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)

“Pretenders” are the bane of our existence as human beings! Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above is vital for all of us who desire to be human. We have let go of the exhortations of true prophecy for the “cheerful words” of the false prophets. We continue to extol “strength” and “self-reliance”, seek “prosperity” and the illusion of “peace” at the altar of pretending and buying the lies and deceptions of another(s). These ways of being are exactly what the prophet is warning us about. We live in self-deception and mendacity while “disaster, pestilence, agony and destruction” are happening all around us.

We have witnessed the truth of the words of the prophet throughout history and in our own time as well. Yet, we continue to buy into the lies of the “pretenders” because it makes us ‘feel good’. It doesn’t take courage to go along with the lies and mendacity, it takes courage to hear and act on the words of the prophet. The prophet has been described as angry, obstinate, unrelenting, difficult, etc and they are! They are all these things and more because they see and have been shown the result of following the “pretenders”-death, destruction, despair, “disaster”. Human beings are capable of so much more than we achieve, we have within us a desire, a longing to re-unite with the divine, to connect with the Ineffable One. And we seem to be afraid to fully engage with our deepest desires, to be connected to something greater than ourselves, to relinquish ourselves from the prison of pretense and pretending.

The “pretenders” who preach to us be it politically, socially, morally, spiritually are so ‘sincere’ that we believe them! Or at least we go along with them because we are afraid to follow the predictions of the prophet less we be shunned from our community, our family, lose our elected office, lose our job, etc. The whistleblower laws were enacted, in part, to protect the people who can no longer buy the lies of the companies they work for and are compelled to speak truth to power-following the examples of the prophets. The protests affirming the dignity of all people are examples of hearing and acting on the words of the prophets. Yet even these paths get contaminated with mendacity and deceptions when some people are not deemed ‘worthy’ of compassion and equality, when some people ‘blow the whistle’ to line their own pockets.

All of us are susceptible to being “pretenders” and we have to be constantly on guard against the mendacity, self-deception that is part of being human. We are witnesses to the lies of Trump and the Republican Party that they care about the United States of America with their MAGA bullshit. They care about themselves, their power, their wealth and they have convinced at least 1/3rd of the country that they care about them! The promise “peace and prosperity” if we elect them to be dictators and authoritarians over us. We have history to show us how well dictators and authoritarians treat the people over whom they have power. They are the ones who cause  “disaster, pestilence, agony, and destruction” and we help them by not heeding the words of the prophets. We have become so used to living the lies of the pretenders who claim “follow me and you will have “peace and prosperity”” with their “cheerful words” of false prophecy and showing you their “strength to self-reliance”. The same bullshit is being given to us by those of the far-left, the ‘progressives’ who seek to blame the ills of society on the few, who claim no responsibility for their part in where we are, who are incapable of seeing their own hypocrisy. It is easy to point their fingers at everyone else, call for the destruction of everything they deem as ‘bad and wrong’, promoting hatred against ‘their enemies’ which is everyone who doesn’t drink their Kool-aid. They are not heeding the words of the prophets either and they are hell-bent on destruction of anything and everything that is not the “underdog” of the month.

We witness people threatening people with lawsuits and public shaming so they can achieve ‘peace and prosperity’, they offer “cheerful words” about their own courage and encourage others to bring this type of pressure on anyone and everyone who they want revenge against. We see this bastardization in the myriad of times the excuse “on advice of counsel” or the infamous “non-disclosure” clauses are invoked. The prophets spoke truth out loud, they confronted the ruling class and the people-no one was exempt from their predictions of ‘change or else’. We think of them as abrasive and unrelenting, too harsh for polite society, so we either ignore them or find ways to silence them, the assassination of Rev King being a prime example. Rather than hear the words of the prophet in today’s language, we fire these ‘rabble-rousers’, we do what we can to ‘erase their memory’ from our family life, our organizational life, etc, because we cannot seem to bear the reflection of our pretending and pretense.

Recovery is about being in truth. It is a way of being that heeds the prophets by speaking truth to the power of our minds and our going along to get along in society. We drop our pretenses, slowly and quickly, seeking to peel back the layers of our own self-deceptions and see the glorious truth of beauty and spirit that lives within us. We travel the road of “happy destiny” knowing we can and will “live life on life’s terms.” God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark