Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 147
“To the Jew, Sinai is at stake in every act of man, and the supreme issue is not good and evil, but God and His commandments to love good and to hate evil; not the sinfulness of man but the commandment of God.” (God in Search of Man pg. 375)
Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance shines through, once again, in this sentence above. Sinai, the act of receiving the Torah, the act of experiencing God is at stake in every one of our actions is an overwhelming, humbling, trembling teaching that is fear producing as well as awe producing. Living our daily actions based on the experience of Sinai, the experience of entering into the covenant with God and with one another seems almost too much to bear! Yet, Rabbi Heschel is reminding us we can bear it, we can live into the Sinai experience with each and every act we take. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us that the “supreme issue” in life is God and God’s “commandments to love good and to hate evil”. The way he speaks is so wonderful because we are so busy accusing one another of evil, extolling the good we do and we ignore God, we ignore God’s commandments to “love good and to hate evil”(bold is mine).
We are watching this finger-pointing happen in Israel, in the United States, all over the world and it is scary for many of us. We have become so ensconced in our thinking, in our self-deception, in the deception of another(s), we have forgotten what is at stake in our actions-Sinai. We have forgotten we are enrolled in a covenant that teaches us that truth and connection are paramount to living well, we have forgotten that “to love good and hate evil” is not just a bumper sticker, but the only way to live in concert with God and to honor the experience of Sinai. We are ignoring the rule of law to satisfy the rule of self; we are ignoring the plight of the poor, the needy, the stranger-all of whom we are to invite to partake of the Passover Meal in 3 weeks- for the plight of the rich and powerful; we ignore the interests of God for the interests of false ego and mendacity. We are re-experiencing the experience of the Pharaoh and Egypt while calling it serving God and our covenant. Instead of realizing our raison d’être is to serve God, to follow the commandments so our actions show our love of the good and our hatred of evil, our actions show our love of evil and hatred of good. We here this daily from our politicians, our trusted servants who have chosen to serve their interests, the interests of the rich, the powerful. They, like the Pharaoh in Egypt, have decided to “deal slyly” with ‘their people’ lest the people rise up and fight against them. They have used mendacity, deception, knowingly to incite people to act against their own interests, against God’s interests and against the Sinai experience. These charlatans, of all colors and stripes, have turned the world upside down, they suffer from a sickness of the soul, as Maimonides writes about in his book, Shemoneh Prakim, the Eight Chapters.
We, the people, have to return to our roots, the experience at Sinai. We, the people, have “to love good and hate evil” once again. We, the people, have to make “God and God’s commandments” the supreme issue in our daily living. We do this by demanding of our spiritual leaders they heal their own spiritual maladies and speak of them from the Pulpit, from their desks. We spiritual leaders have to do our own T’Shuvah instead of pointing our fingers at everyone else. We have to speak truth to power and give comfort to the powerless. We, the people, have to then seek to heal our own soul sicknesses, begin the process of re-covenanting with God, with the principles of God’s commandments, and make sure that we are living these principles “in all our affairs”.
Recovery and Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above go hand in hand. Recovery teaches “having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps…we practice these principles in all our affairs”. Being in recovery is making the Sinai experience, the experience of turning our will and our lives over to a power greater than ourselves, ie God, a daily occurrence and remembrance.
Every day, I remember the exodus from Egypt, the historical one and my own. Every day I put loving good and hating evil into action. Every day, I re-experience Sinai, re-covenant with God, focus on how to live the commandments more deeply, how to have them permeate my being more completely, and every day I know I fall short. This reminds me of my humanity and gives me more compassion for the humanity and frailty of everyone else. I do hate evil and love good, both in myself and in the world. I am sad that I have not always expressed this in ways people could hear, I am not sad that I have fought for God and for God’s commandment “to love good and hate evil”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark