Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 151

“It is not God who is obscure. It is man who conceals Him. His hiding from us is not His essence…A hiding God, not a hidden God. He is waiting to be disclosed, to be admitted into our lives.” (Essential Writings pg.91)

In the first two sentences above, Rabbi Heschel dispels some myths about God and about humanity. “Obscure” comes from the Latin meaning “dark” and “conceals” has the Latin root of “completely hidden”. Using these two definitions, can better understand what has happened and is continuing to happen to all of us: God is not dark, it is humanity who has completely hidden from God! Yet, we humans either blame God for “hiding” or we ignore the spirit of God that fills the universe, that gives us the very oxygen we need to breathe.

“Where is God” has been said myriads of times throughout the millennia and responses range from, ‘god wants this to happen’ to ‘there is no god’. I use the small letter “g” because these responses are deceptions, lies used to exert human power, keep people under the thumbs of priests, rabbis, imams, despots, authoritarians, etc. Because of our desperate need to hide, because of our inability to be responsible and answer Hineni to God’s calls, because we refuse to live into the ways of being holy, because we are more concerned with how things look (optics) than how things are, we are susceptible to the deceptions of another(s) and the lies we tell ourselves. Herein lies the reason for our spiritual bankruptcy.

We darken God’s will in order to ‘bend’ it to our will. Rather than following the teachings of the Bible where we are told to “do justly, love mercy, walk in the ways of God”, we have made God so obscure, so lofty so we can impose our human desires and will all the while calling it God’s will. This is one of the most common examples of idolatry practiced by human beings. When we hear of internment camps being built in the United States for ‘those people’, when we hear of suspension of the Constitution “on day 1”, when we hear a madman, desperate to stay out of prison, desperate to hold onto his money(or continue to fool people he has billions) and he is supported by millions while he hires criminals and people who have Putin’s interests at heart, while he celebrates Viktor Orban, and then say “Christ sent him”, we are in trouble. This is the essence of humanity concealing God!

We conceal God and claim that God ‘has left the building’ in order to exert control over people and to make our egocentric desires ‘holy’. We seem to be incapable of being responsible and heeding the words of the Bible: “don’t scout out after your heart and your eyes which you will whore after”. As my Rabbi Ed Feinstein says: “don’t be a tourist”. We obscure and conceal God so we can be tourists in our own lives, so we can go on a scouting mission. This scouting mission is not to find “the Promised Land”, it is not to find “the Golden Medina”, it is to find the ways we can satisfy our darkest desires, our most egotistical dreams, to gain and hold power over groups of people based on their ethnicity, their religion, their sexual preferences, even their gender. These out of measure desires have brought us to our knees as a society on numerous occasions and it takes a revolution to bring us back to sanity, sometimes bloodless and often very bloody.

What does obscuring and concealing God get us? It allows us to live in the fantasy that we are in control, that we can bend things to our will. It allows us to deny truth and to live in mendacity and fantasy. It tells us that “clothes makes the man”, “with money, I am somebody, without money, I am nothing”. It allows us to imprison people at our will, especially political opponents, it allows us to engage in “identity politics” so deeply we can deny the horrific crimes perpetrated by ‘our people (like Hamas) because they are ‘freedom fighters”. We allow our denigration of any human being ‘not like us’ and claim we are doing ‘god’s will’. We listen to the lies of another and believe them because they appeal to our sense of injury, our need to be victims to ‘the other’. Obscuring and concealing God has made our religious institutions irrelevant for most people, places of mendacity, deception and the ‘good people’ running them are cowards who darken God’s ways, who completely hide from God’s will and, yet, proclaim their allegiance with their bona fides to God. They defy in their actions the very principles they proclaim they follow!

We, the people, have to let go of our need to obscure and conceal God in our daily living. Rabbi Heschel’s entire body of works calls us to this task, he continues to offer wisdom and hope, rebuke and repair, yet we continue to hide from him, from the prophets, from the Bible, from Christ’s teachings, from the ways of the Buddha, from the Dalai Lama, etc. Father Greg Boyle and Homeboy Industries, John Pavlovitz, Rev. William Barber, Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz, are some of the people who are calling out to us to end our concealment of God, to end the ways we obscure God and Godliness. We, the people, need to surrender-to let go of our fears at being seen, our terror of being seen by God and another human being. We need to remember, as Rabbi Hillel says: “What is hateful to you, do not do to another person”, we have to stop the lying, the self-deceptions, the deceptions of another(s) we engage in so we can hide from God, so we can keep the world darkened for our ‘benefit’. We, the people, have to recover the light of Godliness, the struggle of doing the next right thing as the Bible teaches us, and re-engage in a connection with the Ineffable One and one another that is real, transparent, forgiving, loving, truthful and kind. This is a path to uncovering God’s essence again, for us to come out of hiding and live into God’s will. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark