Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 3 Day 120
“It is embarrassing to be a prophet. There are so many pretenders, predicting peace and prosperity, offering cheerful words, adding strength to self-reliance, while the prophet predicts disaster, pestilence, agony, and destruction.” (Essential Writings pg. 63)
Embarrass means “cause someone to feel awkward, self-conscious,” it also means “to hamper or impede/make difficult”. Using these definitions, the prophet is a person who is self-conscious about his mission, he is a man who feels awkward in his role as God’s mouthpiece. Yet, these feelings do not “hamper or impede” his purpose nor his passion for God’s message and his call to deliver it. The prophet is also a person who makes the people around him experience self-consciousness, awkwardness and he does the best he can to hamper and impede the spiritual and moral decay the people around him are suffering, even though the people around him are willfully and unwittingly blind to their spiritual maladies.
Rabbi Heschel describes the prophet, in his interview with Carl Stern, “the prophet is a man who is able to hold God and man in one thought, at one time, at all times…The kind of men who combine a very deep love, a very powerful dissent, a painful rebuke, with unwavering hope.” These descriptions give us a glimpse into the life of the prophet; no one asks to be a prophet, prophecy is thrust upon certain people for the benefit of all. The prophet is a humble person who cannot contain the words of God that he is given nor can he run from his mission. His ability to “hold God and man in one thought, at one time, at all times” causes his experiences of self-consciousness and awkwardness, I believe. His way of experiencing life jettisons him to rise above the myriad of ways people in power seek to impede and hamper him in his mission.
In reading the prophets and Rabbi Heschel’s book on the prophets as well as his use of the prophetic experience throughout his writings, we experience the inner life of the prophet. When we “combine a very deep love, a powerful dissent, a painful rebuke, with unwavering hope”, we are able to see far beyond what our eyes tell us, know much more than our minds can process and awkwardly and self-consciously speak the truth as the Ineffable One demands of us. I hear Rabbi Heschel call out to us to learn from the ways of the prophets, even though “it is embarrassing to be a prophet”, they did not shrink from their mission, they did not allow their awkwardness nor their self-consciousness to hamper or impede their work. They came to the people in their time and demanded the people turn back to God so they could heal their spiritual maladies. They continued to recount the faith God has in people, the faith they had in people.
The prophets of old are speaking to us today, just as their disciples like Rabbi Heschel, Rev. King, et al speak to us right now. We are still being called back to our spiritual origins, to a path of wholeness and holiness, a way of being that is compatible with being a partner of God. The faith of the prophets is in the description Rabbi Heschel gives to us. The prophet would not have been sent unless God loved us deeply, says NO so powerfully we can no longer turn a deaf ear to God’s dissent, it pains God, the prophet, and us to receive the rebuke for our negative actions that we have been blind to, and, finally, only because of unwavering hope in our ability to turn/return would the prophets have been sent. While many of us experience these actions as ‘put downs’, as ‘not nice’, seen in the light of the prophets, the “painful rebuke” and “powerful dissent” can only been experienced as a love call, a deep sense of faith in our ability to rise above our current status to be human rather than less than human.
We are in deep need of hearing the words of the prophets and allowing ourselves to let go of the hubris that has overtaken so many of our leaders and their followers. Rather than deny truth and offer “alternative facts”, rather than ‘bite the hand that feeds us’, rather than continue to blame someone else for our bad actions, rather than seek escapes from reality through mendacity, addiction, money, power, it is time for us to hear the words of the prophets anew and take the next right action. It is imperative for us to learn from the people of antiquity who refused to turn back to being human and were conquered and almost destroyed because of their hubris, their deafness, their deceptions of another(s) and their self-deception.
A little embarrassment is a good thing, as I am hearing and experiencing Rabbi Heschel’s words. When we are able to have our baser instincts hampered and impeded, when we can stop ourselves or be stopped from ‘going along to get along’, when we no longer deceive ourselves into believing ‘this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you’; we are able to put on “a new pair of glasses” as Chuck C teaches us in recovery. We are able to recover our humanity and have a revelation of the infinite dignity of every human being, recover the truth that every human being is a child of God, all of us are in need of and deserving of returning, we no longer have to be afraid of the “painful rebuke” and “powerful dissent” of the prophets, rather we welcome them as a sign that God has not forsaken us, God has not forgotten us, God’s love and hope is the light and the spirit calling us back home, back to being in partnership and fulfilling our unique purpose. This is the path of recovery, this is the message of recovery, this is the action of recovery. The only question left for all of us: are we willing to deal with being embarrassed as a sign of growth and connection to/with the prophets so we can return to our sense of wholeness within? God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark