Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 3 Day 119
“The prophet faces a coalition of callousness and established authority and undertakes to stop a mighty stream with mere words. Had the purpose been to express great ideas, prophecy would have had to be acclaimed a triumph. Yet the purpose of prophecy is to conquer callousness, to change the inner man as well as to revolutionize history.” (Essential Writings pg. 63)
Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above, hopefully, takes our breath away, stops us in our tracks and gives us a jumpstart on changing our inner lives. He is giving us a new way of looking at “triumph”, a different take on the way we celebrate ideas and look the other way at our actions. Immersing ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s words and thoughts cause us to either revere and follow the prophets or to ignore them and continue to celebrate great ideas and bad actions. Prophecy, as described above by Rabbi Heschel, is not about great oration, erudite ideas, heavenly thoughts. Rather it is about bringing a message of change by speaking truth, a message of hope that we can and should investigate our actions, improve our inner life and end our march of conquering people, obtaining power through our callousness.
In our world, our everyday living, we continually accuse and indict another human being of being callous, of being “hard-skinned” which is the Latin root of the word callous. We are constantly pointing fingers outward, continually accusing another of that which we are guilty of, and ignoring our own “callousness”. The prophet points out to all of us, if we are willing to see, the truth of our actions, the subtle and not-so-subtle ways we engage in “callousness” and demands we end our evil ways. We seem to be unable to hear the prophet’s call to examine our ways, to let go of our indifference, our self-deceptions, our ignoring of our inner life. The prophet’s call to us is to return to God, turn to a life of caring and concern for everyone, turn to repair and heal our inner wounds internally rather than attempting to fix our inner life by being callous and hurtful in our outer lives.
“Callousness” is practiced by all of us, sometimes it comes from the scabs that have formed over our hurts and our inner wounds, sometimes it comes from the armor we have learned to put on every time we face the world, the day. Yet, even the most ‘pious’ people have a tendency to become callous. We witness and participate in the very ways the prophets railed against in our zealotry for our ideas, for our ways of being without hearing, considering another point of view. We have callous in the ways we seek to be #1 in all our affairs, to have the most money, the most fame, the most talent, the most…. As well as never being satisfied with what we have, always needing more and more. We are callous when we forget the people who have helped us succeed and instead step on people on our ‘way up the ladder’ never seeing our part, forgetting the kindness’ shown to us, vilifying and denigrating people for ‘harming us’ which many times is just hurting our feelings by telling us the truth! We have become so enamored with ‘how it makes us feel’ that we have forgotten that a rebuke from another is a sign of great faith that ‘we can do better’. The prophets re-iterated the “great ideas” of the Bible and their purpose was to help us turn back to the actions associated with these “great ideas”-not to debate them. When the prophet Nathan calls out King David, he is not doing it to “express great ideas”, he is doing it to hold him responsible, to make him “the inner life” of King David. I believe King David is an example for all people in power, this story reminds us and teaches us a “great idea” of the Bible: just because we can does not mean we should!
The prophets’ are still waiting to see if their mission can “be acclaimed a triumph”, to experience the surrender the hard-skinned human beings have worn for the millennia and heal their inner lives. Changing our ways is their triumph, letting go of our need to abuse another to satisfy our selfishness, our insatiable hunger for more, our need to cover the mirror so we don’t see our actions, don’t have to change our inner lives. We, the people, have the power within us to make prophecy triumphant, we, the people, can choose to engage our with our inner lives and heal our callousness by seeking out “physicians of the soul” as Maimonidies suggests in his book Eight Chapters. We, the people, can, and I will add, must stop seeking the “quick fix” of a pill, a new ‘notch in our belt’, a new partner, a new toy, etc to “fix” us and instead engage in the difficult work of repairing and changing our inner lives. We are needed by the world to show up in our authenticity rather than in our callousness-will you accept this truth, will you help prophecy triumph?
This question is the one we respond to affirmatively in recovery. We engage in exercising our inner lives and exorcising our callousness. We tame our “earthly/evil inclination” to serve our “good/divine inclination”. Each day we seek to find what we do well and where we miss the mark-enhancing the former and repairing the latter. We let go of the resentments and hurts done by another as we realize these no longer serve us nor anyone else. We can forgive people for their callousness and extend “rachmones”, compassionate pity towards the very people we resented and who hurt us.
I am continually changing my inner life-I feel sad for people who are so stuck they have to betray those who have helped them, who have to hold on to their ‘rightness’ rather than own their own part, who have to trash the good name of people who helped them and called them out for their errors in order to wake them up rather than to put them down. I am deeply remorseful for the times I have been callous and am committed to being less so each and every day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark