Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 342

“Intellectually, we know the universe is not here for our sake; it is not here to please our ego. Practically, however, we act as if the purpose of the universe were to satisfy our interests and needs. However, a life without demands on the mind, heart, body and soul, a life without constant intellectual effort, spells the doom of culture. We must not remain the errand-boys of yesteryears fashions; we must not embalm notorious cliches.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg.62)

The first two sentences, written and delivered in 1962, are more true today than when Rabbi Heschel first spoke/wrote them! Herein lies the cognitive dissonance of humanity, the realization that our beliefs and our actions do not match, are not congruent and we seem unable to bring them back together. When our “knowing” and our actions are in conflict with one another, something has to give and it is, unfortunately, our “knowing”, our values.

What was happening and continues to grow in more nuanced and overt ways is that “to satisfy our interests and needs” we will change our beliefs, discard our values, twist ourselves into pretzels to validate our incongruent actions really do serve our highest values, they actually are following the words of Moses, of Jesus, of Mohammed, of Buddha, of …! We have a society that believes in ‘christian values’ as long as we can treat the stranger poorly, take advantage of the poor, shut the door on the needy and make everyone subservient to the ‘ruling class’ of rich people. Because of our cognitive dissonance, people believed the richest man in the world was their friend and Putin’s stooge(s) want the best for the poor and the needy! A liar and convict was/is seen as truthful and authentically christian and the ‘anointed one’!

We know that we have screwed up the climate, we are aware that “drill baby drill” will only continue to retard the climate and hasten more and more climate changes. We know that putting people in “detention camps” and using the military on American soil goes against the goals of American democracy. We are fully aware that putting people’s health at risk and women not being able to receive the care they need because religious zealots and liars claim that it is against ‘christian values’ is bullshit. Yet, people buy into these lies and these harmful ways making themselves believe that it is for ‘the greater good of America’!! We find all sorts of reasons to buy into the cognitive dissonance of our practice being in direct opposition to our intellect. How sad that we were warned and have so many experiences throughout history of how bad this is for individuals, for countries, for a people and we fail to believe it.

The reflection of ourselves in the water, in the mirror has come to be a source of lies and subterfuge for us. Our narcissistic way of being tells us that we are the end all, be all and we can do whatever we want to with reckless abandon and no personal responsibility-this is one of the “interests and desires” we humans have. We see this in our choices of elected officials, we see this in the way we sit in the pews and nod our heads like good sheep, the way we sit in classrooms in colleges and schools around the country nodding our heads and going along to get the grade we need to secure the job we don’t want and make the money that we believe will bring us joy and/or a seat at the table of power. We have so convinced ourselves of the “goodness of power”, the “need to be rich” that we have done things that go against our very values, that we would be ashamed to admit to our children, in order to ‘succeed’, to ‘get ours’. This is cognitive dissonance at its height.

I asked my father, z”l, what he did in World War II when he served and he never wanted to talk about it. He told us a little, he was one of the radio operators for the atomic bomb run on Japan and he never could talk about the horrors he saw in Europe and in the Pacific. When my oldest brother went to “boot camp” for the National Guard, even though my father knew he wasn’t going overseas, my father cried because he knew what boot camp was like and he didn’t want his sons to have to go through the degradation and, God forbid, go to war and experience the horrors that he had. His war and his service were necessary for the good of the world, to stop Nazism from flourishing was a higher goal and what he had to do, what his friends and fellow soldiers had to do in order to achieve this holy goal was not so holy, what they saw was so degrading, so cognitively dissonant, he had to not talk about it, not think about it and it affected him for the rest of his short life. He was more intense about doing the next right thing, he was more intense about treating every person well-regardless of race, creed, religion.

We all need to find the ways to live into our cognitive dissonance rather than run away from it. We have to look in the mirror and, instead of seeing our narcissistic solution to the dissonance, see our cognitive dissonance for what it is and change our actions instead of changing our perceptions and values! We need to realize that “to satisfy our interests and needs” is not the ultimate goal of being human, it is not the reason we evolved and/or were created. We are told in the Bible to “care for the earth”, as we can see, the world is a garden and each of us has a plot to tend, grow, care for and we have to do the best we can each and every day to make it one grain of sand more fruitful and seek to multiply the yield of our bounty so we can share it with those around us. The cognitive dissonance of being human will never leave us, in fact it is a good thing like guilt if used for our benefit and the benefit of another. Both cognitive dissonance and guilt lead us to examine our selves, hopefully, and change our behaviors to be more in line with our values and principles, more in line with care and concern for the universe and our fellow human beings. This is the way to “teach our children” and the way to re-educate ourselves, to re-calibrate our ‘true north’ and re-dedicate our efforts to making the world a better place because we were/are here.

My father left the world a better place by his presence, his children live lives of kindness and righteousness to the best of our ability, his grandchildren keep making significant differences in the world by caring for people in need, and all of us fight our cognitive dissonance and use it to make our corner of the world a little better thanks to his example and love. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark