Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 211
“The problem of living begins, in fact, in the way we deal with envy, greed, and pride. What is first at stake in the life of man is not the fact of sin, of the wrong and corrupt, but the neutral acts, the needs. Our possessions pose no less a problem than our passions. The primary task, therefore, is not how to deal with evil, but how to deal with the neutral, how to deal with needs.” (God in Search of Man pg. 383)
“Evil flourishes when good people do nothing” is attributed to Edmund Burke and Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above goes even further, I believe. Good people, at times, engage in the neutral, engage in pride at their goodness, give their needs free rein. Today is the day after we remembered the sacrifice of life men and women have given so we can “breathe free”. While there were speeches and tweets extolling the virtue of these men and women; today, most people will retreat to the neutral, forget the words we heard and spoke and go back to life as usual. Herein lies the challenge of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom. Authentic needs have to be met. Rabbi Heschel, I believe, is speaking about the inauthentic ones, ones society has manufactured in order to control us. Needs we are being told through advertising, technology, political rhetoric that are false.
One of the most neutral acts most people take is to ‘look away’ when something is happening and they don’t want to get involved! We have, as a society, convinced ourselves that it is too dangerous to get involved, it is too scary, it is ‘not my fight’, etc. We are afraid of losing position, power, money, possessions, social status if we get involved. Look what happened when women reported rape accusations in the past (and probably still now) they were not believed by police, subjected to humiliation by defense attorneys and the courts, cast out by the communities they belonged to, etc; so many rapes and sexual assaults went unreported. We have had to enact “whistleblower laws” to protect those coming forward to report unlawful, unethical actions by people and companies, we have had to enact laws about workplace abuse, etc; all because people did not want to get involved and support the people who were telling the truth. We still witness companies and people paying large fines without admitting guilt, without taking responsibility. These are examples of the neutral to me.
When people are afraid of taking a stand, when “on advice of counsel” replaces conversations, reconciliations, when we ‘go along to get along’, we are living in the neutral. We are more worried about our possessions, our status, than we are about truth and the way we live with our self, the way we live with God. When we “stand idly by the blood of our neighbor”, when we are more worried about saving our faces than saving our souls, when we are more concerned with the loopholes than the truth, we are engaging with the neutral in ways that lead to our ruin as human beings. We are forgetting that our greatest challenges are to “live a life compatible with being a partner of God” and “to be human” as Rabbi Heschel teaches elsewhere.
Possessions, power, prestige, have taken an outsized place in society, they are the definers of who we are for most people-the haves and the have-nots. We are measuring ourselves by a yardstick that is false, that is neutral, that allows us to do the wrong thing and make it okay because we won, because we can. Jewish tradition, with it’s Mitzvot, is a statement of: just because we can doesn’t mean we should, as I understand our way of being. Just as “perfect is the enemy of the good”(Voltaire), so too is the neutral the enemy of goodness, of the moral and ethical as well as the spiritual. There is no neutral in the Spiritual realm, there is no neutral in our souls, yet, we allow our rational minds and our emotional states to overrule our souls rather than having our souls be the arbiter of our actions.
In recovery, we know we cannot be neutral about anything. Being neutral pushes us backwards, allows our old “stinking thinking” to prevail and leads us back into self-inflicted pain and suffering. We use our path of recovery to keep moving forward; we are acutely aware that there is no neutral, there is no standing still.
I have been wrong in my passions at times, I have let them get the best of me. I also know that my bombast in most cases comes from my fear of the neutral, from my fear of letting the loss of possessions, mine or another’s, rule me/us. I stand for my beliefs, I stand against lies, deception, hiding, and this is not done in ‘polite society’. I will not change, I am responsible for when I let passions override what is the next right thing to do and I am responsible for my actions which stand in the face of mendacity and politeness. I am different today from honoring the fallen and I pray everyone else is also. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark