Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 364

“There is no substitute for faith, no alternatives for revelation, no surrogate for commitment…We are guilty of committing the fallacy of misplacement. We define self-reliance and call it faith, shrewdness and call it wisdom, anthropology and call it ethics, literature and call it Bible, inner security and call it religion, conscience and call it God. However, nothing counterfeit can ensure forever.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 3)

This paragraph follows the one I wrote on parts of on Friday. After calling it like it is about the institutionalization of religion, Rabbi Heschel calls out these “institutions” and all of the charlatans around in 1958, and we didn’t heed his call then and we are suffering the consequences of these charlatans and idolators, this “misplacement” makers today on steroids.

We are witnesses to and, in some cases, participants in “misplacement”. We keep hearing of and buying into the “alternative facts” theories and lies, we keep being told about the “revelations” of the ‘holy christian nationalists’ who tell us they want to take us back to a place of ‘godliness’, whose only “commitment” is to themselves and their almighty power and wealth. We are watching millions of people being led down the primrose path of lies and deceits who have substituted faith in a leader for faith in God, who are believing in the “revelation” of the ‘new messiah’, who have made autocrats the “surrogate” for God and their “commitment” to them is ironclad. We are in trouble and most people are willfully blind to the trouble we are in and will be in as we move backwards to the ways of discrimination, slavery, and robber barons.

“We are guilty of committing the fallacy of misplacement” causes me to experience “trembling awe”. I am trembling because I have to look at my life and see where I have committed this “fallacy” and when I have gone along with another who has, is, will commit this “fallacy”. We, the People have to look at ourselves individually, as a community, as a faith, as a country and be responsible for “committing the fallacy of misplacement”. We see this “fallacy” happening in our courts, all the way from the local courts to the Supreme Court who are being political and calling it ‘strict constitutionalists’. We see this “fallacy” happening in our Congress with Republican lawmakers favoring the wealthy, desiring to cut the programs that help the poor, the sick, what they call “entitlements” and calling it populism. We see this “fallacy” happening  with the ‘christian nationalists’ who do everything that Christ was against and calling it ‘christian’. Writing this, I wonder if we will ever learn, if we will ever rise above our baser desires and live into the spiritual heritage that has been passed down and within us for the millennia.

“Change is the only constant” is attributed to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus and nowhere is this more evident than in the Hebrew Bible, yet the ‘powers that be’ don’t want change unless they can control it and manage it-which is the opposite of the essence of this wisdom. Change happens and the more we try and control it, the more we find ourselves in the predicaments mentioned above. Self-reliance is not faith, it is the antithesis of faith. Faith entails a knowing that there is more than me in the world, there is more out of my control than in it, that I/we will be able to respond to the reality of any and all situations with wisdom and sustainability, among other things. Yet, people are under the illusion that the ‘self-made’ man who is a ‘strongman’ and “self-reliant” will have the power to bend change to his will and thereby help us. WRONG-this liar in chief that is about to become the President, who is the head of governments in Hungary, Russia, China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, etc will only bend the laws and ways to their benefit and the benefit of their cronies while claiming complete immunity from the laws of humanity and the laws of God. Witnessing people’s faith in the “self-reliance” of the mendacious ones is sad, it is cruel and it is punishing.

Believing the lie that we can experience “shrewdness and call it wisdom” has been with us for so long and the Bible, etc are the antidotes to this particular lie as well. While very few like the phrase “eternal truth, eternal wisdom” this is exactly what the Bible is-which is why so many clergy over the 3000+ years of its existence have tried to shape it and bend it to their will, to fit their narratives, to defend their sins, their bastardizations of it’s laws and ways. We have seen so often the destruction and ruin that this belief causes and we continue to return to this same “fallacy of misplacement” without any recognition of where we will end up. This is a prime example of Einstein’s saying: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results”.

It is time for We, the People to say NO to these two misplacements, NO to the “substitutes for faith” we have bought into, NO to the “alternatives to revelation” we have swallowed hook, line, and sinker, NO to the “surrogates for commitment” that we have chosen instead of choosing God, Higher Consciousness, and we have to do it NOW. We all need to examine ourselves and root out the deceptions of self and the deceptions by another as well as the deceptions we are promoting in order to be able to save ourselves, to change the ruinous and destructive path we are heading down. We can do this by immersing ourselves in our Holy Texts, not the unholy ones being printed in China that says “God Bless the USA” on it and the profits are going to Trump.

I am yelling, I am screaming, I am uncontrollable about mendacity and lies because I know what it is to decimate people with them, because I lived 20+ years as a liar and a fraud; showing people what they wanted to see and not who I was nor what I truly wanted-their money and my sense of power. I believed in “self-reliance” because I couldn’t trust that people would stick around, having lost my father at 14 to another heart attack, so I could only count on me as no one else understood me-or so I believed. People tried- I couldn’t hear so I went with the societal norm of “self-reliance” and believed “shrewdness” was “wisdom” because I saw how the rich were worshiped and cowed to. In my recovery I am deeply sensitive the lies I tell myself and the lies I hear, the subtle meanings of people who are ‘the best’, ‘the kindest’, ‘the most spiritual’, ‘the wisest and most caring’ for those ‘poor downtrodden people’ who are actually just putting on an act and I call it out and experience the consequences for calling it out, which hurts and is a better hurt than staying quiet. I wrestle with the lies I tell myself and the things I am oblivious to daily and I pray more people will “do T’Shuvah every day” to find their ways of doing the same. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark