Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 151
“The Lord created the evil inclination in man and He created the Torah to temper it”.”The life of man was compared with “a lonely settlement which was kept in disorder by invading bands. What did the king do? He appointed a commander to protect it.” The Torah is a safeguard, the Torah is an antidote.”(God in Search of Man pg.375)
The Torah/Bible are the ‘thoughts’ of God for us to be able to live together as disparate people in a community that respects the dignity of one another. “It is a tree of life” as the prayer says when we return the Torah to the Ark, “all of its paths are peace/wholeness” the prayer continues. Isn’t it time for us to return to a way of living that honors the paths of every human being? Isn’t it time for us to hold on to this “tree of life”? Yet, we continue to see everyone who is ‘different’ from us as our enemy whom we are supposed to conquer, rather that another human being we can and must learn to live together with.
Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, as always, disturbs me, and I believe this is intentional on his part. He, like the prophets before him, wants to wake us up from our sleepwalking through life as selfish, prejudicial homo sapiens and learn to “be human”. Rather than each of us have our own experience of Torah/Bible, rather than each of us have our own connection with and experience with God, as happened at both the Red Sea and Sinai, we have relegated connection and experience to the ‘religious’ leaders and to people purporting to ‘know’ the will of God. These charlatans are using Torah/Bible as a weapon, not as an antidote to their evil inclination, these charlatans are using Torah/Bible as ‘cover’ for their hatred, prejudice, power grab, rather than as a safeguard against their evil inclination. Rather than temper their worst behaviors, they have used Torah/Bible as proof of their ‘rightness’.
When Alan Dershowitz says using George Soros as a dog whistle is not anti-semitism because he is “not much of a Jew” we are witnessing a man, who purports to be an expert on law, an expert on what is Jewish, sell his soul and his fellow Jew out for the ‘friendship’ of Donald Trump and the Republican Party! When we witness this “senseless hatred” of one Jew towards another, we can be reminded of the reason for the destruction of the 2nd Temple. When we see how the Israeli government wants to be friends with Russia, with Hungary, when they want to deny the rule of law for their political gain, when we watch the Republicans in Congress use their power to go after their political enemies and then accuse everyone else of doing this, when we see the Courts be surrogates for the ‘religious’ right and uphold States who are denying the right to vote to people who would not vote Republican, when we experience the myriad of ways these ‘religious’ charlatans attack people who are trying to hold people in power to account, when we experience the denial of women to control their own bodies, all under the guise of Torah/Bible, all under the guise of the Constitution, all under the false pretenses of law, we are witnessing what people in Rome, in Greece, in Israel, in Judea must have seen prior to their destruction.
We must heed Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom, we must put into practice his brilliance and his warnings, we must be disturbed by his insights, his teachings and change our ways rather than ignore him. We must relearn how to use the Torah as an “antidote” to our individual and collective “evil inclination”. We need to remember “the Lord created the evil inclination in man” and stop using it for racist, anti-semitic, anti-muslim, actions and words. We must use Torah/Bible to transform our evil inclination to serve God, to serve another human being. We must immerse ourselves in how to better “love your neighbor as you love yourself”.
Knowing my evil inclination comes from God makes it holy for me, makes me know that I am not evil from birth. Rather this knowledge has propelled me, in my recovery, to learn the nuances of my evil inclination, to learn how I always have to wait for the second thought because the first one may be my evil inclination in disguise. I have studied Rabbi Heschel and Torah/Bible for all these years, I use prayer and gratitude along with my studies so my actions reflect using Torah to temper my evil inclination, something I did not do prior to my recovery. I, as my fellow travelers in recovery, have to continue to reveal truth to myself and to another(s), I have to make sure that I do not allow evil to flourish, because of my fear of falling back into believing my own evil inclination. Each day, this writing, my studies, my actions help me to use Torah/Bible as a safeguard and antidote to my evil inclination and to help me use this gift from God to better my self, better my community, better the world. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.