Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 3 Day 365
“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 endure forever.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg 3)
I wrote on the first two couplets yesterday and today I want to finish this crucial idea. “Anthropology” is “the study of human societies and cultures and their development” according to the Oxford online Dictionary. This is not the same as ethics, yet we give such enormous weight to the “societal norm”, we have put so much faith human development and our ‘humanistic’ values that we believe they are ethical, after all, as Richard Nixon said and Donald Trump has proven, “if the President does it, by definition it is legal.” In ethical living, one doesn’t worry about the society, one worries about what is the next right thing to do, one is concerned with being right-sized, serving something greater than oneself, not going along to get along, and no longer serving the “status quo”. In living an ethical life, one is no longer concerned with anthropology, because the society, the group, the culture has said it is okay to hate Jews, Muslims, Hispanics, Blacks, etc. It is very sad that we have grown in our anthropologic ways and not our ethical ways! Goebbels has had more of an influence than Ghandi, than Jesus, than Moses as evidenced by Trump, Musk and the parade of billionaires who are coming to them to ‘kiss the ring’.
As a teen-ager until my mid 30’s, “inner security” was the holy grail of psychology and, for many, spirituality and, in my years as a Rabbi, I have been asked more times than I can count for guidance on how to achieve this “inner security”. What the psychologists lied to us about, what the false prophets and false gurus sell to people is bullshit! One can never achieve “inner security” because life is always on the move, things are always changing and we can never be sure and secure that this action in this moment will be the best for us in the long run. We can be assured that we are doing the best we can in this moment and never secure, never sure because there is no certainty except that change is the constant. “Religion” is the very opposite of “inner security” because, as Rabbi Heschel says over and over, “religion” is a constant communication of demands upon us by the Ineffable One. We are constantly being called to serve and to constantly review and repair our errors, ‘religion” doesn’t belittle us because of our errors, it reminds us of our imperfections and humanity, it doesn’t promise us a rose garden, it gives us the tools and the path to tend God’s garden-the earth and one another.
While none of us can prove the existence of God, we also have to stop giving into the fallacy of our “conscience” being the same as God. While our “conscience” is a filter through which we hear God’s call, God’s demand, this hearing is specific for each individual and different for each of us, ergo-not the whole being, the entire entity that is God. In Judaism, we don’t know what God is, God is too large for our definitions and cannot be manipulated by our limiting definitions, so we ‘define’ God by what God isn’t.
The last sentence above is the one that we all need to immerse ourselves in.The Roman Empire did not last forever, the Greek Empire didn’t last forever, no civilization from antiquity that was built on falsehoods, on idolatry, on authoritarianism is with us today. The only one to survive intact is Judaism. It survived because there were leaders and prophets who brought the people back to “God”, back to “ethics”, back to “religion”, back to “faith” and back to the “Bible”. Each great civilization has fallen because they became so enamored with themselves that they became counterfeit, they discriminated against people, they made the ‘stranger’ unwelcome, they abused the poor and the needy, etc and they fell in battle, in economics; the people lost what little freedoms they had.
I read the last sentence above and I say “please God” because it will take an “act of God” to unmoor so many people from their “counterfeit” belief in a liar and a cheat, a grifter and an immoral leader, be it the one in Russia, in Hungary, in Saudi Arabia, in Turkey, in Israel, in the United States, wherever in the world the people buy into the lies of the leader, they believe them because these charlatans have used religious idolators to buffer their claims of being ‘anointed by Jesus’, ‘only they can fix it’ ‘lets rebuild the 3rd Temple, hate ‘those people’ make America great again’, etc. I believe what is counterfeit cannot last forever-the 100 years Reich lasted about 12 after all. It is imperative, however, for all of us who “know”, all of us who are unwilling to live “counterfeit” lives to stand up and say NO to the liars, say BULLSHIT to the grifters, call the ‘religious’ phonies IDOLATORS, and help people see truth once again. Rabbi Heschel’s demand, as I hear him loud and clear this morning is to live as “descendants of the prophets”, to “speak truth to power”, to respond to the demands of the moment, to live the most spoken commandment in the Bible-“love and care for the stranger, the poor, the needy, the widow, and the orphan because you were strangers in the land of Egypt”. Rabbi Heschel’s voice is ringing in my ears, and I pray in yours, to remember how we were treated as slaves in Egypt and we brought out to be free. I hear the words of Leviticus 25:10: “Proclaim Freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants therein”. None of us are exempt from this demand, command. None of us get to sit on the sidelines while the idolators, the grifters, the liars spread their poison and enslave so many. None of us get to fiddle while the world, while freedom burns, as the world did in the 1930’s with Nazi Germany.
I know the truth of the last sentence viscerally. I lived a “counterfeit” life prior to my recovery, I know the pain and the anguish it brought to the people around me, to myself as well. I know that it took an ecstatic event to wake me up and, thank God, once awoken I have not turned back to the lies I lived into while asleep. I lived a willful blindness because I knew better and made so many substitutions for truth that I cannot tolerate any bullshit now. I am unwilling to be politically correct and nice when I hear the words of lies and mendacity, of deception and self-deception from another person and from myself. I have many compatriots who are not as blunt, who couch a rebuke in better terms and I admire them-it just isn’t me. I am not perfect and not always correct, yet about 80-90% of the time my inner lie detector proves true and I have to say something because I cannot allow “counterfeit” ways to survive, I can’t be a party to lies. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark