Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 112
“After the Lord had created the universe, He took a look at His creation. What was the word that conveyed His impression? If an artist were to find a word describing how the universe looked to God at the dawn of its existence, the word would be sublime or beautiful. But the word that the Bible has is good. Indeed, when looking through a telescope into the stellar space, the word that comes to our mind is grandeur, mystery, splendor. But the God of Israel is not impressed with splendor; He is impressed with goodness.”(God In Search of Man pg.372-373)
“To teach humanity the primacy of that distinction is of the essence to the Biblical message”, Rabbi Heschel is using the Bible as his proof text. God is not concerned with splendor, with grandeur, with mystery as Rabbi Heschel teaches us, God is impressed and, I would add, concerned with goodness. We keep seeking to uncover the sublime, the beautiful, we worship splendor and grandeur, we continue to follow ‘the beautiful people’, we make idols out of celebrities and our need for dopamine has reached such a level that we are constantly seeking greater and greater acts in order to feel alive, in order to experience grandeur, etc. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us, chiding us, imploring us, as I hear his words ringing in my head and heart, to get back to goodness, return to distinguishing good from evil. Otherwise, I believe he is teaching us, we lose our humanity and we stop being human and become a human being that exists and is empty.
We seem to be so caught up in looking good, feeling good, that we miss the opportunities to do good and to be good. This is a trait that has been passed down through the generations beginning with Adam and Eve, Cain/Abel, Jacob/Esau, Joseph/his brothers, etc. We are trying to impress one another, we try to impress God with the grandeur and beauty of our sacrifices, our rites and rituals, and it doesn’t work according to the wisdom above. We are left empty and God is the opposite of impressed, God is disgusted according to the Prophets! They railed against our beautiful sacrifices and rituals that did not change our attitudes nor our actions towards the stranger, the poor, the needy. They told the people stop with these sacrifices and engage in “love your neighbor as you love yourself”. Yet, the people could not hear them, just as we have not been able to hear Rabbi Heschel and other modern-day prophets such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Father Gregory Boyle, Pastor William Barber, John Pavlovitz, Pastor Mark Whitlock, Rabbi Harold Shulweis, John Lewis, Martin Buber, Pastor Ed Treat, Reinhold Niebuhr, etc. Instead we listen to and follow the false prophets like John Hagee, Jerry Falwell Sr and Jr, Pat Robertson, Franklin Graham, the Fellowship Foundation and their false rhetoric of what God wants, their false actions in pursuit of power for themselves and for their cronies, the lies and deceptions they are selling to people in the name of God that is actually in the name of IDOLATRY!
Goodness is what impresses God as Rabbi Heschel is teaching us, yet, we continue to put more stock in grandeur, beauty, the sublime, the mystery. We are seeking to know God and to find God rather than to “walk in God’s ways”, rather than “do justly and love mercy”. We are not supposed to know God nor find God’s Abode because the “whole world declares God’s Glory” so God is everywhere, within everyone, every creature. We are being called on to practice goodness, to make distinctions between good and evil and we continue to be impressed with grandeur, we continue to believe that our minds will save us and the distinctions can be made by our lower/rational mind rather than our higher consciousness, our spirits, our intuitive mind. Rabbi Heschel is demanding we return to our basic goodness of being and our seeking beauty, grandeur, the sublime, etc will be found within our being good and distinguishing good from evil.
In recovery we “made a decision to turn our lives and will over to the care of God as we understand God”. This step encourages us to find our own understanding of God as we learn in Chapter 15 of Exodus after the Israelites crossed the Red Sea. This step is the only way we can continue to grow in our recovery because it is a return to our basic goodness of being, it is a return to relearning how to distinguish between good and evil, between deception and truth, between mendacity and authenticity. We return to a primordial state of openness, of knowledge, and of action. Our hearing improves so we can tell when deception abounds and when we are in truth as well as when others are in truth. We return to a state where service to God, to another human being, to tending our corner of God’s Garden becomes a daily opportunity and a daily joy.
Writing this today, I am in deep remorse for the times when my hearing, my seeing, my actions were for the sake of self and I believed/disguised them as being for the sake of God, of another. I am, in hindsight and with the help of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, able to discern the subtleties that easily disguise good and evil. I see how my own self-deception and fears led me to not say things I should have and say things that I should not have. They led to make bad decisions and take wrong actions that I regret and caused pain to another(s). I am sorry for these errors, From these ‘missing the marks’ I continue to grow in sight, grow in goodness, grow in being responsible and grow in service. The key is to serve people, to serve God and in so doing my soul is served and my life just keeps getting better and better. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.