Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 280
“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)
Today is the first day of Elul, yesterday was Rosh Hodesh Elul and the 30th day of Av. It is 3 weeks and one day since we commemorated the destruction of the Temples and, as we observe 3 weeks between the breaching of the walls of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and the destruction of the Temple, we observe these 3 weeks since the 9th of Av as a time of healing and introspection as to our part in the destruction, not just of the Temple, rather how we have retarded the work of creation we were created to fulfill and how we have advanced our purpose, our mission, our work.
Looking at the second question above and using it in our Chesbon, our accounting of our soul, of ourselves is a deep dive into who we are, the lies we tell ourselves and the way we need to be to serve our mission, our purpose, to serve God and to serve our corner of the world and make it a little better than when we found it. “Integrity” is comes from the Latin meaning “intact”. The Hebrew is “shlaemute”, wholeness. Immersing ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s question: “Is integrity at all possible” we find, again, a both/and response. Integrity is possible and it is hard, it is not a constant for anyone except the spiritually elevated, even the Dalai Lama speaks of his anger issues, he laughs at himself, however which shows his humanness and his wholeness. Yet, we find so many people setting themselves up as having the ‘utmost integrity’ while deriding everyone else who disagrees with them. We see this mendacity in tribalism, in populism, in any and every form of grouping that is dependent upon a ‘high priest/warrior king’ as leader and this leader is given the power to determine what we think, what we say, what we believe.
As a nation, our integrity is being retarded. While we have never kept intact the words of the Declaration of Independence: “all men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights…life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, we are in a state where scared white men are speaking of the goodness of slavery for the slaves, banning books like Maus, Diary of Anne Frank, Toni Morrison’s books, anything that speaks of the ills done to slaves, to Native Americans, etc-anything that would make them question themselves, admit their errors to themselves, is banned or ignored. We are very far from being intact as a nation and the reason is because we are not intact as individuals! We are broken people whose brokenness is being played out as anger, as “godly”, as ‘we are the saviors and warriors of Christ’, except the Christ they speak about and worship has no relationship to the Christ in the Bible, just as the ruling party and Netanyahu have no relationship to the words of the Prophets nor the lessons of the Hebrew Bible! Yet, these broken people who try so hard to convince themselves by convincing us how together they are, how they are fighting for the ‘little guy’, how ‘they are our retribution’ have bought their bullshit, they have drunk their own juice and are bringing us to the brink of disaster, just as the priests, royalty and wealthy did at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple.
“Is integrity at all possible” is the question before us as part of our “accounting of our souls”. While Trump, Netanyahu, Giuliani, Cruz, McCarthy, Greene, Jordan, et al want us to believe they are the paragons of integrity, as do many of the progressives, like Bernie Sanders, the Squad, et al, I believe it is only when we can acknowledge our both/and; our separation and connection with God and human beings; when we can see the ‘errors of our ways’ and the good we do; when we stop seeing ourselves and one another with myopic vision and see the whole picture of self and another-good and not so good; we are in integrity. We are intact as human beings because we see our whole self, fulfilling the Latin definition and the Hebrew definition of integrity.
In using this question in our accounting, we have to determine when we were split and how we fed our split nature. We have to delineate our tunnel vision and how/when we wear “a new pair of glasses”. There are many other ways to respond to the question of “when have we acted with/without integrity?” In looking back on the past year, I realize when I worry about the past or the future, I am not intact and when I live in the moment, when I seek to not blame anyone for my own errors, I am more intact with my whole being. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark