Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 134

“The major folly of this view seems to lie in its shifting the responsibility for man’s plight from man to God, in accusing the Invisible though the iniquity is ours. Rather than admit our own guilt, we seek, like Adam, to shift the blame upon someone else. For generations we have been investing life with ugliness and now we wonder why we do not succeed. God was thought of as a watchman hired to prevent us from using our loaded guns. Having failed us in this, He is now thought of as the ultimate scapegoat.” (Essential Writings pg. 90)

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above calls all of us to account. We are witnesses and participants in our lack of responsibility, we are guilty of this crime of blame and denial in a myriad of ways. When something bad/wrong happens, we ask God “why is this happening” instead of asking ourselves the same question. When we denigrate the humanity of another, when we deny agency to women, to minorities, to the masses, we use God as our excuse. We constantly engage in “shift the blame upon someone else” and never admit our responsibility nor our guilt.

This way of being results in “making a false image of God” in direct disobedience of the 2nd Commandment and it is done by ‘the faithful’, by ‘spiritual leaders’ by the idolators and charlatans who are running our religious institutions and our governments! It also results in people moving farther and farther away from God’s will, denying the existence of God and having many believe that reliance on our ‘humanity’ is enough. It is laughable to witness the words of the people who believe we don’t need a higher power, that God, being invisible, is just a “crutch” for ‘the weak’, when we are witnesses to the incredible paths of “man’s inhumanity to man” throughout the millennia. To validate our bad behavior, to validate our false image of God, we use the name of God - how ironic, how sad, how dangerous.

We are living in the “major folly” more today than when Rabbi Heschel wrote these words. He wrote them in the shadow of the Shoah, in the shadow of Nazi Germany which, in the 1930’s was considered the height of learning, society, etc. Today, we have dictators like Putin, Orban, MBS, along with the terrorists like Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, the White Supremacists, who use God to validate their bad behavior and claim their behaviors are holy, just, merciful, etc! They are incapable of taking responsibility for their bad actions towards the people of their country nor towards the rest of the world, they are incapable of admitting guilt because they have bought their own bullshit and believe they are doing the will of God by oppressing their own people, spreading disinformation and lies about other people, fomenting war and dissent in democracies and working together to ‘take over the world’. We here in America are not immune to this way of being. Just as in the 1930’s when Father Coughlin was extolling Nazi Germany and trying to foment a move towards Fascism in our country, just as in the 1950’s and 60’s clergy were opposed to Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights movement, just as today when there are elected officials and clergy seeking to spread their prejudice towards LGBTQ+, people of color, Jews, anyone not like them, we hear their call that ‘god tells them to do this’ and rather than call them out for their lies, their deceptions, their lack of responsibility, their guilt in the deaths of so many, we ignore, we shrug our shoulders, we stay silent. This is the crime many people commit-silence when God is blamed, used to promote authoritarianism, prejudice, when God is blamed for the cancer of the soul of humanity that is spreading and metastasizing throughout humankind.

We have the power to end this folly, we have the inner strength to stop our shifting of blame, we are capable of seeing our responsibility and changing our course of living. Being created in the Image of God, we have within us the spirit of God, the call of our Yetzer Tov to control and manage our Yetzer Hara-both of which are necessary parts of being human. We have the duty and our very existence as free people depend on our standing up against the dictators, the authoritarians, the charlatans, the idolators and standing up for the “Invisible” One. We, the people, have to take to the streets, like we did during the civil rights movement, and march against the oppression of irresponsibility, we have to protest the lies and the narrow view of God, of humans, of identity politics, of ‘christian nation’, of the supremacy of any race, creed, religion, over another. We have made ourselves into Pharaohs who “do not know Joseph” and do “not know God”. Instead we set ourselves up to be god, to claim only we know the will of god, all the while it is Avodah Zarah, idol worship that we are participating in.

This change has to begin within each individual. We have to “do the work” and relive the moments of crossing the Red Sea, of standing at Sinai and once again proclaim “we will do and then we will understand”. We have to recommit to the covenant with God to take the actions even though we do not understand the ‘reasoning’, we surrender to a truth that is greater than we can comprehend, a way of being that goes against some aspects of our nature and our intellect. We are exercising our spiritual knowledge and growing our inner power to override the call to veto God’s will in favor of our own. Three times a day we commit to “not follow our hearts and our eyes to whore after them”. This is the recovery movement everyone needs to join. None of us are immune to the “folly” Rabbi Heschel is describing-from the ‘greatest’ to the lowest, from the rich to the poor, from the leaders to the workers/followers. This is the reason it is so crucial for the hierarchy of institutions, especially religious ones, to live the principles upon which Moses, Jesus, Mohammed taught. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark