Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 261
“In addition to our being uncertain of whether our motivation prior to the act is pure, and to our being embarrassed during the act by “alien thoughts,” one is not even safe after the act. We are urged by Jewish tradition to conceal from others our acts of charity;(Mishnah Shekalim 5,6) but are we able to conceal them from ourselves? Are we able to overcome the danger of pride, self-righteousness, vanity, and the sense of superiority, derived from what are supposed to be acts of dedication to God?”(God in Search of Man pg.388)
Today is Tisha B’Av, the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av. This is the day we commemorate the destruction of both Temples, the loss of our sovereignty, and other destructive experiences in Jewish history. The caveat being, according to the Rabbis, that these are destructions that could have been avoided had we just be truthful in our “acts of dedication to God”. Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom and teachings above speak directly to us as a warning to look inside our selves, to take a deep dive into our rationalizations, the lies we tell ourselves, our egotistical need and drive to be the smartest person in the room, our ability to be unkind for the ‘right’ reasons.
Rabbi Heschel is calling to us to be in awareness of our motives, awareness of our “pride, self-righteousness, vanity, and sense of superiority” that we defend as “acts of dedication to God”. Today, in the Jewish world, most people are not willing to look inside themselves and see the destruction that have wrought because of their false pride, because of some inflated sense of knowing better, their inability to acknowledge their own missing the marks, their need to be perfect and to blame someone else when things go wrong. Yet, these same people will go to temple and synagogue and pray for the reconstruction of the Temple, going back to sacrifices they don’t believe in, all the while unwilling, unable to do their own T’Shuvah, their own inventory, make their amends, cause restoration of the dignity of another human being and find ways to overrule their self-righteous urges.
In Florida, saying slavery helped slaves learn trades and use of tools that helped them later on is an example of vapid, “sense of superiority” thinking. In Israel, Netanyahu and his cronies have decided they do not need any checks and balances, whatever they decide is good, right and lawful-a la Richard Nixon and Donald J Trump. The cry of so-called religious people that abortion is prohibited in the Bible is not a universal truth, in Judaism, life begins when the fetus takes its first breath, i.e. when it is born. Yet, over and over again-in business, in government, in so-called religious institutions, in any type of ‘guru’ worship, in all types of fascism, communism (as it is practiced), in our families, in our streets we are encountering people who fall prey to the “alien thoughts”, before, during and after what could be a “good deed”.
Without heeding Rabbi Heschel’s warning and wisdom, without doing “T’Shuvah one day before we die”, hence everyday, we fall into these soul-sucking traps. We find reasons to hold grudges, we hold onto resentments, we forget the people who have helped us and are angry that we needed their help so we ‘get even’, rejoice, even cause, their loss of dignity, using their mistakes against them, using their vulnerabilities against them, which M.Scott Peck calls the definition of evil. How does this happen, we wonder. It happens because of our vanity, our emptiness, as the Latin defines vanity. We have become so empty inside, we have neglected our spiritual life, we have stayed infantile in our conception of God, in the ways of religious living, we have either bought in completely to the mendacity of religious leaders who only seek power or we have rejected the truth and wisdom and instruction of our Holy Books completely. This keeps us empty, angry, subject to our rationalizations, our whims, our self-deceptions, and the deception of another(s).
Today, this Tisha B’Av, we can choose to be in recovery from “pride, self-righteousness, vanity, and a sense of superiority”. We can do our own inventories and make our amends as a way of connecting to one another, as a way of accepting one another, as a path to wholeness in our inner life. We can let go of our false egos, we can fill the emptiness we experience inside with spiritual connection to the Ineffable One, to the spirit of the universe, to God and join with others in a truthful, other-serving seeking of how to live well, how to live together, how to honor the dignity of every human being. I am guilty of falling into the dangers Rabbi Heschel speaks of, I am also in recovery from them. I accept my imperfections, I am sad when I see what is going on, I do the best I can to keep my side of the street clean, and I apologize to anyone I harmed because of falling into the dangers mentioned above. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark