Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 224

“It is not by the rare act of greatness that character is determined, but by everyday actions, by a constant effort to rend our callousness. It is constancy that sanctifies. Judaism is an attempt to place all of life under the glory of ultimate significance, to relate all scattered actions to the One. Through the constant rhythm of prayers, disciplines, reminders, joys, man is taught not to forfeit his grandeur.” (God in Search of Man pg. 384)

In our pursuit of “the next big thing”, the “next great score”, the “next high”, we have ignored the wisdom and the call of Rabbi Heschel’s words above. We are a society that is obsessed with greatness, addicted to bigger and better, all the while believing if we achieve greatness, if we make some huge accomplishment, we will be okay, we will be happy, we will be noticed. While there is some truth in this belief, Rabbi Heschel is teaching us that these ‘rewards’ don’t last long. In fact, like an addict, we keep chasing the ‘high’ we get from a great act precisely because we have to keep feeding the dopamine rush that we got from the first great act!

Callousness, from the Latin, is “hard-skinned” and in English means “a cruel disregard for others” and “insensitive”. The Hebrew word means “tough” and is related to the word used in the Bible to describe Pharaoh’s heart being “hardened”. Rend, in the archaic definition, is “to wrench something violently” and the Hebrew word used also means “to tear”. Rend in a literary sense is defined as “to cause someone great emotional pain”. These definitions cause us to realize how hard we hold onto our callousness, how difficult Rabbi Heschel’s call to action in the first sentence above truly is! We witness and participate in callous behaviors everyday; in our politics, in our business world, in our family life, in our discourse, etc. Yet we seem to oblivious to the harm to we cause to another(s), the harm we cause to ourselves, the emotional and spiritual sickness we are engaging in towards self and another(s). This is how insidious callousness has become and, I believe, Rabbi Heschel’s use of the word rend. We are a people who have become “hard-skinned” to the plight of another(s) and, in doing so have become “insensitive” and display “a cruel disregard for others”.

How often have we heard and uttered, “they deserve it”, “let them help themselves, I did it on my own”, “they are trying to take our jobs away”, “they are trying to take our power away”, and other such statements to defend our callousness, to defend our hard-skinned, hard-hearted attitudes and actions? As a country, we are witnessing these attitudes in our Congress on a daily basis, we are watching, hopefully in horror, as the Republicans in the House of Representatives work hard to destroy the gains, the freedoms, the compromising bipartisan nature of making our country work for everyone. We are watching, some in delight, as they continue to push laws and pass laws in some states which impede peoples’ ability to vote, which target people they don’t like, people they are afraid of, they are banning books, is burning crosses far behind?

Rabbi Heschel’s words were published in 1955, some 68 years ago, when everyone was celebrating the end of WWII, the prosperity of the Ike years, watching Donna Reed, Father Knows Best, etc. In a time that is looked back upon as “the good old days”, Rabbi Heschel saw the rot that was still within us, the callousness that was still at our core as individuals and as a country. Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy, the killing of the Ethel Rosenberg whom the Government knew to be innocent, Jim Crow laws, anti-semitism and racism were rampant and, at times, subtle, etc were happening in these ‘good old days’. We speak today about “making a killing” in business, “slaughtering” the competition, etc. We denigrate a group for our benefit, we seek power to be corrupt, not to help. We have retarded the wisdom of Rabbi Heschel above, we have sought to and succeeded in being more callous, in seeking more “rare act of greatness” and become more willfully blind to our callousness and more stubborn than Pharaoh in our refusal to change!

Recovery begins with our acknowledgement of our callousness, of our “hard-skinned, cruel disregard for others”. While many people equate sobriety and recovery, they are different in my opinion and experience. I can be sober and a dry drunk-continuing to act in callous and perverse ways; in recovery, I have to let go of these paths, I have to “violently wrench away” my inner callousness, my unhealthy fears and my erroneous beliefs of isolation, loneliness, non-acceptance. I can’t do this without first coming face to face with my own callousness, cease my blaming of another(s) as a reason for my own callousness and begin the difficult work, the joyful daily actions to rend my own callousness. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark