Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 137
“If the nature of man were all we had, then surely the outlook would be dim. But we also have the aid of God, the commandment, the mitsvah. The central Biblical fact is Sinai, the covenant, the word of God. Sinai was superimposed on the failure of Adam.”(God in Search of Man pg 374)
One “nature of man” we seem to mired in is our desire to win at any and all costs and our propensity for mendacity and self-deception. ‘Dishing the dirt’ is a major pastime for many of us and we seem ready, willing, and able to believe the ‘dirt’ more often than the good. We forget the commandment to ‘not go about as a tale bearer among people’. In fact, we have raised this tale bearing to new heights/lows. LaShon Hara, evil/negative speech is considered a ‘delicious pleasure’ as one of my rabbis’, Jonathon Omer-man, once described it. Many people engage in this gossip and slander for their own gain, to make themselves feel better, to win an election, to beat the competition, etc. This “nature of man”, left unchecked, left unchallenged destroys families, communities, countries, civilizations, and we seem to be unable to engage in it.
Listening to the political discourse of some very loud politicians should make us tremble and yet it doesn’t. When Fox ‘news’ puts forth lies knowingly and their hosts like Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingram knowingly rile up their viewers so they can get better ratings and make more money, we are approaching the precipice of destroying democracy and making a mockery of free speech. When Marjorie Taylor Greene brags about killing her enemies, when she talks of divorcing ‘blue states’ from ‘red states’ she is speaking treason. When Ron DeSantis engages in hate speech against everyone who isn’t for him, everyone who isn’t on board with his authoritarianism, he is fomenting anger, he is promoting violence against ‘our enemies’ as he puts it. These people, along with so many others, are dangerous and what is more dangerous is all the people who stay silent. All of us who listen to this negative rhetoric, these mendacious statements, theories, hate speech, and do nothing are even more dangerous than those who speak them. By doing nothing, we are giving silent acquiescence to these lies, we are allowing this negativity to overwhelm us and, quite possibly, become our reality. Of the 70 million people who voted for Deceptive Donald Trump, there are many who know the truth, who know he and his cronies were lying and they voted for him anyway because they voted ‘their pocketbook’, his ‘love for Israel’, his ‘standing up for White Russia’, etc. They bought into the deception, they imbibed it enough to deceive themselves that ‘he wasn’t that bad and better than the other guy’. We have come to accept authoritarian liars as good people because “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”!
Our country is still a laboratory for democracy and freedom. We are still struggling to put into practice the words of our Declaration of Independence, we are still wrestling with “welcoming the stranger” as Abraham in the Bible was known for, we are still battling our split soul of Jacob/Israel. It is not a war that we will win once and for all, it is not a practice that is one and done, it is not something that can be legislated. This struggle to see “all men are created equal” never ends because we are constantly bombarded with deceptions from outside of us and our inner self-deceptions. “Welcoming the stranger” means we have to share our good fortune, we have to remember our roots and our ancestors who were strangers to this land, we have to remember they were recipients of the sacrifices of the people who came here before them and owed the strangers coming after them a welcome atmosphere rather than a suspicious one.
In recovery, we are constantly battling our split soul, our Jacob/Israel. We know the dangers of giving into the Jacob part of our soul completely because then we con, lie, steal and cheat the people around us and go back into the prisons of our minds, we punish anyone and everyone around us with our need to be right, our need to be in control, our need to win. In recovery, we learn how to sublimate our Jacob energy to serve Israel, the energy and way of being that is in concert with the divine, using the aid of God to make life better for our self and for all other selves.
OY! Looking at the myriad of subtle ways my own ‘nature’ has crept into my actions makes me ill, sad and remorseful. Self-deception is so powerful and cunning that I have fallen prey to it more often than I realized, in fact, only in hindsight am I able to be accountable for the subtle ways I have given into my “nature”. More on this tomorrow because I am running out of room:) God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark