Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 110
“The power to make distinctions is a primary operation of intelligence. We distinguish between white and black, beautiful and ugly, pleasant and unpleasant, gain and loss, good and evil, right and wrong. The fate of mankind depends upon the realization that the distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, is superior to all other distinctions. As long as such realization is lacking, pleasantness in alliance with evil will be preferred to unpleasantness in alliance with good. To teach humanity the primacy of that distinction is of the essence to the Biblical message.”(God in Search of Man pg.372)
We have come to worship our intellects, I believe, precisely because of this “primary operation”, yet we seem to be like surgeons without training, spiritual leaders without a sense of a power greater than themselves/higher consciousness, CPA’s who can’t read a balance sheet, musicians who don’t know how to play their instruments, etc. We worship intellect and we do not always make the distinctions Rabbi Heschel is talking about. We may do the prayers of Havdalah, the ending of the Sabbath in the Jewish Tradition, with the prayer of gratitude for distinctions, yet we ourselves seem incapable of distinguishing fact from fiction, lawful from lawless, what we are called to do and what we want to do. We seem to be a society, that knows how to make distinctions and yet, we only make the ones we want to serve our self, and we will engage in mendacity, self-deception to defend our inappropriate choices.
This is, as Rabbi Heschel suggests with the last sentence above, an age-old problem. We are witnesses to what Rabbi Heschel is warning us against. He wrote in the backdrop of the Shoah, of WWII, what we believed then as “man’s greatest inhumanity towards man”. We get to immerse ourselves in his wisdom today in the backdrop of anti-semitism rising again, Hitler being praised, racism, police brutality that goes beyond color lines, Russia invading Ukraine, Middle East unrest, ‘alternative facts’, etc. We have watched our country fade from being a shining city on the hill to a mere facade and empty shell of democracy with politics being about combat nor governing. We have watched one group of people, both lawmakers and the citizens who elect them, say they are for law and order and they will not support the Capital Police, they will not hold the leaders of Jan. 6th responsible. They extol people who support White Supremacists, Anti-Semites, Killers of innocent Journalists, business people who only care about the bottom line while cheating the people that work for them. More tax cuts and more safety net cuts Kevin McCarthy brags about, while the people of his district will suffer from a government shut-down, from a loss in Social Security and Medicare.
We seem to be incapable of staying the course of making the distinctions between good and evil, right and wrong, when it serves our selfish needs. We seem to be able to distinguish between Jew and non-Jew, hence anti-semitism is on the rise, we seem to be able to distinguish between black and white, hence bi-racial couples and children are vilified and driving/walking while black is a crime punishable by death by cops! We seem to be losing the capacity to distinguish between pleasant and unpleasant because we have upended their definitions, we are in a time of spiritual crisis, a crisis of the soul which Maimonides, the famous Middle Ages philosopher and Rabbi speaks about in his book, The Eight Chapters.
The main issue for us today is that we are too blind, too scared, too selfish, too boorish to realize our blindness, our incapacity to make the proper distinctions. We are being aided in our blindness and incapacity by the very Clergy who are supposed to represent, teach and live “the Biblical message”! People are leaving the Churches and the Synagogues because their souls are not being fed with truth, rather with pap, with hearing what they want to hear and it being delivered tepidly. Or the messages of what is right is being so bastardized by the people in the Pulpits that the only people who go are those ‘true believers’ who want to hear validation of them making the wrong distinctions, validation of their “eye disease” of prejudice, etc.
In recovery, we learn to make the proper distinctions from the moment we enter this life-saving process. We begin with the first step: we begin to distinguish what we are powerless over and what we can control. We learn that controlling another person is not within our purview and being able to control our choices is. We learn that while we could have one drink, one bite, one snort, one bet, one quickie, we will not be able to NOT have the second, third, etc. We distinguish between what is our selfish will, our messages of lies and deceptions that emanate in our minds and from the minds of another, of society and what is truth from within and from our Higher Power/Higher Consciousness.
One of the great distinctions I have been aware of in my recovery is to see the Divine Image in every person, whether they show it to me, whether they live it, even when the hide it, I see it and try to speak to it, try to embrace every person’s divinity and I fall short. I am grateful for this sight, I also do not hide my Divine Image from anyone so that I am never alone, I am never lonely. Living through my Divine Image makes me closer to being One with God each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark