Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 130
“Does not goodness tend to turn impotent in the face of temptations? Crime, vice, sin offer us rewards; while virtue demands self-restraint, self-denial. Sin is thrilling and full of excitement. Is virtue thrilling? Are there many mystery stories that describe virtue? Are there many best-selling novels that portray adventures in goodness?” (God in Search of Man pg. 374)
Society has confused rewards and punishments throughout history. As Rabbi Heschel is teaching us above, we have come to confuse reward and punishment, we believe “crime, vice, sin offer us rewards” because this is our experience! We have watched another(s) and enjoyed ourselves the “rewards” of our sins, the getting away with crimes, misdemeanors, the enriching ourselves at the cost of another(s), the power of enslaving groups of people, the inner joy and camaraderie of hating together, the “delicious pleasure of LaShon Hara, evil speech” as Rabbi Jonathan Omer-man once taught me. We have come to accept immorality as ‘just the way the world works’ and pay little attention to the plight of those who are our victims and the victims of another(s).
From Pharaoh in Egypt to White Supremacists today, from Amalek to the Neo-Nazis’ of today, we see the joy, the rewards that authoritarians receive, Putin has a nation of people who, like the Egyptians, will follow him into a modern Red Sea, Orban has the Hungarian people believing Jews are the cause of their problems. The insurrectionists and other far-right political/religious groups believe blacks, browns, some Jews, democrats, are the destroyers of “the American Way”. All of these people, groups believe these ways of being give them power, prestige and money and they are not willing to give their positions up, they are not willing to see the destruction they bring, they are not willing to change, they are not willing to hear the call/demand of God. Some may give lip service to the Bible, to God’s word, and they are constantly deceiving, bastardizing the Bible, God, goodness.
In the face of these crimes against humanity, goodness does tend to turn impotent, people who stand for democracy, freedom, caring for the stranger, the poor, the needy, people who stand up and say Dayenu-Enough are laughed at, ridiculed and ignored by the populace because we have been deceived for so long, we have bought into the self-deception that crime pays and goodness is for shleppers! We are seeing this in our Churches, Temples, Mosques, in our government, in our election cycles, in our schools, in our homes. Banning of books, not teaching the truth of slavery in our country’s history and present, silently going along with denying the legitimacy of the faith of that is different than ours, using the Bible to beat people down rather than lift ourselves and all people up are all subtle ways of exercising the power that sin, crime, vice give us.
When Jews clap for Orban, when Christians applaud deplorable conditions at our borders, when Muslims cheer a suicide bomber, when business’ make unseemly profits through deception, when media giants knowingly deceive their viewers and destroy the reputation of good people, business we are witnessing how corrupt our society has become, how “goodness tend to turn impotent in the face of temptations”. While this is not a new problem, it is a problem that has reached new heights, new ways of spreading and is a cancer on the soul of humanity! As Rabbi Heschel describes prejudice as “an eye disease”, a “cancer of the soul”, so too is our embracing of the rewards of injustice, power-grabbing, mendacity and self-deception. We can and must turn away from these delights, these delicious pleasures, these rewards that kill our spirit, our society, our communities, our families. We must acknowledge the truth, the validity of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above(and all of his wisdom) and return to the Big Book of Being Human-The Torah, the Bible, the Koran, the New Testament, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, etc.
My recovery and the recovery of all the people I know begins with letting go of the rewards of mendacity, crime, sin, etc. As the Yiddish saying goes, “you can’t dance at two weddings with one tuchus”, my recovery began when I stopped living a double life, stopped wearing the mask needed to ‘get ahead’ in the moment, stopped hiding behind a facade. When life crashed down on me enough for me to see this truth, to finally hear the words and love that people had been giving me for years, finally accepting the demand of God, I could let go of the bullshit and self-deception I had been living in. Letting go of ‘winning at all costs’, net worth=self worth, “crime pays”, and other such poppycock, taking the hands of the people who reached and reach out to me, not needing to seek out the people who didn’t reach out, began my recovery and have continued to deepen my sense of self, my embracing of people as human beings and my being who I am no matter where I am. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark