Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 144

“Man was the first to hide himself from God (Genesis 3:8), after having eaten of the forbidden fruit, and is still hiding (Job 13;20-24). The will of God is to be here, manifest and near; but when the doors of this world are slammed on Him, His truth betrayed, His will defied, He withdraws, leaving man to himself. God did not depart of His own volition; he was expelled. God is in exile. (Essential Writings pg. 91)

Taking in the first sentence above should cause us great alarm as well as crumble the facade and mendacity humanity has built up over the millennia that God hides, that God has withdrawn from the world. It is humanity that is hiding, from the first error Adam made till now with all of our errors, our missing the marks. We blame God for being too distant and no longer interested in the works of humanity, many so-called ‘religious people’ blame the secular ones, the infidels for God’s withdrawing from our world rather than take responsibility for the hiding all of us do.

Our hiding is so subtle, most of us are unaware of how we hide from both God and our own inner life, our spiritual core. Our hiding begins early on when we deny wrongdoing because we don’t want to be ‘punished’, when we seem incapable of being responsible for our actions. We hide, as Adam did, because we refuse to learn from our errors, we are afraid of doing T’Shuvah, taking inventory, and repairing any and all damage we have done to the world, to another human being, to ourselves. Rather than “failing forward”, we keep falling backward into denial, blame of another, etc. We are so stuck in our hiding that we even blame God for our malice, our cruelty, our inhumane ways of treating one another. “Nothing happens in God’s world by accident”, “God loves the rich and successful and doesn’t love the poor and needy as much” are two lines we hear often from the people who hide the best. “They brought this upon themselves and this is God’s retribution”, is another phrase that ‘proves’ God is punishing the people who are downtrodden, who need help and care. “God loves me and not you”, hence I am successful, “I can enslave you, making more profit on your back is just me using my God-given talents and smarts to succeed, it is what God wants” gives some people the right to take advantage of the power they have and even turn democracies into autocracies.

We hide from our spouses, our significant others, we hide from our children and our employers, we hide from our employees and our friends. We hide from our clergy and they from us. Hiding is the appropriated state of humanity, it seems, since the time of Adam. Hiding from God allows us to hide from everyone, hiding from God allows us to do what we want to and use/blame God depending on the situation. Hiding from God has been and continues to commit us to a slow death while we are alive. Our hiding from God, from family, friends, causes us great angst, that we have decided to call mental illness, we have decided to call it depression, anxiety, bi-polar, etc. While these conditions do exist and need medical treatment, they are diagnosed much more often than medically sound! They are used as an excuse for our hiding from God, they are used as a pap for our hiding from one another, and the solution, therapy and pills, do not deal with the underlying cause: a spiritual malady caused by our hiding from God!

Maimonidies in his “Eight Chapters” cites the differences between medical healing and spiritual healing. While we may not agree with all of his conclusions, the thrust of this book is to educate us on the spiritual health/sickness we all may suffer from. When we believe we are not worthy, this is a spiritual malady; when we believe we are more worthy than anyone else, this is a spiritual malady; when we believe we are meant to have “rule and dominion” over another, another group of people, we are suffering from a spiritual malady; when we believe that the color of our skin, the ‘faith or non-faith’ we ‘practice’ makes us better suited to hold power and ‘those people’ have to be subjugated to ‘our way of being’, we are deeply ensconced in our spiritual malady. We have taken hiding to such a level that we have become blind to the truth, we have become ignorant of God’s will, we are delusional as to our ‘nearness to God’. Yet, we continue to live into our hiding and our delusions, we continue to believe that anyone who helped us who we now have to step on, it is God’s will for us to be disloyal to principles, to values, to people, to God. We continue to shout our loyalty to God, our adhering to the rituals, the dogma all the while betraying the Covenant, ignoring the call of the prophets, refusing to take responsibility and fiddling while the world burns from climate change, from authoritarianism, from our hiding.

Rabbi Heschel’s brilliance in the first sentence above shakes me to my core. I have spent the past 35+ years not hiding, not blaming my hiding on God, on another. I continue to take responsibility for my actions and accept the actions of another. Yet, I continue to be crushed when people hide from me, when I experience what I thought was real and true actually be a facade that was really, really good. This is what we all need recovery from: hiding and believing our facades are real. We all need to recover from our spiritual malady and the first step on this path is to admit we are spiritually ill, we are hiding from God, from the people around us, and this hiding causes great pain and harm to another, to God, and to ourselves. The next right action is to open ourselves up to God’s healing power as the prophets teach and proclaim to us; Hosea calls out to us that no matter how many times we have committed adultery, no matter how many times we have prostituted ourselves, God is ready to accept us back, God desires us to return. I know this to be true from my history and the experiences of so many people I have encountered in helping them recover their spiritual health. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark