Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 155
“We are never alone in our struggle with evil. A mitsvah, unlike the concept of duty, is not anonymous and impersonal. To do a mitsvah is to give an answer to His will, to respond to what He expects of us. This is why an act of mitsvah is preceded by a prayer: “Blessed be Thou …”(God in Search of Man pg 375
Doing a mitzvah is also following the 248 positive mitzvot, the 248 “thou shall” words of God, of higher consciousness. Whether one wants to deny God, be unsure of God’s presence, deeply believe in God, we all need to follow these 248 “thou shall” “positive” mitzvot. Some people call doing a mitzvah being moral, doing a good thing, etc. Yet, as Rabbi Heschel is teaching us, “to do a mitsvah is to give an answer to His will, to respond to what He expects of us”. Even for those people who want to say “God is dead” or there never was God, the world has accepted the mitzvot as the minimum standard of morality, the standard of what is right and wrong, the standard of being human. At least we say we do, yet we know that this is not historically the case, no matter what Ron DeSantis and his Republican cronies, the Dixie Democrats and their white supremacist followers, want to say.
We are going to celebrate the Exodus from Egypt on April 5, 2023 and we are witnessing a denial of the slavery that this country engaged in for over 2 centuries, a denial of the degradation of Black people even since the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. We are listening to these “good god-fearing idolators proclaim their loyalty to God, they are claiming the proper response to what God expects of us is to denigrate the stranger rather than caring for them, enslave the needy rather than helping them, sell another human being rather than redeeming them, hating Jews, people of color, Muslims, women, anyone they deem as different rather than loving their neighbors!
Reading Rabbi Heschel in the context of today’s world should be calling us to remember the Prophets of Israel and how they pleaded with us to turn back to God, to stop our idolatrous ways, to stop bastardizing life by doing empty rituals and calling them mitzvot, calling them answers to God’s will. Rabbi Heschel is issuing a call to action, as I hear him today, and every day. Today’s call is to study the positive mitzvot, engage in “just do it” rather than try and think about them. Turn away from looking for the loopholes of the mitzvot, the loopholes of answering and responding to God in the best way for our selves. Turn towards taking the leap of action that is God’s will, that is what God expects of us by engaging the 248 positive ways of impacting the world, God, one another and our own inner life. Only by doing the positive and not doing the negative mitzvot can we begin to understand God’s will and fulfill God’s expectations for us.
Each of us are going to do them in our own unique manner, there can be no lockstep routine of doing a mitzvah, I believe. We have to stop telling one another the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ way to do a mitzvah and be more concerned with answering God’s will and responding to God’s expectations than being the ‘mitzvah police’ or the ‘abortion police’ or the ‘literal police’ and/or any other type of extremist. When we deny women choice, opportunity, when we deny people of color voting rights, healthcare access, equal educational opportunities, when we denigrate Jews through anti-semitic tropes and actions, when we use the Taliban and/or Al Qaeda, to paint all Muslims as terrorists, we are not fulfilling God’s will nor God’s expectations. We have to stop worrying about how someone else is fulfilling God’s will and expectations and be mindful of how we are. When we have to rebuke someone it is not to lord over them, it is to connect to them and remind them that they matter, we are concerned about them and we are here to help them.
Recovery is all about this change in perception through changing our actions. Our first action is to admit our powerlessness over our addictive ways of behaving, be it a substance or a process/thinking that causes them. We were as sick and stuck in Egypt as the people described above and as unaware of it as they are. Upon our realizations of our enslavement to these addictive ways, we let go of prejudice by reaching out our hand to everyone we met in meetings and elsewhere. We make a decision to answer and respond to God’s will and expectations rather than ignoring them. We committed to fulfill the 248 positive ways of living a life compatible with being a partner of God and we do the best we can each and every day, remembering that God is perfect and we are a work in progress.
God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark