Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 123

“The words the prophet utters are not offered as souvenirs. His speech to the people is not a reminiscence, a report, hearsay. The prophet not only conveys, he reveals. He almost does unto others what God does unto him. In speaking, the prophet reveals God. This is the marvel of the prophet’s work: in his words, the invisible God becomes audible. He does not prove or argue. The thought he has to convey is more than language can contain. Divine power bursts in his words. The authenticity of the prophet in in the Presence his words reveal.” (Essential Writings pg. 64)

While the studying of the prophets is, I believe, supremely important for living a life of meaning and purpose, the studying of them has to lead to acting in ways that are in concert with their words. As Rabbi Heschel teaches us in the first two sentences above, the prophet is giving us “souvenirs” nor “a reminiscence, a report, hearsay”. Rather than seek to bring us to ‘the good old days’, rather than give us ‘that old time religion’, the prophet is giving us a vision of our misguided and/or wrong actions and a vision of what life is when we return to God, we allow ourselves to be guided by principles of decency, kindness, truth, forgiveness, justice, mercy, etc.

The days of the prophet were not good. They were days of great peril for the Kingdoms of Israel and Judea, they were days of destruction of the foundation of Judaism at that time, they were days of trembling fear in the people because of the upcoming assault of Assyria and Babylonia. The prophet comes to remind the people there fear should not be of the outside enemy, the fear should be of the enemy within each individual and within the kingdoms themselves. The prophet gives us an inside view of the rot and decay that the people seemingly are blind to, the willful leaving the principles and values that they accepted at Sinai have become so sullied and forgotten, the people are, like Nadav and Avihu, Aaron’s sons, dying from the inside out.

“The words the prophet utters”, as Rabbi Heschel continues to remind, teach us, convey the thoughts, the desires, the will of God and they also reveal God’s presence, God’s voice to all of us. Yet, as I experience Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above, I believe their words also reveal our own imperfections, our own inside rot and to not understand and imbue their words as meanings, warnings, calls to action for each of us today is to encase the prophet’s words as “souvenirs”, as ‘a reminiscence, a report, hearsay”. We are doing this at our own peril, at our own descent into internal and external degradation.

The calls against aid to our allies, against the “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”, against hatred of ‘the other’, are outward indications, signs of the decay, the rot, the desecration of our inner life that we are experiencing, that we are hiding from. What the prophet reveals is as imminent and present as when his words were uttered. What the prophet sees has not gone away, the call of God from Sinai has stopped calling to us, the words and deeds of Rabbi Heschel, the Baal Shem Tov, Rev. King, Thomas Merton, have not been overturned nor forgotten. What is happening today, as it did 2+ millennia ago, is our unwillingness to see, to hear, to accept, to turn and return. What is missing is our unwillingness allow the mirror to reflect the truth of our inner decay to us, rather, like the Queen in Sleeping Beauty, we only see the reflection we want to see, we are using false glasses that turn ugly into beauty, hate into love, selfishness into service. Oh what a state of being we are in.

While it is easy to blame the politicians, “the man”, anyone other than ourselves, it is time for us to delve into the “the words the prophet utters” as if he is speaking to us, it is time for us to “lift up our eyes and see” as Abraham was told to do by God, it is time for us to surrender our hubris and take the actions that serving another human being, serving God promote. It is time for each of us to accept our responsibility for what was, what is, and what can be. We, the people, have to see what is being revealed to us not to argue against, not to defend our bad actions, rather to see where we are, the fork in the road that we are at each and every day, and make a decision to stop going down the path of perdition, stop our descent into lawlessness while making laws that promote our unlawfulness. We, the people, have to pick up on and carry on the revolution of the prophet, the rebellion against societal ‘status quo’ and take up the sling shot of young David to slay the Goliath that has overtaken our inner and outer living.

Recovery is, in essence, using the words of the prophet to reveal to us what truly is, it is using his revelations and conveyances to accept the truth of where we are and how we can steer our life back onto the course it was originally set on. While we got off course because of the storm of living inauthentically, we are able to heed the words and see the ways the prophet reveals to us so we can once again serve God, serve another and be on a path of wholeness within us.

The prophet continues to convey and reveal truth and ways of living to me. I have not always followed these revelations and through their vision and revelations I have been able to course correct these past 35+ years. I continue to become angry at injustice and impudence while at times committing both, I continue to be upset at the lack of mercy given and responsibility taken by leaders of countries, governments, and, of course, by spiritual leaders-and I am guilty of doing the same. I don’t blame another for my errors and I hear the prophet speaking and revealing truth to me each and every day-especially when I don’t want to hear it! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark