Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 130

“There are no proofs for the existence of the God of Abraham. There are only witnesses. The greatness of the prophet lies not only in the ideas he expressed, but also in the moments he experienced. The prophet is a witness, and his words a testimony to His power and judgement, to His justice and mercy.”(Essential Writings pg. 64)

Imbuing Rabbi Heschel’s description of “the greatness of the prophet” should cause us to ponder both their words and their experiences. The prophet comes to us with a power and a ferocity borne from his experience of his encounter with God, fueled by the decency, kindness, caring he has for the human condition, and the vision of a path out of mendacity and duplicity. Yet, up to today, we continue to disbelieve them, discount their “ideas” and deny their experiences.

When a the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court can say: “human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without the wrath of a holy God” while allowing innocent people to be put to death, while continuing racist policies, while dehumanizing women and making them subservient to men, etc is in direct opposition to the “holy God” he speaks about if we are to believe the prophet, if we are to accept the truth of their ideas and their experiences. Yet, he sees no contradictions between his words and his actions. Herein lies the challenge for all of us.

We read the prophet’s words, at some of us do, we quote them and we use them to validate our ways of living while denying their ideas and their experiences with our actions. Much like the people of Ancient Israel and Ancient Judea, we proclaim our loyalty and fealty to “the God of Abraham” while our actions and our words deny the “greatness of the prophet”…the ideas he expressed” and “the moments he experienced”. We deny the truth of his encounter with God, his being empowered by God to help us return to living in God’s ways, in being truly human, and instead we seek to use them to puff ourselves up, to offer phony words of praise and understanding to bolster our power and make our own names great.

Be it in the political realm, the religious realm, the social realm, what is happening across the spectrum of each of these realms is “Hillul HaShem”, the desecration of God’s Name, not the sanctification of God’s Name as these deceivers proclaim. When a business is more concerned about their shareholders and their dividends, their profits and covering up their mistakes, when “the buyer beware” instead of full disclosure of the flaws,  etc are the ‘rules of business, we are ignoring both the ideas and the experiences of the prophet. When we continue to imprison the ideas of the prophets and decry their descendants, we do so at our own peril. When we use lies and deceptions to denigrate decency, freedom, the dignity and worth of certain individuals and groups so we can hold onto and/or gain/regain power, we are denying the “greatness of the prophet” and his ideas and experiences. When we hear spiritual leaders use their words as a call to action against their ideas and experiences, we are in danger of losing our ability to make “free will moral choices” as Rabbi Abraham Twerski teaches us is an essential ingredient of being human.

“The greatness of the prophet” is the central idea that I hear from him: the purpose of human life is to serve something greater than itself. We are called by the prophet to rise above our pettiness and pride, our envy and enmity, our prejudices and fears to live into the beauty, the glory, the joy, the freedom of serving the ideas, the will of God. The prophet’s experience is one of connection with God and human beings. The prophet’s ideas and experience are to have a “powerful dissent, a painful rebuke, a deep love and unwavering hope” as Rabbi Heschel says in his interview with Carl Stern. These experiences and ideas are gifted to us by the prophet so we can emulate them, we can live into them, we can engage with them and make our corner of the world a little better. In Leviticus we are told to “proclaim freedom throughout the land to all its inhabitants thereof”, this is inscribed on the Liberty Bell as well. Yet, rather than walk in the footsteps of the prophet, we walk instead in the footsteps of the deceivers, rather than walk the “freedom trail” we walk the slave route, rather than live the truth that “all people(sic) are created equal”, we still live into the lie of white superiority. Rather than stand up for the people, for truth, for freedom, for God, many are standing with Putin, authoritarianism, Christian Nationalism, and other ways of denigrating the human spirit, the image of God we all are created in and calling this religion, swearing they are the ‘true inheritors’ of the prophets so they can deceive their followers.

We are in desperate need of recovery from our societal mendacity. We are in desperate need all of us to join the recovery movement that promotes a spiritual literacy drawn from the ideas and experiences of the prophet. Bill Wilson’s experience of his spiritual awakening is similar to the experience of the prophet’s experience with God. Every spiritual awakening, be it ecstatic or the ‘educational variety’ mirrors the experience of the prophet and through this experience, we become imbued with his ideas and the path to carry them out. In recovery, we don’t need a hierarchy to tell us what to do, we need to listen to our higher consciousness, our soul, and use the ideas and experiences of the prophet to propel ourselves to greater heights, to our proper actions, to fulfilling the words on the Liberty Bell and we live together in freedom, with respect and rejoice in our differences and learn from one another-rather than continue to deny the humanity of another for our own gain. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark