Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 178
“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)
The prophet, Micah, tells us how to serve God: “Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with God”, Moses tells us: “Choose Life”. The Torah teaches us to “care for the stranger, the poor, the needy, the widow, and the orphan” 36 times and the Holiness Code in Leviticus 19 gives us the practical ways of how to live: “You shall be holy because I, God, am holy”. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us “ the mitsvah, the humble single act of serving God” is the path to “helping man, of cleansing the self” in order to deal with the problem of evil. Yet we continue to avoid this truth, we continue to be indifferent to power, the joy, the necessity of ‘the mitsvah”.
Of course many people pride themselves on how many mitzvot they perform, how many times they proclaim their faith in God, Jesus, Allah, etc. These same people do not use the “humble act” of the mitsvah to actually serve God, to help another person nor to cleanse their inner life of the evil that lurks within. They wrap themselves in holy garments, in holy books, in the trappings of service all the while seeking to kill the spirit of another human being, love themselves while hating anyone who is different from them, put harsh burdens upon their ‘enemies’, “deal wisely with them lest when war comes they rise up against us with our enemies” as Pharaoh puts it in Exodus, Chapter 1. These so-called freedom fighters, these heroes of “the American Way” are antithetical to everything that the mitsvah stands for, they are using their bastardization of the mitzvah to do evil, to obstruct justice, to show no mercy, to walk away from the path God gives us.
People today are stuck in their own lanes and their own greediness, their hunger for power and their desire to feel good about themselves. Rabbi Heschel is calling out to all of us to change our ways, to remember/learn that helping another human being is serving God. As he says in his interview with Carl Stern, if you hurt a human being, you are hurting God. Yet, we continue to either participate in hurting another human being by treating them as less than human and/or not on equal footing as we are and denying their infinite worth and dignity. We do not seek to be merciful when guns are our answer to pulling into the wrong driveway, when killing innocent people because they are Asian, Jewish, Muslim, and/or because they are LGBTQ+. We are not serving justice when we pass laws that ban teaching the truth about slavery, anti-semitism, when we go to war with “woke” as an excuse to be cruel. We are not “walking humbly with God” when we take these actions and so many more and state we are doing mitzvot, we are acting in the name of God.
We are at another crossroads in this country, in Israel, in the world. We are engaged in another civil war to determine if this nation, every nation, dedicated to the proposition all people are created equal will last on the earth, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln. Living Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above calls upon all of us to re-dedicate ourselves to the Truth that all people are created with equal infinite worth and dignity, that all people are created as unique individuals with gifts and talents from God that are unique to them alone and we need all of us to participate in life and building a world that “does justly, loves mercy, walks humbly with God.” Each and every human being has to “Choose Life” for this to happen and we do this by living a “mitsvah, a humble single act”.
Service is one of the cornerstones of recovery in general and my recovery in particular. Mitzvot have been and are the foundation of my recovery, my growth as a human being, my transformation from con man to Rabbi, from selfish drunk to generous grateful recovering person. The mitsvah, for me, is the essence of service because I am serving God, helping another human being and cleansing/transforming myself, my inner life. I am angry at the bastardization of mitzvot, I am appalled at the lack of justice and mercy we are witnessing, and I am sad and distressed at the people who say they know what God wants and God wants them to be like Pharaoh instead of Moses. Being of service means giving another human being what they need, not necessarily what they want. Being of service gets me out of myself and into my true self/essence. I am always on the journey to Mt. Sinai, to meeting God and I have to remember to be awake enough, to be present enough in a mitzvah to not pass by the “burning bush”, the light God gives me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark