Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 3 Day 341
“The prevailing philosophy of education operates upon the assumption that man and his destiny must be conceived in terms of interests and needs.I maintain that if we continue to entertain such a view, education will be doomed to failure. Such a view is part of a way of thinking which tends to flatten things. We deal with human beings as if they had no depth, as if the world had only two dimensions.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 62)
The prescience of Rabbi Heschel always astounds me and especially today. We have seen the failure of the philosophy he describes in italics above. When our mind is focussed on only our “interests and needs” is it any wonder why we are in the state we are in?
Identity politics, claiming of victimhood, wearing our ‘poor me’ on our sleeves has landed us in a state where people have put a convicted felon, a man found guilty of sexual assault, a bankrupt businessman, a liar and cheat in the White House. Whether one voted for him or not, the main motivator in the voting was not saving democracy from a man who told us he wants to be “a dictator on day 1”, the main motivator was what people perceived to be their “interests and needs”. In our daily living, we demonize ‘those people’-whomever disagrees with us- rather than seeking to find common ground and see how much in common we actually have and even where we disagree it is more about the how than the what. Yet, being a ‘victim’ of the white man, a victim of the Biden administration which did more than the Trump administration to help the working person, hating the over correction of the far left in their victimhood and shaming, cancel culture, etc. led us to believe that we could be like Trump and get away with all the bad impulses we have and he will champion our resurrection to being equal once again. While this may work for white men, anyone else-not so much probably and he sold this lie, he told us who he is, how he is going to get ‘retribution for all of us’ while seeking to get his revenge and still trap the working class and the poor in their misery.
When we fail to see life in three-dimensional terms, we will always live in either/or, zero-sum ways. These ways have led to the myriad of wars throughout history, they have led to the exiling of people, the enslaving of people, the mistreatment of people, the demonizing of groups of people just because it was convenient and expedient to do so. This has been true throughout our history, it was true in Egypt for the Israelite People, it was true in the Greek Empire, the Roman Empire, it was true for early Christianity-hence the anti-semitism that exists to this day. It was true during the Crusades against Muslims mainly and today, the pick for Secretary of Defense is a man who has a Jerusalem Cross tattoo, signifying his belief in the righteousness of the Crusades, his anti-Muslim stance, and his belief that the U.S should be ruled by Biblical Law, as he and his fellow christian nationalists define it. The flattening out of human beings is as prevalent on the left as on the right. The left does it by demonizing those who hold different opinions than theirs, those who belong to a group they have determined are “colonizers, oppressors, etc.”, case in point-the far left is as anti-semitic as the far right and deny civil rights to the Jews in America and Israel while we were among the first to join with Rev. King and the Civil Rights movement in the 50’s and 60’s!
The failure of “interests and desires” , the flattening out of humanity, the lack of “depth” and living in “two dimensions” only has led us to our current state of affairs. In America, 1/2 the voters in our last election voted for their “desires” to not be responsible for their mistakes, for their crimes like their ‘fearless leader’ and they voted for what they were sold are their “interests” even though in reality they are the “interests” of the rich. On the other side, the demonizing of ‘those people’ and the lack of three dimensional conversations about policies, the lack of meeting people where they are, not speaking in ways that people could hear convinced people that the liars were telling the truth, that they were so much better off with the person who bungled the Pandemic and told us to ingest bleach to save ourselves!
We are in desperate need of a deep dive into our inner life. We are in desperate need of a return to our core values, the values of every spiritual path: justice, kindness, mercy, compassion, love, rebuke, amends, etc. We cannot do this when we only are concerned with our “interests and desires” and not with what is true and right. When we live two-dimensional lives we choke our inner life, we strangle our souls and this leads us to more misery and despair, it leads us to seek out ‘bad guys’ in order to make ourselves look good, we live in being a ‘victim’ and blaming ‘them’.
“Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their country” goes the beginning typing test and it is true in this moment as it is in every moment. “Evil flourishes when good people do nothing”, a quote attributed to Edmund Burke and not validated, is as true today as when he said/intimated it in the middle of the 18th Century. We are the people being called upon, each and every person here in America, in Israel, in Ukraine, in the free world. We are the people who have to safeguard our freedoms and democracies so we can help others around the globe. We have the lessons from history when we have allowed a tyrant to take lands from a free country, we have the lessons of what happens when we demonize one group and coalesce around the hating of that group, so we know how to prevent these tragedies from happening again! It is an inside job. We have to live into the spiritual values we claim to love and hold dear-no more just spouting them. We have to “care for the stranger”, we have to “love our neighbor as we love ourselves”, we have to “proclaim freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants therein”, and so many more like “do justly, love mercy, don’t bear false witness, walk humbly in the ways of God”. To do this, we have to repair our inner life, we have to see our three-dimensional natures and live into them all.
The ways I do this type of living is to constantly review my days, quickly and slowly, to see what I have done well and where I have missed the mark-make my plan for amends and correction as well as a plan to enhance the good. I do my writing and studying each day and I engage in meaningful conversations. I do the best I can to engage in “Conscious Living” and I hope to spread this way of being beginning the week of Dec. 2 in small groups online and in person here in the Desert. I believe in the goodness of people and our similarities. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark