Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 4 Day 3
“The Bible is an answer to the question, What does God require of man? But to modern man, this question is suppressed by another one, namely, What does man demand of God? Modern man continues to ponder: What will I get out of life? What escapes his attention is the fundamental, yet forgotten question, What will life get out of me?” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 4-5)
I am writing for a second day on this topic because the thoughts and wisdom move me to. The writing above goes to the very heart of what it means to be a person in the world, how to be human. Rabbi Heschel is presenting us with, what seems to me, a clear choice- are we going to live our lives as if there is a demand, a call for us to rise above our self-centered, narcissistic ways or are we not! A simple choice that we make many times a day with our actions and our words. A simple choice that is full of nuances and complexities, that is made by us all the time with or without our awareness.
“What does God require of man” is the question that haunts all of us, whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we ‘believe’ in God or not. Every human being hears a call within them to go above themselves, to be more than the selfish, narcissistic, crass homo-sapien that is part of our human nature. This question is not denying the homo-sapien part, the ‘animal instinct’ part of us, it is asking us to respond to something higher, to a “power greater than ourselves” as AA puts it. How we respond to this ‘call’, to this ‘requirement’ is the choice we have, we don’t have a choice not to hear it, not to respond to it.
Some of us respond to it with a loud and firm NO-I won’t do for anyone other than myself, my family, my circle of friends. Some of us respond with a loud and firm NO-I won’t care about nor do anything that doesn’t serve me to help another person. Some of us respond to the ‘demand’ to be more than our ‘animal instinct’ calls us to be with a loud and firm YES-caring for the stranger, the needy, the poor is an important part of my spiritual life, not hating my enemy in my heart, loving my neighbor as I love myself, we are all created in the Image of God, all of us have certain unalienable rights, etc is at the core of my being human. Some of us, maybe even a majority of us, are apathetic, indifferent to the ‘demand’ and go about doing what is expedient and easy never taking a stand on one side or the other. This is the most dangerous group because they are the most easily swayed and least able to live into principles and values they say they care about.
Every day we have opportunities to respond with an affirmative action or a negative reaction to “the fundamental, yet forgotten question, what will life get out of me”. By this I mean each day we are presented with opportunities to say, with our actions, that we are hearing and heeding the requirements that God presents to us or to say, with our actions, that we are not heeding them. This is a daily question put to us, it is a daily response we have the choice to make and we are in a period of time where so many of our elected officials, who claim to be ‘good christian, muslim, jewish’ people deny the call of God, deny what “God requires of man”, denies there culpability and their crimes against the very people Jesus, the Bible, the Koran care about! We are in a period of time when authoritarians are able to convince the ‘masses’ to go against their personal interests, go against the very Bible, Holy Texts they proclaim allegiance to and support the very people who say NO to doing anything for anyone that won’t serve them. This is the state of affairs we find ourselves in right now and it is scary.
We, the People who say YES to the demands of God, who want to be able to have it said when we die that we added to this world, we lived our principles and we made the world a little better because we were in it, have to rise up and speak up. We have to remind the large percentage of people that indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. It is a silent justification affording evil acceptability in society” as Rabbi Heschel says. It goes along with his statement “in a free society some are guilty, all are responsible” so there is no “I did not know, I was only following orders” defense for the evils that man perpetrates on man, for the evils that authoritarians and their cronies perpetrate on the masses, like Musk, Trump, Orban, Putin, et al. We, the People have to stand up and be firm in our defense of the human spirit, in defense of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Bible, the Koran, the New Testament. We, the People, also have to take stock of our actions each day, be it through a 10th Step as is taught in AA, through confession, through a daily practice of T’Shuvah as Judaism calls for, or a gratitude practice, a practice of self inventory as some Eastern spiritual traditions call for-whatever way one chooses, we must keep current with ourselves and not fall into the trap of the progressives nor the conservatives of always believing in their own righteousness and rightness. We, the People who value principles and declare an allegiance to the spiritual call within us have to constantly be in awareness of how we live them and how we don’t, with all of the nuances of living. It is hard and this inventory is eye-opening, we become filled with “trembling awe” and an awareness of the power we possess and the surrender to something more than ourselves we need to do. Only through seeing our own difficulties will we be able to have mercy for those who are indifferent and be able to speak to them in ways they will be able to hear-especially after they realize the truth of what their indifference has wrought.
I have done this inventory throughout my recovery, it is part of my daily T’Shuvah practice. I have dreams about things I have to make right from years ago and things I did right years ago that I forgot about. This way of being, knowing that I am doing the best I can in the moment to fulfill “what does God require of” me gives me the strength and confidence to continue, to fight the odds, to go against the grain, to remain alert, aware, and in the war to overcome “indifference to evil”. I continue to rail against mendacity in all its forms, I continue to offer ways to hear the ‘demand’, the ‘call of our souls’ to do something greater than our narcissistic self calls us to. I continue to believe in the power of good to overcome evil and to make this a daily reality, we have to teach the nuances of evil as well as the nuances of good. We have to give people the proper tools to be able to hear the evil in them as well as the evil outside of them, we have to demand of our religious institutions the teaching of TRUTH, not dogma; the teaching of spirit, not the glories of the past, etc. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark