Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 278
“Self-suspicion looms as a more serious threat to faith than doubt, and “anthropodicy”, the justification of man is today as difficult a problem as theodicy, the justification of God. Is there anything pure and untinged with selfishness in the soul of man? Is integrity at all possible? Can we trust our own faith? Is piety ever detached from expediency.?” (God in search of Man pg. 390)
How can we seek to justify God? God is the Ineffable One, the Infinite One, the One without end, and yet, humankind, in all of our hubris, our ‘need’ to understand so we can ‘believe’, seek to justify God’s existence, etc. We do this so we do not have to be responsible to something greater than ourselves. We do this so we can set ourselves up as ‘godly’, as the ‘one true representation of God’ and your suffering is either a sign God loves you, or a sign God doesn’t love you-depending on whom you are listening to, which charlatan in robes, cloaked in oil which they claim has anointed them God’s representatives and we invest such power in. All the ‘where was God in the Holocaust, why does God let bad things happen to good people, etc’ are paths to justifying our wrong doings, giving into our baser desires, allowing us to “suspect thy neighbor” and do harms in the name of ‘self-care’. Truly, who are we to justify God, we should be grateful to God, humbled before God, servants of God, partners with God, etc.
As usual, Rabbi Heschel is disturbing me this morning and every morning with his wisdom and teachings. The only way I can justify myself and humankind, I am seeing today, is to fulfill God’s will instead of mine, to “nullify my will before God’s will so God’s will becomes mine”(Pirke Avot 2:4). Our justification as human beings comes for our surrendering to God’s will, to “do justly, love mercy, walk humbly in God’s ways”. Yet, we have so much hubris that we expect God to walk in our ways, we demand mercy for ourselves and give none to another(s), we decide what justice is-ensuring that what is just for ourselves doesn’t apply to anyone ‘not of our kind’-hence the justice for the rich and the rest of us. We witness and participate in these God-denying, idolatrous actions daily and we say nothing, we do nothing to change ourselves, our systems! Instead of being descendants of the prophets, we are acting like descendants of the Greeks and Romans, both civilizations were destroyed and did not make the transition to modernity. Yet, we would rather use our minds to justify our idolatry, our inhumanity, our fear-mongering, our inappropriate use of power, than justify our existence as partners with God, as tillers of the soil, as keepers and growers of God’s Garden-our world. Rather than use the sayings and commandments of the Bible to help us grow, we are using the words of the Bible to have rule and dominion over one another.
We are so deep into self-loathing that we continue to find ways to justify our existence by not justifying God’s. We keep seeking a world where God is not necessary, through science, religion, logic, psychology, etc. Yet, the Surgeon General considers loneliness to be a major disease today. Loneliness comes from a disconnection from one another -usually attributed to the Pandemic, which only made the truth of what has been happening for a long time clear to ‘the powers that be’. Loneliness is a spiritual malady! It is a look into the vapidness we have been living within ourselves and this vapidness reflects our loss of living with meaning and purpose, it reflects our suspicion of everyone around us, it reflects a deep belief of being unloveable and unable to live in covenant with God and/or another human being. Because of the lies of the Greeks-humans can attain perfection- we find ourselves on the merry-go-round of not good enough and the best there is, we can do anything with impunity(Trump, his minions, the Republicans in the House of Representatives) and you have to follow our rules-authoritarianism. Maybe it is time to heed Rabbi Heschel’s words and accept God’s Will, justify our existence by doing God’s will and living together in a loving interdependence with God, with one another!
In recovery, we justify our existence by “turning our will over to the care of God” in our 3rd step. This is the culmination of our entering recovery (as opposed to abstinence); the surrender process. Surrendering our will to God’s will, surrendering our “need to be right” to our need to connect, rekindling a belief and commitment to a power greater than ourselves, are necessary if we are to move into our inventory, our process of taking off the blinders we have been wearing and seeing what we have done that isn’t good and what we have done that is good. After we surrender, we clean house so we can once again justify our existence through service and decency. It is the 29th of Av, tomorrow is the new month of Elul, the time for us to do our inventories, to surrender to truth, to God, and make our amends and our resolutions to do better, to enhance the good we do, will you? God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark