not be afraid to burn in hell, they seem to be actively helping to make our living today a hell on earth-in that they have allied with the fundamentalists to make war not peace, to denigrate the human, to allow for the rise of fascism as we have seen throughout history. Whether we present God “as a comfort” “a rumor as if it is nice to have Him around” both of these presentations allow people to bastardize the words of the prophets, twist the teachings of Jesus, and use God as a weapon against their own enemies, all the while being the real enemies of Godliness, of holiness, of truth, justice, kindness, mercy, humility.

In recovery, we believe God is love, God is joy, God comforts us AND, God challenges us to be one grain of sand better each day. We ask for God’s help to be a little more human each and every day. We know that we need to seek God’s wisdom and God’s will for us and for another, we acknowledge we are imperfect and that doesn’t preclude God’s love for us, God’s love of us. We live in constant “trembling awe” of God’s challenge to us: care for the stranger, the poor, the needy, the widow, the orphan around us and in everyone. The recovery revolution has opened people up to seeing the similarities among all people, it gives us the opportunity to cure our prejudices, remove the cancer of prejudice from our souls, give us a “new pair of glasses” to correct the “eye disease” of prejudice and blame, hatred and self-righteousness. We are constantly living into the 11th Step of AA: “sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”

As Rabbi Heschel says in his Yiddish Poem, “God follows me everywhere”. This was true even before I knew it and, in my recovery, this truth haunts me daily. I am constantly hearing the challenge of God as I go about my daily life, I am worried that I am not responding to this challenge well enough and I don’t know how to do better right now. My challenge from God is to be me, as Reb Zusya teaches and I do the best I can each day, and each evening I find comfort in God’s love for my efforts. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark