Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 2 Day 236

“We believe that the ego can become converted to a friend of the spirit. “The evil drive” may become the helpmate of “the good drive.” But such conversion does not come about in moments of despair, or by accepting our moral bankruptcy, but rather through the realization of our ability to answer God’s question.”(God in Search of Man pg. 384/5)

The goal of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and all spiritual disciplines is to make “the evil drive become the helpmate of the good drive.” As Rabbi Heschel is teaching us, “such conversion does not come about in moments of despair”. It also does not come about from the performance art of empty rituals, not does it come about from a grandiose vision of ‘the one true spiritual discipline’. Nor does it come about from an ‘instant conversion’, we are not ‘saved’ by one act, we are not able to make our “evil drive become the helpmate of the good drive” by sheer force of will. We make this happen through allowing our prayers, our meditations, our taking the next right action change our inner lives, through changing our ways of thinking, through seeking truth and standing up for truth, through sublimating our desires to what our souls know to be true, correct and acting accordingly.

Many ‘religious’ people seem to be constitutionally incapable of converting their egos to be “a friend of the spirit”. Often times, they are unaware of how the “evil drive” becomes the dominant force in their lives because it is disguising itself as “the good drive”. We witness this phenomenon and participate in this phenomenon whenever we are pointing our fingers at another group and labelling them as “the other”. We witness this bastardization whenever one religion engages in making another spiritual discipline ‘the wrong way’. We participate in this masquerade when we ignore the plight of the stranger, the poor, and the needy making them the cause of the ills of our world, as some ‘religious’ people have done with blaming everything from 9/11 to mass shootings on LGBTQ+ people. We participate and support this disguise of “the evil drive” when we are willfully blind to the basic commandment to “love your neighbor as you love yourself.” We participate and support this disguise when we are unwilling to have a conversation with those we disagree with, when we agree with the vilification of people who are being accused of wrongdoing without the benefit of the doubt, when we betray friendships and forget the good people do and define a person by what we have been told and/or perceive as their last bad action.

We are in a grave spiritual and moral crisis today. We are in a crisis of faith, a crisis of morality because we wrap ourselves in the flag, in our ‘religious’ bastardizations, in our ‘religious’ rituals and call ourselves good without taking inventory, confessing the exact nature of our errors, doing T’Shuvah in order to fulfill Rabbi Heschel’s teaching: “the evil drive may become the helpmate of the good drive.” His use of the word “may” is demanding we do the work to make this happen, he is calling out to us to learn from history how ‘good’ people stood idly by the bloods of their neighbors, how ‘good’ people engaged in atrocities against their fellow people in the name of ‘racial purity’, in the name of scapegoating the Jews in Europe in the 1930’s and 1940’s, as well as throughout history up to and including today. He is reminding us to stand against the “cancer of the soul” that prejudice against people of color causes, stand up against the denial of basic freedoms like voting rights, stand up against the subjugation of women and their bodies to the whims of men, stand for and with Godliness, stand with those who do justly, love mercy and walk in God’s ways-not the false ways “the evil drive” has convinced so many to follow.

Recovery is a spiritual path that helps us live into Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above. We begin our journey by surrendering our false egos, not completely at first of course, and begin to believe we can change, we can transform from a being whose “evil drive” dominates everything we do to a person who, little by little, is making our “evil drive become a helpmate of the good drive.” The pathways to make this transformation take many forms and involve a deep dive into our inner life, our actions, and a commitment to change the paradigm we have been living at.

I struggle daily to fulfill Rabbi Heschel’s vision and teaching above. I have been accused of being too ego driven and, at times, I have been. Yet, through these past 35+ years I have made my ““evil drive” become a helpmate of “the good drive” much more often than not. It is hard work that is constant and joyous! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark