Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 160
“There is no reverence for God without reverence for man. Love of man is the way to the love of God. The fear lest we hurt a poor man must be as deep as the fear of God, for He that oppresses the poor blasphemes his maker, but he who is gracious unto the needy honors Him (Proverbs 14:31).”(God in Search of Man pg.375)
“Love of man is the way to the love of God” is a sentence that has been forgotten and misunderstood for millennia. Usually, we are told, even in our prayers, that we are to love God and that will lead us to love people. Yet, here, Rabbi Heschel is teaching us the opposite. Many Priests, Rabbis, Ministers, Imams, and other spiritual leaders preach to us to love God first. Yet, without the love of one another, Rabbi Heschel is reminding us there is no pathway to loving God. An outrageous statement in some ways and a statement that has been ignored by most people.
I hear Rabbi Heschel’s words as a demand for us to stop wrapping ourselves in the cloak of loving God while we hate one another. Instead of doing good for one another, instead of living in truth, kindness, caring, compassion, love and helping one another to move towards doing good, we perpetrate evil upon one another in the name of God, in the name of success, etc. We, the People of God, have used the vulnerabilities of another to build ourselves up, we have stepped on people and deceived people in order to gain power, property, prestige and wealth while ‘saying’ we are ‘god-fearing’ people. In his wisdom above, Rabbi Heschel says nothing about fear, only about love.
What does it mean to love man? It means to see one another as partners in making the world a little better than how we found it. It means to stop seeing one another as an enemy and worrying about guarding our stuff because of fear of someone else taking it. It means to stop being willfully blind to the needs of another and to surrender our incessant need to ‘get ahead at any and all costs’. It means to see the divine image of all people and connect with this image to help and serve. It means to not take bribes which blind the eyes of the righteous. It means to care for one another as we care for ourselves. It means to risk the wrath of another by telling them when they miss the mark. It means to rise above our narcissistic traits and connect with one another as human beings. It means to “walk in God’s ways” by caring for one another. It means to raise up the soul of one another rather than try to crush it. It means to pursue “righteous judgement” as Moses teaches us in Deuteronomy. It means to accept each person as a divine reminder and a divine need and assist one another to achieve the divine need we are here to satisfy.
We are in a perilous state, as we have been before, where people are more interested in their agendas than in God’s! In California the ‘progressive’ democrats killed a bill where fentanyl dealers would be warned after their first conviction for distributing it that they could be subject to charges of murder if they sold it and someone died. In their blindness to what is happening and to fulfill their agenda on prison reform, which is an agenda I support, they killed a bipartisan effort to do something about this hideous killer drug and the people who are not loving another(s) by giving them poison, by facilitating their death. In Florida, the governor called out the DA in New York for indicting Trump and calling him a puppet of liberal Jews. In one statement, he proved his bona fides as a racist and anti-semite, and he is a candidate for President of the United States! We see people unable to speak with one another over the polarization that has happened here and in other countries across the globe, like Israel. Yet, these people who care for their agendas uber alles, speak of how they and/or their leaders are anointed by God to do these hateful acts!
In my recovery, I have found that love of human beings also involves my ability to admit my errors. It means to see the divine image in everyone and not ever put another human being out of my heart. I may have to put them out of my home/my space, I just can never dismiss them as a human being that needs my empathy, my love. “Love of man” has forced me to change my ways often in my recovery, it has given me the light to change the way I speak to an individual based on how they can hear, how they understand. It has opened me up to a broader vision of what Torah teaches, of the different pathways when “walking with God”. Recovery through Torah, through faith, through a spiritual discipline means I see the content of a persons character and engage with people to uplift my character and theirs. It means being cured of the eye disease and the cancer of prejudice and finding acceptance of my place and rejoicing for and with another as they find theirs. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark