Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 3 Day 111
“Above all, the prophets remind us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty but all are responsible. If we admit that the individual is in some measure conditioned or affected by the spirit of society, an individual’s crime discloses society’s corruption. In a community not indifferent to suffering, uncompromisingly impatient with cruelty and falsehood, continually concerned for God and every man, crime would be infrequent rather than common. (Essential Writings pg. 62)
Rabbi Heschel’s voice is the voice of the prophet, he is not only relaying the prophetic message, he is speaking about what has happened throughout history, what was happening some 62 years ago when his book The Prophets was published and he prophesied what would happen in our time; unless we changed our ways. In the last sentence above, Rabbi Heschel gives us the path to change, he is calling out to us, as the prophets did in their time, how to live into his words in the first sentence: “few are guilty but all are responsible”.
We are living in a society that is “indifferent to suffering”, that is not “impatient with cruelty and falsehood” and is not “concerned for God and man”. While we hear from people who claim to be religious, who claim God is their guide, the actions of many of these people belie their words. We are living in a time where suffering is accepted as ‘the norm’ for ‘those people’. Suffering is the result of the actions of the sufferers according to some, the victim is being blamed for their plight in many cases and we have seen the phenomenon of the victim becoming the victimizer as well. All of these stems from a spiritual malady.
Our indifference to suffering goes hand in hand with our acceptance of cruelty and falsehood. In our political arena politicians make grand promises and they keep very few, unless the promise is to cause more suffering. When our Congress will not find nor even seek compassionate solutions to immigration, legal and illegal, because they can ‘run’ on the issue we are witnessing cruelty and experiencing falsehood. Yet, we, the people, seem to accept this cruelty as ‘just the way things are’. When our prisons are overcrowded and used for punishment only, when guards treat prisoners as less than human, we witness cruelty. When we watch in silence as the Congress continues to seek to hold spectacles of lying and deception so they can puff out their chests and show how ‘tough’ they are, we are witnesses to cruelty. When we watch as people suffer because they cannot earn a living wage and the minimum wage is so low people have to work two jobs to eke out enough to pay rent and for basic necessities, we are part of the cruelty. When we “stand idly by the bloods of our brothers” we belie the ‘faith’, the ‘religiosity’, the ‘humanism’ the ‘morality’ we proclaim we have. We, the people, cannot blame the politicians, the government, the prison system, the big corporations, etc in order to shirk our responsibility. We, the people, are responsible irrespective of whether we are the perpetrators.
Breaking our indifference is the solution. We have to wake up and stand up, we have to take God, truth, kindness, caring out of the hands of the idolators and deceivers, out of the mouths of the liars and the mendacity of the ‘powerful’. We have to listen to the words of the prophets, we have to act on their words as they, Rabbi Heschel, Dr. King, and so many others guide us to. We have to say NO to the ‘religious liars’, we have to say NO to the politicians that seek to divide us into red and blue, we have to say NO to the progressives who only care about the ‘underdog of the month’ and not everyone who suffers. We have to stop blaming everyone but ourselves for our current state of affairs. We have to work together to heal our society, to care for the poor, the needy, welcome the stranger, act Godly whether we believe in God or not.
We can only do this when, as we say in AA, “our own house is in order”. We have to regain our spiritual health, we have to seek out physicians of the soul to heal our inner lives, our inner wounds. We need help to hear the call of our intuition, our spirit and the power to carry out this call within us. We need to engage in a societal change from dogma to spiritual consciousness; be it God-consciousness, Higher consciousness, however one wants to call a raising of oneself above their base needs. We, the people, have to return to using our intuitive minds as a gift and using our rational minds to serve our gift as Einstein says rather than give into what our rational, narcissistic minds tell us and forgetting to hear and heed the call of our intuitive minds, our spirits. This is the way of the Bible, this is the message of the prophets: return to God, to Godliness, to higher consciousness, to your intuitive mind, however you want to understand what makes us human. We can do this, we can live into the prophetic voices, we can live into the Biblical teachings, when we appreciate our ability to understand anew the directions and stories, when we end our need to be right and instead seek to do right.
This way of being is central to recovery. We are recovering our integrity, our essence, our path back to something greater than ourselves. I seek out a new way of understanding and applying the wisdom of the prophets and the Bible each and every day. I make errors, I am imperfect and I have to make my amends and move on-whether someone wants to forgive me or not is up to them-my job is to do T’Shuvah. Each day I begin with prayer, meditation, and this writing so I begin my day with a plan and a path. I pray you all do the same and then at night we see how well we have done and what harms we have brought so we can make amends the next day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark