Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 3 Day 80
“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 last two sentences above send chills up and down my spine! While we pat ourselves on the back as parents, teachers, mentors, and guides, most of us fail to ask ourselves the questions that Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom demands of us. How have we “relinquished our roles as educators? How are we failing to “teach our children” to “love God with all our heart, all our soul, all our everything”? How are we letting go of our job to “speak of them in our house, when we walk on the way, when we lie down and when we rise up”? How have we “relinquished our roles as educators” by not living the principles/commandments/instructions of God, of decency, of kindness, of love, of truth, etc? When we see what is happening in schools(religious and secular), colleges, universities, to truth, to telling the whole story to developing the ability to discern and mature our minds and our souls, we know the truth of Rabbi Herschel’s words. When we forget to tell the whole story of the United States with our conquering of the Native American People, our trading in Slave Labor, our forgetting the words of the Declaration of Independence “all men are created equal”, we are “have relinquished our roles as educators”. When we teach that “Black people benefited from slavery because it taught them useful skills”, when we forget to teach about the Holocaust, when we forget the lynchings, when we fail to tell the story of Billie Holiday who was persecuted because of her song “Strange Fruit”, we “have relinquished our roles as educators”. When we do not teach the importance of “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” found on the Statue of Liberty and the terrible treatment of people at Ellis Island, we “have relinquished our roles as educators”. When we fail to speak to the souls of our children, the spirits of our peers and the inner life of our elders, we “have relinquished our roles as educators.”
In relinquishing “our roles as educators”, we have abandoned the principles upon which the humanity was created: to be “a contemporary of God”, to be “a divine need”, to be a “divine reminder” as Rabbi Heschel reminds us in his interview with Carl Stern. We have abandoned the care of the poor, the uplift of the needy, the embrace of the stranger for our own selfish desires, our own ‘need’ for power and glory. We are witnessing this abandonment in the Halls of Congress, Social Media, the Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, the Middle East in general, the UN, and across the globe-all done by ‘religious people’ as well as by non-religious people as well. We are witnessing a coming together of the charlatans, the authoritarians, the ‘god-fearing’ and the God-denying to further their own aims, their own goals, their own desires by abandoning the principles of Christ, Moses, Mohammed, who taught us the values of Godliness, the words of the Prophets to return to God, to stop our backsliding, to repent in order to be restored to our humanity.
We hear a lot of lip service to God, to religious and moral ethics and values while witnessing the exact opposite. We are hearing a lot of anger, a lot of hatred, a lot of blaming, a lot of bullshit that ‘religious’ people attribute to ‘god’s will’ while it is actually their will and their need for power, certainty, control. When ‘people of faith’ proclaim the ‘sins’ of another group loudly and falsely in the ‘name of god’, they are really proclaiming their surrender to ego, their surrender to mendacity, their surrender to deception. It is happening all over the globe and it is happening right here in our country, in our schools, in our Churches, our Temples, our Mosques. We keep surrendering to the “conventional notions and mental cliches” of society and are afraid to stand up for what is true and right. This surrender is devastating our society, it is killing the spirit and the passion of so many, it is causing wars, it impedes the command to help one another, to “love our neighbor as we love ourself”, it denies the command to “not stand idly by the blood of our brother/sister”, and it uplifts greed, bribery, injustice instead. We speak about “never surrender”, yet we continue to belie our own surrender to self-deception and lies.
We have the ability, however, to “surrender” to the Will of God, to the words and teachings of God we have received from Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, etc and the wisdom of the wrestlings to understand and apply these values to our lives today, to our situations today, to grow our understanding and use of God’s will for us through our immersion in both the words and the spirit of God’s teachings. This surrender is not a ‘giving up’ or a ‘losing’, it is actually an admission that we are not the smartest person in the room, we are in need of learning and we are teachable. This is the Recovery Revolution! We surrender to truth, to our powerlessness, to our acceptance of being “a contemporary of God”, to our awareness of our strengths and weakness’ as well as what we have done well and how we have harmed. In recovery, we teach our children and one another a different way of being: one that “practices these principles in all our affairs”. We take back our “roles as educators” and we surrender to truth rather than mendacity!
This has been my life’s work in my recovery. I have fought against my own mendacity and self-deception and, while not always winning, I have won more often than not:) I refuse to surrender to the whim of people nor to the political correctness that governs our world, on the right and left. I have heard God’s call to me and I do the best I can to help people educate their souls and grow their inner lives. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark