Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 335

“Spiritual values are, of course, delicate, precious, and intangible. They can neither be measured nor firmly and exactly described. And yet spiritual attitudes can be evoked and fostered, character can be affected, generosity and reverence can be cultivated.” ( Insecurity of Freedom pg. 61)

Today is Veterans Day in the United States and I am thinking of all who have served to ensure that we became a democracy, protected our democracy, fought in the World wars, in all of our wars whether or not they were ‘necessary’ and those who serve today. Each of these people and their families stood for and are standing for the very “intangible, delicate, and precious” “spiritual value” called democracy, freedom, equal rights for every person as our Declaration Of Independence states. When I asked my family members who fought in WWII, what they fought for, I remember my father saying he fought for people to not live in cages, not be uprooted from their homes and the horrors he experienced in the war were too much to speak of. Because they fought and so many “gave their lives that that nation might live”, we, their descendants and the recipients of their “generosity” must honor and cherish freedom for all, must continue to work to ensure the words of our Declaration of Independence are lived into, that we become a “more perfect union” one grain of sand each day.

Precisely because “spiritual values are, of course, delicate, precious, and intangible”, we have to guard them and ourselves a little more each day. What happens to most people is what Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato says in his book Path of the Just, to paraphrase, what he writes in it is not new, rather it is truth that everyone takes for granted and precisely because we take it for granted we become oblivious to the truth. The same is true of our “spiritual values”. We have come to accept them as true and necessary so we forget them and twist them to ‘our advantage’ rather than living into them so we can live better. We have become so used to saying “Christian values”, “Jewish values”, etc that these words are empty because we twist the words of Scripture, we abuse the words of the Koran, we make the words of Buddhism into serving us instead of us serving the wisdom and spirit of these Holy Texts! We take the “delicate” and “intangible” and commit adultery, we whore these principles because we want to do what we want to do, not be held responsible, and f**k everyone else. It is what corporations do when they say what they are doing to poison the earth is in the “best interests of their shareholders”, what clergy are doing when they go along with the powerful instead of speaking truth to them, it is what politicians do when they say they want to represent the people of their districts, states and instead represent the special interest groups that give them money, the party they are affiliated with, and/or their ‘christian/jewish/islamic/etc values’.

While we know these values in our inner life and we get a ‘pit in the stomach’ when we are going against them, we seem to be ignoring the preciousness of our “spiritual values”. They are “precious” because they are “delicate”, because they are “intangible”, because without them we relive the days of the Pharaoh in Egypt, we become slaves to the taskmasters, the worst traits of human beings are on display and everyone suffers. The perpetrators of the lies, of the harshness, of the hatred suffer from a deep sense of insecurity, a constant looking behind them and around them to see who is going to be their Cassius and their Brutus. The people who are being forced into camps and harsh labor-physically, mentally, and spiritually-suffer from the loss of dignity and freedoms. These “spiritual values” are what our democracy was founded on, what George Washington spoke about in his farewell address, what Lincoln labored to preserve, what  JFK meant when he said “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”. We have to return our goal of seeing everyone as “created equal” not just some people, we have to return to our goal of ensuring everyone’s “unalienable rights; Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”

We have to return to our “spiritual values”, we have to learn and relearn them. We have to recommit to them and make them our “North Star”. While “they can be neither measured nor firmly and exactly described”, we know them when we experience them and we know them when they are not being practiced by ourselves and by another person, an entity, a government. It is time for us to stop needing ‘polls’ to tell us what is right, it is time for us to end our extremism on both ends of the continuum, it is time for us to stop lying to ourselves and it is time for us to return to being a people who believe and follow thru with our covenants, our commitments to God/higher consciousness. It is time for us to stop trying to prove these “intangible” “spiritual values” and live into them in our ‘everyday living’. We don’t need the Sabbath to live holy each day, we don’t need to be told what to do by some power-hungry autocrat or wanna be guru! We have within us, in our souls, in our guts, in our inner life the “spiritual values” that create worlds, that give life to the dead in spirit, strength to the weary and hope to the hopeless. Stop fighting against Donald Trump and MAGA, stop fighting against “the Woke”, stop fight ing against ‘your enemies’  and start fighting for our shared “spiritual values”, our shared infinite dignity as human beings, our shared desire for freedom, our shared goals of making the US “a more perfect union”, our shared heritage of caring for the voiceless and the powerless as Moses and Christ taught us, our shared heritage of admitting our errors, making our amends, and changing our ways as King David showed us. We have the power to do this, it is not in heaven, it does not have to be sought for in heaven or in Christ- it is within us, it is implanted in our inner life, in our spiritual DNA-we just have to practice our spiritual values out loud and, as the prophets showed us, Very Loudly!

I have been tongue-tied so often because I am unable to describe and explain what I know in my bones to another person and been rejected, called selfish, intractable, chaos producing, etc. Even when my predictions prove out, the people who are unable to connect to our shared “spiritual values” can’t admit their errors. What I am realizing is our ‘intangible”, “delicate” and “precious” spiritual values are not the same as morality. Our “spiritual values” are paths for us to follow in order to be moral, in order to not bastardize our moral goals and live an ethical, spiritual life. I keep growing into these “spiritual values” and my biggest error is not seeing that just because something is clear to me, doesn't mean everyone else will see clearly and I have to be more patient and clearer in describing the indescribable! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark