Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 226
“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)
Rabbi Heschel gives the problem and the solution in all of his writings and especially in his teaching above. To “rend our callousness”, we must act in ways that sanctify life and we must be consistent with these actions. We have become addicted and adjusted to the callousness that we call ‘religious’, ‘god’s will’ (small g to denote this deity is actually idol worship), ‘good for our country’, ‘stop those people from taking our jobs’, ‘stop those people from grooming our children’, ‘stop those people from controlling the media, the banks, etc’. We have become so addicted to and adjusted to callousness that the Southern Baptists Church has thrown Saddleback Church out of its conference for having women pastors! “An ultraconservative faction with a loud online presence is going further, pressing for ideological purity and arguing that female pastors are a precursor to acceptance of homosexuality and sexual immorality.”(New York Times, 6/13) Isn’t this a little ridiculous? Yet, because of our addiction and adjustment to callousness, this type of thinking, rhetoric, mendacity is permeating our sanctuaries, our offices, our business’, our government, and seems to be a prime example of “self-will run riot”, which is what we in recovery call any actions that go against God’s call to “do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God”.
The only solution, as Rabbi Heschel so simply tells us, is a “constancy that sanctifies”. Sanctify means to “set apart, to make morally right” and in Hebrew the word used is “Kadosh” which is translated as holy and means “to elevate, to set apart, to connect”. I am hearing Rabbi Heschel is calling us to make a constant practice of acting in ways that are morally correct, that elevate us and those around us, that set us apart from the animals who have no free will to choose, and to connect to one another in love, mercy, justice, kindness, compassion, concern. We have to improve our actions of sanctifying our self, our souls, our inner lives so we can improve our relations with one another. We have to remember that EVERY human being is created in the Image of the Ineffable One, EVERY human being includes women, LGBTQ+, People of Color, Jews, Muslims, those of no religion. We have to improve our actions and raise them up to honor the inherent dignity that every human being possess’, to recognize every human being as a reminder of the divine, as a fulfiller of a divine need. We have to take the next right action to never think of our selves as ‘better than’ or ‘less than’ anyone else because God created us and “God don’t make no junk” as a bumper sticker says.
It is time, way past time actually, for us to detox from the joys our callousness gives us, it is time to recognize the sanctity of women, who are ‘good enough’ to bear and raise the children of the Southern Baptists’ but not good enough to pastor to them in their times of need, in their times of joy? We have to change our ways, we have to begin a program of recovery from the callousness that oozes from our pores, yes, even the ‘good people’ have callousness within them. We all need to surrender our grip on the callousness we have become adjusted to, we have to admit our powerlessness over our acting out in callous ways all the while trying to disguise them, deny them, etc. We need to believe that God, not the false idols that many religious and non-religious people have made and call God, can and will restore us to sanity. This sanity comes from our souls, it is a meeting of our souls with our minds, our emotions where these latter two entities have votes, they can no longer veto what we know deep in our hearts, our guts, our ‘bones’. Then and only then can we truly be consistent in acts that uplift instead of put down, actions that raise up our beings and serve God as well as the people around us, people we know and those we don’t.
I am suggesting that we begin to engage in a path of recovery for how we live. I have surrendered my callousness as it rears its ugly head and it has made me more vulnerable and more open to the love and the disdain of another(s) persons. I keep choosing to focus on the love rather than the disdain, choosing to elevate my actions one grain of sand a day, choosing to live in God’s ways instead of society’s. I choosing to “practice these principles in all my affairs” as the 12th Step declares, I choosing to live in justice, love, kindness, compassion, mercy, and truth. I make the choice to keep learning and rooting our my callousness each day so I can live in freedom and joy. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark