Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 115
“Good and evil are not values among other values. Good is life, and evil is death. “See I have set before thee this day life and good, death and evil…choose life”(Deuteronomy 30:15-19) (God in Search of Man pg 373)
As Rabbi Heschel stresses throughout this chapter in God in Search of Man and throughout all of his writings, speeches, demonstrations and teachings; good and evil have been taken for granted, thrown around like footballs and become irrelevant to so many people. Our inability to discern one from the other is causing destruction, devastation, death and decline, yet we seem to be intent on continuing this descent into self-destruction! I hear Rabbi Heschel’s words: “"Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. It is a silent justification affording evil acceptability in society”, demanding from everyone a new way of being, an end to our indifference, a new beginning of choosing life.
Watching the State of the Union address last evening reminded me of how indifferent to evil we have become. When people were calling the current President of the United States a liar for repeating their words back to them, when they extol the immediate former President for his lies, remember taking bleach to prevent Covid-19, we are witnesses to this indifference. When we consider a corporation to have human rights, we are engaging in indifference. When we go along to get along, we are being indifferent. We have to end our own indifference, not just complain about another human being, another law, another unmet desire. It is time for all of us to heed Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above and beyond in order to save our own souls, to save our own lives and, of course the lives of everyone else and the life of democracy and freedom.
We seem to have forgotten the responsibility freedom puts upon us, we seem to have become indifferent to the fire for freedom that is in every human being. We seem to have become indifferent to the suffering of another human being and blame them instead of care for them. We seem to have become indifferent to our need to “choose life”! We do not have to see one another as adversaries, this is another step on our path to total indifference. When we set up ‘good guys and bad guys’, we can ignore the plight of people we disagree with, we can look past anyone and everyone who is not ‘with us’, we can look through the needs of another and forget they are our neighbors and we are commanded to “love our neighbor as our self”. I believe this is the key to our indifference. We have stopped loving ourselves enough to “choose life” so there is no chance for us to fulfill this demand, request, prayer of God! Our indifference to the primacy of the values of good and evil, our indifference to our actions towards our self, our negative self-talk, our indifference to our neighbor’s plight because we live in scarcity and miserly, take us to choosing death instead of life.
We need to heed Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance, we need to heed the wonder and radical amazement of Dr. King, we need to live into the words of Jesus, of Moses, of Mohammed, of the Dalai Lama, of the Buddha, etc instead of bastardizing the foundational spiritual principles of faith and of living well. We need to demand of our clergy: kindness, truth, love, justice, mercy, forgiveness, compassion, caring, etc instead of putting up with the outlandish lies, the confusion of good and evil that comes from too many pulpits. We need to stop seeing anyone else as “the other” and remember everyone else is created in the Image of God. We need to “walk in God’s ways” instead of trying to convince ourselves and everyone else that God is walking with us in our race to do evil. We have to stop being indifferent to God’s call which is heard in every cry from another human being for aid and comfort, for freedom and opportunity, for fresh air to breath and healthy water to drink.
In recovery, we are choosing life each and every day. We know our lives depend on the state of our spiritual condition each and every day. We know we no longer have the luxury of being indifferent to anything. We know we must be engaged, involved and active in our daily living and in being of service to everyone who crosses our path. We seek to remove the blinders from our eyes so we can see and discern what “choose life” means today and how to accomplish it. In recovery, we are dedicated to living well.
I just received my past criminal record in the mail for a license I am applying for and looking at it has given me great pain. Not that I was unaware of what is in it, the pain is from my indifference to the evil I wrought with my prior actions, the pain is that I am seeing the wreckage of my past in 6 pages of charges and convictions. The joy is that this is in the past, I have a certificate of rehabilitation from the courts and, most of all, I have a certificate of rehabilitation from God, from my years of service and from the people who love me. I am loud and abrasive when I sense evil, when I sense indifference to evil because I am so sensitive to the slippery slope of indifference which leads to destruction. I am not pretty when I sense it, I am not ‘nice’ when I see it, I get a lot of dirty looks and comments because I have no filter when indifference and/or evil surround me. I am too afraid of both to keep silent. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark