Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 122

“People need exhortations to courage, endurance, confidence, fighting spirit, but Jeremiah proclaims: You are about to die if you do not have a change of heart and cease being callous to the word of God. He sends shudders over the whole city at a time when the will to fight is most important.” (Essential Writings pg.63)

I am hearing Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above as a call to all of us right here, right now. The prophet was debased in his own time because he was not helping with “the will to fight”, he was not understood as giving “exhortations to courage, endurance, confidence, fighting spirit”. Yet, he was and is exhorting all of us to return to the authentic desires of our hearts; a return to hearing and doing “the word of God.” This is the great conundrum of studying and living into the prophetic vision, the prophetic experience.

We are willing to fight for what we want if and when it serves our selfish need, the prophet is fighting with us to serve the needs and will of God, to care for one another, to pierce the hard-skin we have covered our hearts and souls with in order to block out doing the next right thing. The prophet comes to disturb us, as Rabbi Heschel says elsewhere, he comes to wake us up to truth, to authenticity, to healing our spiritual maladies and the people want to fight the enemy, not realizing “the enemy is us”, as Walt Kelly’s comic strip character Pogo teaches us. We are our own worst enemy because we fail to recognize, consider, deal with the spiritual maladies that are keep us “callous to the word of God.” We are our own worst enemy because we fail to recognize our spiritual maladies that are slowly killing us, that allow us to slowly kill another(s), that keep us in “everlasting ignorance” as Herbert Spencer writes in the Big Book of AA.

The prophet’s predictions of disaster and destruction is not to deny the “fighting spirit” of the people, I believe, it is to focus this “fighting spirit” to defeat the enemy that we have become to ourselves and to our communities. We are the ones who are the cause of the ills of the world we live in because we have not had “a change of heart”, because we are unwilling to “cease being callous to the word of God.” This is self-evident to those of us who are willing to remove the cataracts over our eyes and see what truly is, it is as clear as glass to those of us who are willing to “circumcise the foreskin of our hearts”. And, as in the time of the prophets, the majority seems to be unwilling to do either!

We live in a world of illusion and facades, exactly what the prophet warned us against and exhorted us to leave. We live in a world where we seek medical advice for our spiritual maladies and take the latest ‘miracle’ pill, the latest fad in clothing, politics, the latest guru to follow, etc to cover over the psychic, spiritual pain we are in. We use power to fool ourselves into believing we are okay, we use money, fame, proxies to make ourselves believe ___will save us(fill in the blank). We have done this throughout history and the prophet confronts our mendacity and we shun the truth. We quote them, we ‘extol’ them and we do not heed them. Listening to the myriad of ways clergy, spiritual gurus, and philosophers bastardize their words causes some of us great pain, anguish and, for some of us we erupt with the same abrasiveness as the prophet. Our capacity to engage in self-deception is endless it seems and the prophet’s capacity to witness it without saying something, without ‘pulling our covers’ is zero!

Yet, many wonder, how can we live in this world without our facades, without our “mental make-up”, how can we embrace the word of God as the prophet is telling us? We believe we will suffer at the hands of these who proclaim their loyalty to God, to Jesus, to Mohammed, to Buddha, etc while their loyalty is only to themselves, their gang of thugs seeking/holding power. This belief and fear causes many of us to be like the Marranos in Spain after the Inquisition. We worship God in secret and our outer actions go along with the societal norms and, just as the Marranos stopped practicing Judaism, so too do we end an authentic worship of God. We are in desperate need of immersing ourselves in the words of the prophet, we are in the throes of a spiritual malady that is trying hard to kill us and, as we see in the political world, in the war to be free, the battle for the soul of democracy, it seems to be winning. When the whims of those in charge are more important to serve than “the word of God”, when the concern for ‘optics’ is more important than truth and reconciliation, when the pendulum swings from one extreme to another without any middle ground, when we witness the degradation of kindness as weakness, when we believe in “alternative facts”, when we are willing to turn a blind eye to those who have helped us, saved us, fought along side of us because it is the expedient thing to do, because of “on advice of counsel”, we are in desperate need of Jeremiah’s exhortation!

The prophet’s call is a call to return, to recover our connection to our spirits, to God, to one another. It is abrasive to those who do not want to let go of their false selves, who are afraid of who they are without their mendacity, without their shining armor, without their self-deception. In my recovery, I have been bombastic, difficult, abrasive, loud, forceful, in my denunciation of these paths so we can recover our authenticity, we can recover the “word of God” that is within each of us and make our corner of the world one grain of sand better each day. I make mistakes and do t’shuvah, I learn and grow, I get extolled and exiled because the prophet, Rabbi Heschel live with me and continue to disturb me, continue to exhort me to “have a change of heart and cease being callous to the word of God”! I refuse to be a Marrano, I refuse to be silent, I refuse to go back into hiding, I accept the consequences of my refusal and I can live with me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark