Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 98

“We all live in them, feel in them, think in them, but, failing to uphold their independent dignity, to respect their power and weight, they turn waif, elusive-a mouthful of dust(God’s Quest for Man pg.25). When placed before the Bible, the words of which are like dwellings made of rock, we do not know how to find the door.”(God in Search of Man pg. 244)

Continuing to learn from Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom about “holiness in words” that is the Bible, we get to look inside of ourselves and at our outer actions in order to judge ourselves, our world. The first sentence above is like a knife “circumcising the foreskin of our hearts” as Moses tells us in Deuteronomy. Rabbi Heschel is calling us all out, demanding we be accountable for our use of the words of the Bible. He is, like the prophets of Israel, railing against our misuse of Biblical words, beseeching us to end our abuse of the words of the Bible, offering us a path of return of using them to live by rather than living by the abhorrent ways we are want to bastardize them.

Rabbi Heschel is acknowledging our ability to use the words of the Bible to live, feel and think AND he is putting a mirror up to us all so we can see how we have failed to “uphold their independent dignity”. The words of the Bible are holy and they give us the path to living life at a higher level than our lowest common denominator. Rabbi Heschel is giving us the opportunity to re-tune our hearing, to get the correct pitch and melody of the words of the Bible so we can, once again, sing and live in harmony, in creativity for the sake of heaven and one another, and “make our lives a blessing”.

By failing “to respect their power and weight” we have live in selfish, self-centered ways; our ‘good acts’ are for our sake, not the sake of heaven, not for the sake of another. Our clergy who preach so wonderfully and eloquently are also guilty, rather than speak the words of the Bible with a fervor and passion for truth, for decency, for caring about tone another, we hear the political views, the lack of “independent dignity” and “respect for their power” as messages from God. We are being inundated with the words of the Bible spoken through false lips, we are being preached at by false witness’ and they have become so compelling, we hear these words used to validate authoritarianism and autocrats! These words written in 1955 are so prescient with how our world is bastardizing the words of the Bible today-we seem to have taken Rabbi Heschel’s warning and turned it into a way to power rather than a way to compassion, to holiness.

One could wonder and ponder how and why this has happened, one could debate the ‘rightness’ of today’s misuse, abuse, bastardization of the words of the Bible, and I choose not to. Suffice it to say, this has happened today as it has happened in every era-people looking for power, seeking to deceive and to be deceived. I am more interested in how we stop our efforts to “turn them waif, elusive-a mouthful of dust.”  This can only happen when we end our neglect of the Bible, when we stop making the words, the thoughts, the ideas, the ideals, the paths of the Bible orphans. When we end our incessant need to neglect, when we stop willfully making them difficult to achieve, we can regain the power, dignity, weight, and respect the words of the Bible deserve and, in the process, begin to repair our selves, repair our neighborhoods, repair our countries and our world.

We can change our trajectory, we can turn towards the “holiness in words” that the Bible both is and gives us, we can unclog our ears, “circumcise our the foreskins of our hearts”, allow our spirits to veto the ways in which we seek our desires over what is the next right action to take. We have the power to do this and it begins by being accountable to ourselves, to one another and to no longer seek to defend our bad actions by using the Bible to validate our flawed behaviors. We have to begin by demanding of our clergy to preach truth, to learn with their flock and let go of their dogmas, their political leanings-on both sides of the continuum- and learn anew each day, each year from the words of the Bible. We need to demand of clergy and layperson alike that the prayers we utter matter! No longer are we going to allow ourselves, our neighbors, our enemies, our clergy to pray by rote, be insincere in our communicating with God, with ourselves. We are going to demand rigorous honesty and introspection. We are going to work together, clergy, layperson, friend and foe to “uphold their independent dignity, to respect their power and weight”  through study, action and love. This is what is needed by all of us; we, the people, have to demand this of our clergy as well as of ourselves if we are to avoid turning the words of the Bible into “a mouthful of dust”!

This is one of the principles of recovery-recovering “the independent dignity” of the words of the Bible, the words we use in our everyday discourse, respecting truth, seeing the dignity of every soul, and of our selves. Recovery is based in words that come from the Bible, as Rabbi Heschel points out above, we “turn our will and our lives over to the care of God…” each day as a sign of our respect for the “power and weight” of the words of the Bible. We are engaged in a daily struggle to enhance our living, raise up the lives of another, keep our side of the street a little cleaner and be a little kinder today than we were yesterday.

I ma guilty of what Rabbi Heschel is calling out above and I spend my waking hours infusing the “holiness in words” of the Bible into my life a little more each day. I am humbled to have been able to help many people achieve “recovery through Torah” and I apologize to those for whom my Torah was not accessible. God Bless and stay safe, pray for the return of the hostages, Rabbi Mark