Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 176
“Evil is not only a threat, it is a challenge… The mitsvah, the humble single act of serving God, of helping man, of cleansing the self, is our way of dealing with the problem. We do not know how to solve the problem of evil, but we are not exempt from dealing with evils.”(God in Search of Man pg. 377)
We have forgotten the wisdom of Rabbi Heschel above and see evil as only a threat, only “how to solve the problem of evil” and not as a “challenge”. In between the first sentence above and the second, Rabbi Heschel teaches us that we are in a “tragic predicament” and hiding in temples and churches, mosques and synagogues, imploring of God to intercede, recognizing the peril nor faith in the omnipotence of God will “stem the tide of evil”(ibid). This was in 1955 when he wrote this and we ignored him then and, unfortunately, many of us are ignoring his prophecy, his call to us, his standing for God, Godliness and his deep faith in our ability to overcome our selfish desires.
One of the challenges of evil, I have found, is that most of us do not recognize it and/or ignore it. We see evil and shrug thinking, ‘this is just the way it is’. We see evil and we engage in self-deception and mendacity to explain that what we are seeing isn’t really evil. We are witnessing people point fingers at their ‘enemies’ and call them evil, we are watching people tell us not to look behind the curtain and if we do, not to believe our eyes, just listen to their words. We are witnesses to the evil of gun violence, senseless hatred, racism, anti-semitism, homophobia, misogyny, and so much more and we seem frozen to do anything. While it is easy to decry “evil”, it is crucial to heed the words of Edmund Blake: “evil flourishes when good people do nothing.” Hence our need to engage with the brilliance of Rabbi Heschel about “the mitsvah”.
Staying with the first sentence, for today, and thinking about our duty to “wage war with evil”, to honor what we “owe to God” from yesterday’s writing; isn’t it time for all of us to stand up to the challenge of evil rather than use it as a threat to impale our opponents, our antagonists, our enemies? When Tucker Carlson uses his megaphone to spread lies, knowingly in order to keep up his ratings and the stock price of Fox News, when Kevin McCarthy goes along with the fringe elements of his party to threaten the credit worthiness and promise of the United States, when the Republican Party is willing to have Trump, a twice impeached and indicted perpetrator of evil, of racism, of anti-semitism, of disdain for the rule of law as their front-runner for their party’s presidential nomination, when the 160+ non-freedom caucus members are too afraid to join with democrats and find solutions to our national challenges, we are witnessing the threat of evil and failing to meet the challenge of evil. We have become so afraid of the deceivers, the Putins in our midst, the Orban admirers here in our country, the thread of fascism that runs throughout our land because they have guns, they have taken over State Houses and State Government in some areas of the country that we cower when evil is in front of us and think we can hide from its effects. How asinine and stupid can we be, how ignorant of history and the failures of our ancestors can we be?
When we see evil as a challenge instead of just a threat, we seek to find solutions through communal discourse. We begin with our own tribes, of course, and, because we know we cannot meet the challenge alone, we begin to engage with other tribes to work together to meet the challenge of evil. Rabbi Heschel’s life is a perfect example of this. He banded together with Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King, the Berrigan Brothers, Union Theological Seminary, the Vatican, to meet the challenges of evil in his time. He did not need to solve it alone, nor did he need to say ‘only Judaism can save us’. He knew that to “wage war with evil” we would need the help of other tribes and only through creating a community dedicated to “dealing with evils”.
I have been engaged in an eternal struggle with evil my entire life. When I was acting in evil ways, I was a threat to everyone. My recovery, and everyone who is in recovery, is dependent upon seeing evil as a challenge and not let it overwhelm me/us. For me, I have to call it out, I have to confront it, which doesn’t make me popular, doesn’t make me welcome in “polite society” all the time. Yet, I continue to seek out people to work with and help me confront the “evils” we are facing in this moment. I understand Carlson, Murdoch, McCarthy, et al, they only want power because they believe with power they can control evil and use it as a weapon to stay in power. I have to rail against it because I am a student of Rabbi Heschel’s, I am a Jew, I am a human being, I am a son/grandson of men of decency and love, because I can’t live with me without doing this. God Bless and Stay safe, Rabbi Mark