Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 2 Day 293
“Such a person is worse than an idol-worshiper … . The latter, paying homage to the stars, worships an object that does not rebel against God, whereas the former worships beings some of whom rebel against God. The former only worships one object, but there is no limit to the number of human beings whom the perverse in religion may worship. Finally the inner attitude of the idolator is apparent to everybody; people can guard themselves from him—his denial of God is public knowledge. The hypocrite’s denial, however, is unnoticed … . This makes him the worst of the universal evils(Bahya, Duties of the Heart, Chapter 4). (God in Search of Man pg. 392)
Immersing ourselves in Bahya’s writing above, I hear Rabbi Heschel’s demanding us to look inside of ourselves and come to terms with our own incongruences, our own actions that serve ourselves paths of hypocrisy. The last two sentences above cut right to the heart of the issues facing us today as they have from time immemorial. The issue is not our incongruences as much as it is our denial of them, of our refusal to be embarrassed by them, of our inability to acknowledge and change them. Rather than follow a path of T’Shuvah, we instead practice our denials, our hiding from ourselves and everyone else, our wearing of masks of piety, of righteousness, and this leads people to believe in us to their ruin, to the ruin of decency, the ruin of truth, the ruin of freedom. Coming to grips with the truth that all of us are incongruent at times, all of us say one thing and do another at times is crucial for our growth, imperative to our ending the practice of evil that we perpetrate upon one another by our incongruent behaviors. Yet, we continue to run away from facing ourselves, from calling out the hypocrite, from even discerning the perverseness of the people Rabbi Heschel and Bahya are speaking about.
These are the people the prophets railed against, the priests who would offer sacrifices while engaging in ways that served the rich and the powerful. Their words and warnings fell on deaf ears, just as the words of people who speak truth to power today and have throughout the millennia fall on deaf ears. As I ponder the words above, I realize more and more that we, the people, buy into the words of these ‘false prophets’ because they say what we want to hear, we ignore their actions and buy into the lies they tell us because we are afraid to see the truth of ourselves, we are afraid to admit our own hypocritical ways, we are unwilling to look at the times when we don’t ‘walk our talk’. So, we go along with the ‘strongmen’, the authoritarians, the populists believing they will save us from having to look at ourselves, make our amends and change our ways; which leads to our loss of freedom, to what makes us human as Rabbi Abraham Twerski teaches: our ability to make “free-will moral choices”.
There is a solution, we are not stuck in the evil that the false pietists spread, and that is engaging in a path of recovery, one of the paths of Torah, of the Bible. We are in the middle of Elul, we are 22 days from Yom Kippur and, as we learn in the Talmud (Tractate Yoma 86b), “Reb Meir would say: Great is repentance because the entire world is forgiven on account of one individual who repents as it is stated: “I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely, for My anger has turned away from him”(Hosea 14:5). Since we do not know which “him” the prophet is speaking of, we all need to repent! We all need to see the difference between living as a hypocrite and actions of hypocrisy that we are all susceptible to and engage in from time to time. This is the basis of the recovery movement, this is the basis of Torah, our imperfections, our incongruences, and our return. We have to let go of our need to hide, our need to ‘save our face’ and, instead, save our beingness, save our tuchus’, save our humanity and the humanity of everyone else.
The first time I was taught the words of Reb Meir, I was overwhelmed with anxiety, fear and relief. I had to make a decision, would I trust our ancient wisdom, would I truly ‘turn my will and my life over to the care of God…” and engage in the ways of living as a Baal T’Shuvah, a repentant? It was at this moment I realized what living Hineni, here I am, meant. I made a decision 36+ years ago to continue to ‘come clean’ upon realizing my own hypocritical actions, my own incongruent ways of being. I missed the mark over these past 36 years by giving into my fears, my seeking personal benefits, and going along to get along. I also missed the mark through living into the caricature of me that I painted and others put on me. I am so remorseful for these harms, for these ‘evil’ ways and I improve upon them each time I realize the myriad of disguises they take. I have not always walked my talk and I know I will never be perfect in doing this. I do, however, also know I get a little better at it each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark