Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 225

“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)

We are witnesses and participants in a march towards more callousness and anger, more hatred and less compassion, more blaming of another and less taking of personal responsibility. We are extolling callousness, anger, blame, mendacity as a “rare act of greatness” these days, much to the horror of some/many and in direct opposition to the wisdom of Rabbi Heschel. Our “everyday actions” are not rending our callousness, it seems as if they are hardening the callousness on both extremes. Anytime one takes an extreme position, one becomes hardened to hear anyone else’s opinion, take any other facts and/or ways of seeing what is into account. The extremes belie radical amazement, they become callous to wonder, to awe, to the plight of people not like them. We see this in our political world today, as we have since Newt Gingrich and company, we see this in fundamentalist religious sects, we see this in business dealings, we see this in our Supreme Court which  is working hard to undo the hard-fought freedoms some of us marched for in the 1960’s, some died for in those years and in subsequent years, be it racist attacks, LGBTQ+ attacks, or mass shootings at schools, synagogues, churches, nightclubs, dance halls, business’, etc. We have become so callous, there are people who believe carrying a gun in the open, without a permit, without training, is part of the 2nd Amendment and there should be no background checks, no regulation-when asked if what he would give up to make life better, a ‘person’ answered: ‘my wife, yes; my kids, maybe; my gun,NEVER!’

And, as always, we have to look inside of ourselves to see our own callousness, our own mendacity, our own extreme positions that harden our hearts. We all have a Pharaoh inside of us, the Biblical stories teach us about the archetypes that live within us, and we have the choice to decide how to respond to these inner archetypes. As the Native American story goes about a grandfather teaching his grandson about the two wolves who are at war within him, the one we feed is the one who wins. We have had a steady diet of callousness, hatred, blame, mendacity throughout humankind’s history. We have to ask ourselves which “everyday actions” are feeding our Pharaoh, which “everyday actions” are feeding the Moses within us. Which “everyday actions” feed greed and envy, competition and comparison, which “everyday actions” feed our sense of oneness with all people, seeing the similarities in all of us and welcoming the differences as God-given?

We have the power to decide and to choose whether to be Pharaoh or Moses for ourselves and, by extension, for another(s). We have, as I am hearing Rabbi Heschel’s demand and call to us, the obligation to choose to feed our Moses, to “Choose Life” as the Bible commands us. We make the choice of how to use our power to be grateful and open to people and/or how to decimate people we have used and abused and are no longer needed by us every hour. We are practicing our callousness in the ways we treat the people who helped us achieve some status on the way up, with reverence or disdain, we are practicing our callousness in the ways we relate to the world around us, ‘let me get mine’. We practice our goodness in the ways we greet people, the ways we leave the door open for reunification as God does for each of us, the ways we welcome, feed and care for people who are in need, who are poor, who are strangers as Abraham taught us. We are making the choices to “rend our callousness” and to expand our callousness with each action we take.

AA is 88 years old, Judaism is 3000+ years old, Christianity is 2000+ years old, some Eastern disciplines go back 4000+ years, and all deal with the problem of our callousness, how to mitigate the Pharaoh inside of us. I have wrestled with this issue forever, even before I was aware of the war within me. My recovery has been and is dependent on how I fight for the Moses within me, how I let go of the callousness and the anger, the greed and envy, the sadness and the blame heaped upon me by another. I have to be responsible for my part, I just don’t have to be callous towards myself by accepting everyone else’s part, everyone else’s blame. I am sad and dismayed at the callousness I have experienced and the callousness I have perpetrated. I do it less each day, I have more compassion each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark