Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 3 Day 135
“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 wisdom above describes the inner turmoil that happens to every human being. “We have been investing life with ugliness and now we wonder why we do not succeed” roils through our inner lives and our minds. We, humans, continue to do the same thing over and over again and wonder why life is not better-we are following Einstein’s definition of insanity and calling it sane. What makes this all the worse, in my opinion, is that many of our clergy are leading the way into the ugliness we witness and experience!
Believing that there is only one way to serve God and that one way is my way gives many so-called ‘religious’ people a surefire path to ugliness as we have witnessed throughout the millennia-from antiquity through today. Yet, we continue to find new and more inventive ways to promote and invest in ugliness through anti-semitism, anti-muslim, anti-christian, anti-catholic, anti-eastern philosophy. These anti’s are fueled by both the secular and the ‘religious’ leaders seeking absolute power over their ‘flock’. They spread mendacity and deception, they call their blind followers to action through hatred of “the other”, they promote fear of anyone ‘not like us’ and promote all manners of destructive behavior, including participating in Jan.6th, denying aid to Ukraine, calling Hamas ‘freedom fighters’, extolling Putin and Russia, welcoming Orban, promoting fascism, etc. When they ‘lose’ they seek to blame “stolen election”, the Jews, the Blacks, the Latinos, every different “the other” they can and their followers believe them!
Politics and religion have combined to create the exact state of affairs that the founding fathers of America were concerned about and the Supreme Court, the Congress, some State Legislatures falsely claim they are “strict constitutionalists”! They imbue the air with ugliness, we have confused good and evil to such an extent that we are unaware of the ugliness even those of us who are not under the ether of these charlatans get confused. The shifting of blame has reached such a crescendo, that the deceivers, the ‘good christian folk’, the ‘religious Jews’, the ‘devout muslims’ have convinced their followers that God wants them to be ugly, God wants them to be evil, God wants them to poison the souls of people and the world! What an ingenious way to shift the blame for their ugliness onto God, onto anyone and everyone else but them. This lack of responsibility, this denial of truth is crushing the soul of freedom, murdering the spirit of being human.
We, the people, have to deal with our inner turmoil in healthier ways. We see people practicing Yoga as a way to clear their mind, they go to Zen, to Church, to the Mosque, to Synagogue to find ways to deal with their inner turmoil only to be sent to therapy. The inner turmoil most of us suffer from is not pathological, it is spiritual in nature. We are seeking to find a way to freedom from the inner pharaoh we all have, we are seeking an experience like crossing the Red Sea, we are seeking enlightenment like we received at Sinai. What we are getting from our institutions is, instead, dogma, blame, finger pointing, falseness and being told that God doesn’t love us because we are not rich, not pretty, not famous, etc. We are getting that welcoming the stranger doesn’t apply here, caring for the poor and the needy is not what we think it is, women are inferior beings who have to be managed by men, LGBTQ+ is anathema to God, we are not all created in the Image of God nor are we all created equal! “How does this make you feel” is a normative response from therapists-These lies, this shifting of blame to God, to another human, to another group, MAKES many of us ANGRY, CRAZY, and MAKES US WANT TO SHOUT FROM THE MOUNTAIN TOP- LIAR LIAR. Yet, doing this only makes me more vulnerable, doing this allows people to discount the truth of our words. We are in a conundrum, some of us are experiencing the experience of the prophets, speaking truth to power and being shunned because of it, watching the inner turmoil of each person and the whole community turn to rot from the inside out and cause the destruction of freedom, of their holy soul, of their service to God.
Blaming God for this is the easy way out. “This must be God’s will” is an easy answer to the ills and the Oys of life, just as it is an easy answer as to why the bad seems to flourish and the bad things happen to good people. Believing that everything that happens in God’s world is for our own good is a nice statement-it doesn’t take into account that we are living in a world created by us humans! We have the Bible, we have the history books, we have the experiences passed down by our ancestors of hatred, of pogroms, of concentration camps, of sneak attacks, of broken covenants, and we forget that God doesn’t want us to lie, cheat, steal, make false images of God nor ourselves, that God doesn’t want us to murder our souls, to steal from ourselves nor anyone else, doesn’t want us to bear false witness, to whore ourselves nor covet what another person has. God wants us to “want what we have” and then grow what we have, God wants us to fulfill our divine calling, to live with purpose and passion, with truth and love, to remember “You will be Holy” - not as a future deal, but as something to engage in right here, right now. Lets us all end the blame game, the lying game and the ugliness we have created. Lets clean up our acts and God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark