Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 317

“The Torah is not description but guidance; not an acceptance but a challenge; not reminiscence but commandment. It is not a portraiture of that which is but a vision, an anticipation of that which ought to be.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg.57)

In his commentary on Leviticus 19:2, the Ramban says we have to be told to be holy because there are people who will be “scoundrels within the bounds of the Torah”. I hear Rabbi Heschel echoing this sentiment in the words above. When we see Torah as ‘history’, it is easy to believe it is describing something that was, that we can just accept the laws/commandments, that it gives us a false sense of ‘how to be’. Yet, as at the end of the Holiness Code we are told: “Love thy Neighbor as thyself”, there is no description as to how to do this, nor is this a reminiscence because even the Jewish People who proclaim Am Yisrael Chai, the Jewish people live, have never all agreed on anything, except, maybe, the Shema is our watch phrase, our goal. The same is true with the other Spiritual Texts held in the same esteem, holiness as the Torah and the Bible; they are for guidance, they are a challenge to our status quo, they are commanding and demanding, they are a vision as well as an anticipation of that which both ought to be and can be-if we are willing to use the Holy Texts for their intended purpose.

“The Torah” is a manual that guides us on how to be more human today than we were yesterday, how we can be better versions of ourselves in this moment than we were a year ago, how to live a life that feeds our spiritual as well as physical selves and how our souls become the arbiters of what is the next right thing to do rather than our rationalizations and feelings. We are given 365 “don’t do this” commandments because, as we have seen throughout history, we do them with little or any thought when we believe it is in our best interests to lie, to commit adultery, to steal, to make the truth non-existent, to be misogynistic when we want to have dominion and rule over a woman and/or over another group of people. We are guilty of “Coveting our neighbors’ stuff” because we decided they ‘took’ it from us rather than come face to face with our own shortcomings and repairing ourselves, as long as we have someone to blame, we don’t have to be responsible for our part in our own demise, in our own current situation. We have 248 “Do this” commandments because we can see how often we didn’t-even having them spelled out to us, we find reasons not to take the next right action and do what we are called to do. A few of the most violated “do this” commandments is “care for the stranger, the needy, the poor and the orphan” another is “proclaim freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants therein”, still another is “forgiveness”. We think it serves us to denigrate the stranger, those who are ‘different than us, and hold onto our grudges! While there are many more, these three show us how we can deceive ourselves to go along with an authoritarian, with a societal ‘norm’, to our own ruination. Violating these three and the others ruins our humanity, we lessen our own value and worth, our own dignity and image; we tarnish the divine image we are created in and we deceive ourselves into believing someone will save us, rather than depending on our own strength, independence, wisdom and ability to join forces for good, for what is right and what is being demanded of us. Torah is guidance, it is not a nice story or a story of fear and punishment. It is guidance as to what happens when we take the next right action and what happens when we take the next wrong action. We don’t have to blame anyone else, we just have to look within which is the goal of Torah, to look within and then outside to see how we can add rather than subtract.

Torah is the challenge of building a world that we can live in with one another in harmony and detente, if not peace. It is the vision of how we ought to help one another, redeem the poor, ransom the captive, dignify another human being and see the infinite worth of every individual, after all we all stood at the bottom of Mt. Sinai, we all stood at the edge of the Jordan when Moses spoke to us reminding us that everyone was at the Jordan waiting to cross over and we all were equal from the water drawer to the head of the tribe.

It is time for us to reclaim the Torah from the Charlatans of the far right and the far left. It is time for us to reclaim the Bible from these ‘experts’ who believe ‘only i know what God wants’ when Torah has so many faces, so many understandings, so many interpretations. It is time for We, the people, to recapture the commandments, to use the guidance, to end our longing for the good old days and realize the best is yet to come because there living in the past is ignoring the beauty of today and the challenges of today. It is time of We, the people, to challenge the liars who claim life is so terrible, those authoritarians who want to tear everyone down so they can have control and dominion over people for their own selfish desires. We, the people, have to regain the vision of Shalom, wholeness that permeates every word of Torah, of the Bible. It is time for all of us to sit down and argue for the sake of heaven, for the sake of learning with the thoughts and values of the Bible, of the Torah rather than argue to be right and in control. We, the people, have to reclaim our heritage from the prophets, to speak truth to power and to the people, to be loud and proud of who we are and what we bring, to serve something greater than ourselves so we can truly be our authentic self. We have to ability, we have the texts, we just need to be willing-are you?

I have used the Torah and the Bible as guidance and hear the commands of the text over and over again in each reading and I hear the guidance and the commands anew each time. To this end, I have studied with Rabbi Ed Feinstein for 31 years going over the same texts, arguing anew over each one and finding new ways to set our vision in line with the divine, to hear the commandments anew, to deepen our compassion and understanding of our fellow human beings. Ed and I have been partners in Chutzpah as he says, partners in healing broken spirits, partners in loving our neighbors, partners in proclaiming freedom for all, partners in knowing if we are alive, we have to learn. The guidance and the vision of Torah has shaped my life for the last 35 years in ways that are too large for me to even comprehend. It has made me more responsible, more sensitive, more enraged at mendacity, more compassionate towards people who are just stuck. Torah has made me engaged in anticipatory excitement of what can and should be, it has cleaned my shame and allowed me to be imperfect, it gives me the strength and sight to do T’Shuvah and no longer worry about someone else defining me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark