Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 4 Day 7
“Unlike animals, man is the playground for the unpredictable emergence and multiplication of needs and interests, some of which are indigenous to his nature, while others are induced by advertisement, fashion, envy, or come about as miscarriages of authentic needs. We usually fail to discern between authentic and artificial needs, and misjudging a whim for an aspiration, we are thrown into ugly tension. Most obsessions are the perpetuations of such misjudgments.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 5-6)
Reading and re-reading these words, we are able to come away with a “duh” response, of course what Rabbi Heschel’s words convey, the spirit as well as the prose are truth and perception, which makes the reading and re-reading of them all the more necessary. Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, an 18th Century Jewish Mystic, said about his book, Path of the Just, that if one was going to read it only once, don’t bother because the words in it, the ideas in it were truths that are universally accepted and because they are so universally accepted, they are easy to ignore and overlook. The same is true with all the great philosophers, mystics, prophets, holy texts. Yet, we, modern human beings, keep believing in ‘one and done’. In medical schools they would show some procedures, like drawing blood, once, then have the students perform it, then have them teach it. Our belief in our own excellence is a dangerous belief, our need to be certain and our need to be ‘master race’ is a recipe for disaster, war and slavery.
All of this is my prelude to Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above. Human beings are a conglomeration of needs, both “authentic and artificial”, some “indigenous”, like food, clothing shelter, the need to be loved, the need to love, the need to “not be alone”, the need for people to help us where we are weak, uninformed, unable to perform a certain task because it is not in our skill set, etc. Some are “induced” by outside forces, like we decide we “need” a Mercedes-Benz rather than a Honda because what will the neighbors think? We “need” a bigger house in a better neighborhood, development, whether we can afford it or not because it will signal we have “arrived” and other such societal pressures that people feel. Lets face it, having last year’s or, God forbid, 2 years’ ago smart phone is so gauche, so ‘pedestrian’, so ‘not cool’ that we keep upgrading until we are either so stuck in our dissatisfaction with what we have or we are trapped by our spending into constantly trying just to keep up with our payments.
The worst actions we take against ourselves and one another though, I believe, come about because of “miscarriages of authentic needs”. Inevitably, when “we usually fail to discern between authentic and artificial needs” we will sabotage ourselves, those around us and we will commit actions that, upon reflection, we will abhor and certainly would hate for these actions to be committed against us by another. Yet, in our “miscarriages of authentic needs” we commit grave crimes against ourselves. Instead of loving ourselves so we can love our neighbors, we do hateful actions to ourselves and aer unable to see neighbors and instead we see competitors, enemies, people we have to be better than. These “miscarriages” result in our becoming farther and farther away from our own authentic self. They result in our believing the lies of a grifter, autocrat, and eventually falling into the trap of slavery; we repeat the storyline of the Children of Israel who were lulled into slavery by the wiles and slight of hand of “a new Pharaoh arose who did not know Joseph”. When people claim not to “know” the people who have helped them, when they forget the debt we owe to the people who first gained our freedom, helped us in times of trouble, stood with us against an onslaught of lies and subterfuge, we know they want to manipulate the rest of us into forgetting so we lose our moral compass, we buy into the “artificial needs” that they are promoting and we “suspect our neighbor” instead of loving them.
We, the People have to recognize we are in such a time right now. We have to wake up to what is, not wring our hands and engage in self-flagellation, we have to look at our own errors of “misjudging a whim for an aspiration”, we have to look within ourselves and see the “obsessions that are perpetuations of such misjudgments”. We, the People have to return to a time when our focus is on making these United States a “more perfect Union”, making ourselves a better human being today than we were yesterday, constantly seeking to root out our “artificial needs”. We, the People are being called to account and the next 2-4 years will determine our loyalty to the principles the U.S was founded on, to the principles that religious traditions are founded upon, or it will show us our loyalty to falseness, to authoritarianism, to hatred of another which in turn shows us our own self-hatred. We, the People, are being tested, not by God, by our own understanding of freedom for all, we are being tested by grifters and liars to see how far they can push us. We, the People, are being tested by our own angels and demons to see if we are willing to become enslaved to ideas that have been proved invalid throughout the millennia, to see how long it will take for us to once again revolt against the greeks and our fellow Jews as the Maccabees did and their eventual downfall because of senseless hatred, the fall of every great world power because of their “perpetuations of such misjudgments” as they became more and more enamored with themselves and stopped looking within truthfully. The ruin and destruction that happens before these realizations, however, is devastating-revisit the 2nd World War and what it did to Europe, Japan, America, how many people died because the rest of us didn’t care enough to get out of our selfish and “artificial needs” to see truth, to stand up for our neighbor and, instead, be “America First” no matter what country one wants to substitute for America. We, the People are being called today to say NO to falseness and to our own “artificial needs” our own “misjudgments”, our own “obsessions” and say YES to truth, to kindness, to repair, to wrestling with our angels and demons and to living more authentically each day.
I have read this passage over and over again and it keeps showing me new ways of seeing myself and the worlds around me. I do not choose the texts I write on as much as they choose me. I have been wrestling with “aspirations and whims” forever and I choose “aspirations” much more than “whims” these days. I am constantly on the lookout for “misjudgments” by myself and another. I see how the lies of another(s) set fire to my fear of buying into their lies which leads me to buy into my own lies which leads me down a path I travelled in my youth and it was too destructive to repeat. I keep pushing myself to grow along spiritual lines. I believe I am one grain of sand better each day and I will wrestle like this forever. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark