Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 153

“The direct effect of His hiding is the hardening of the conscience: man hears but does not understand, sees but does not perceive-his heart fat, his ears heavy (Isaiah 6). (Essential Writings pg 92)

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above gives us the challenge and the dilemma of being human and our concealment, obscuring of God to ourselves. We are living in a period where “the hardening of the conscience” of humanity seems to be getting stronger and stronger. We make moral equivalence where there is none, we blame the people we victimize, we extol the authoritarians and the despots, we denigrate people ‘not like us’ and we wield power for our sake not for the sake of heaven nor the sake of our neighbor.

In 1972, in his interview with Carl Stern, Rabbi Heschel spoke to “the hardening of the conscience” when he said we no longer “love thy neighbor as thyself”, rather we “suspect our neighbor” instead. Our need to exile God, as Rabbi Heschel says earlier in this passage, has caused us to not even recognize “the hardening of the conscience” that takes place. Much like the hardening of the arteries that go undetected until there is a crisis, “the hardening of the conscience” goes undetected until it is almost too late; we had a Civil War because the conscience of the Southern States almost congealed in their desire to have dominion and rule over people of color, we went to war in 1941 because the conscience of Japan and Germany almost congealed in their desire for power, for rule and dominion over other Asians, over Europe and Germany’s desire to exterminate the Jewish people.

Rather than learn permanent lessons and change our ways from these drastic upheavals in our history, we can trace the subtle and not so subtle ways humanity has continued its trek to “the hardening of the conscience”, its blasphemous ways of exiling God, of concealing the truth of God’s will, of obscuring the actual calls and demands of God for the sake of our power, our ego, our need for certainty. We push God into hiding because we cannot be certain that what we are doing is truly God’s will, that we are being ‘perfect’ in performing the deeds God calls us to do. In order to deal with our anxiety, we seek certainty, we seek surety, and in seeking the unattainable, we have hardened our conscience and live in self-deception, deception of another(s) and mendacity.

“Now we are engaged in a great Civil War” are words written and spoken by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 as part of his Gettysburg Address and, because of “the hardening of the conscience” of humanity, we think these words no longer apply, yet they do! We are in a civil war in our country, we are in a civil war in Israel, in Gaza, across the globe there are civl wars happening. The war is whether “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal… can long endure.” In nation-states all over the world there is an internal war going on between people who’s conscience is not totally hardened, who are awakening to the reality of what “the hardening of the conscience” has done to their countries, to their way of life, to themselves and are fighting to do angioplasty on the arteries of their conscience. Be it the Anti-Trump, Anti-Bibi, crowd, be it the Anti-Right Wing Religious Zealots, Anti-Putin, Anti-Fascism crowd, there is a ground swell to be more like Alexi Navalny than like Ben-G’vir, to be more like Rev William Barber than like Stephen Miller, to be more like Bill Gates than Jared Kushner. Every one of us needs to have angioplasty done on the arteries of our conscience. Every one of us needs to recognize the diagnosis that Rabbi Heschel gave to us some 70+ years ago was correct then and is devastatingly correct now.

We have the cure, however! The cure is in recovering our Spiritual path, in tearing down the walls, the paths, the dams we have built to keep God in hiding. The cure is to let go of our need for certainty, for surety, for needing to be right. The cure is to look in the mirror and see what God sees, see what is reflected in our soul’s truth, not the ways our minds/intellects lie to us. The cure is to end our need to have rule and dominion over people who are not like us, to stop trying to make people, even our own children, over in our image. We have to end our erroneous belief that we are God, that we know all and we see all. We have to begin to reflect on our errors rather than blame another person for them. We have to see how we have put so much plaque in the arteries leading to our conscience that we now believe we can wrap ourselves in the flag, in the Bible, in the New Testament, in the Koran, etc and defy the very words these symbols, these texts speak. We are in desperate need to end our mendacity, our sublimation of holy ideas and ways to our selfish, egotistical needs. We are in desperate need for true Spiritual Leaders, people who will be physicians of the soul so we can do the necessary surgery to remove the plaque from the arteries leading to our conscience and heal the maladies of our souls that we suffer from.

From the time I was 16-36 I was proud to build up the plaque that impeded my ability to listen to my conscience. These past 36 years have been spent removing the plaque, hearing and responding to the call of my conscience and my soul. I have not always done this well and I have been engaged in healing my spiritual maladies and I no longer care about the judgement of those who seek to blame me, I no longer am concerned with what those who want to exploit my errors and my vulnerability do, I am only concerned with “the hardening of the conscience” that I am avoiding and, I pray, helping another(s) avoid. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark