Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 79

“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)

The more I live into with the second sentence above, the more disturbed I become. We are witnessing the bastardization of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching in our business affairs and in our personal lives. In our both areas, we believe “all is fair in love and war” and practice questionable ethics. Business’ are guilty of so many ethics violations and, when caught, will pay a fine and never admit guilt. Fox’s settlement with Dominion Voting Machines is one of the latest examples. Business’  and Political Action Committees won the Citizen’s United case in front of the Supreme Court making “dark money” available to political campaigns that serve the interests of both business’ questionable actions as well as the desires of wealthy to make sure they stay untouchable, in control, and promote right-wing policies that seek to keep the ‘riff raff’ under their thumbs. The same people who flourished in a free society and open markets want to make sure they gain and keep control of the country and not let anyone who isn’t ‘their crowd’ have a seat at the table. Be it the Dobbs decision, the decision to end affirmative action, the decision against Student Loan forgiveness, and any of the myriad of cases that Leonard Leo and his gang of merry men support they all have the same theme: keep ‘those people” down on the farm. And, of course, they do this under the guise of ‘good christian values’! Yet, God is shouting to us from Mount Sinai, God is demanding from us “defiance, rejection” and we seem to be deaf to these calls, these demands. Not only are we deaf, our hearing is so distorted many people hear God’s affirmation of these questionable actions, many people believe deeply that making scapegoats, pointing fingers at the downtrodden and poor, the needy and the stranger are what God is affirming! This is how far we have fallen away from Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, from God’s teaching in the Bible, from God’s call to us on Mount Sinai and at the Red Sea.

Of course, none of this happens in our business dealings without our personal lives being in shambles. We are seeing a rejection of spirituality, a rejection of religious values, in favor of religious behaviorism, in favor of self-determination. I am hearing Rabbi Heschel remind us, call to us, and teach us that God is not hear to comfort us when we are making errors, when we are bastardizing God’s will and the teachings of Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, etc. We have come to believe that freedom allows us to ‘get ours’, to do what we want, to scapegoat, ignore, enslave, deny rights to anyone who we deem ‘less than’. We seem to find what is wrong with the world, with people and use these vulnerabilities against them and for ourselves. We are witnessing family life disintegrating because of these traits, we are witnessing communal life fall apart as we live behind the gates of our communities and our homes. We see our cities fill up with homeless people, with people seeking refuge from their native countries because of the violence and rape they are assaulted with. Yet, we remain impervious to God’s demand to be defiant in the face of injustice, we remain impervious to God’s call to reject selfishness, self-centeredness, in the face of the cries of the innocents.

Unfortunately, this move away from God’s call for us to be defiant and rejecting of these behaviors is, in a large part, promoted by ‘religious people’. Be it the far-right settlers in Israel, the ultra-orthodox Jews across the globe who support Bibi and his gang of thugs, the Evangelicals and far right Christian Nationalists who support Trump and his gang of thugs, the Heritage Foundation who promote the 2025 project to put Government Agencies under the rule of the “prosperity gospel” and authoritarian rule, Iran and the radical Muslim Imams who promote hatred, anti-semitism, jihad and Shariah Law; all of these so-called ‘religious’ people are deaf to God meaning “defiance, rejection as well as affirmation.” They have led us to a time where young and old people reject religious values because of their duplicity and mendacity; to a time where religion has once again become insipid, dull, oblivious, and out of touch to the majority of people. They have led us to a time where people reject the “baby with the bathwater”.

We, the People, have to take back what being spiritual, what being religious has always meant: defiance of mendacity, rejection of hatred, stereotyping, gaslighting, affirmation of the inherent dignity of every human being, affirmation of and recognition of the divine image in every one of us. We can only do this when we join the Recovery Revolution! Rabbi Heschel is calling upon us to recover the concern of God, recover the challenge of God, recover the teachings of Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, etc. He is demanding we let go of our old ideas and immerse ourselves in the teachings, the guidance of God in this moment, to see every moment as new and full of possibilities, to not give into despair. He is reminding us we have the choice to put on a “new pair of glasses” and see today as new, not be pulled down by the errors of our past, rather learn from them to make today a better day than yesterday. I hear him teaching and demanding we let go of our old ideas and view today with wonder and radical amazement, the maladjustment to conventional notions and mental cliches. Rabbi Heschel is a rebel, a prophet, a teacher and a guide. Will you join him in recovering the true nature of God?

I have joined him in ways that permeate my being. I view the world through the prism he offers to us and this allows me, when I am not sleep walking in life, to have defiance and rejection of what is not right, what is not Godly, and affirm the right of all people to “not learn war anymore”. I affirm the dignity and divinity of all. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark