Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 154

“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 is calling out to all of us to end our ignorance and our stubbornness. He is demanding we end our incessant need and way of purposely misunderstanding and misperceiving God’s call, the call of our neighbors, the call of our souls.

It is not our inability to hear nor see that Rabbi Heschel is addressing, it is our unwillingness to understand and to perceive. Perceive comes from the Latin root meaning “entirely take” and in English both words are synonyms of each other. Rabbi Heschel is also making a correlation between our hearing and our seeing, our understanding and our perceiving that is, all too often, misused in the ways we live our daily lives.

When our conscience is hardened, when our morality is distorted, when we live amorally, we become incapable of really understanding what we hear. Humanity has, for the millennia, put up barriers between understanding what we hear with our soul’s ‘ears’ as opposed to our mind’s/ego’s propensity to twist everything to what we believe is in our best interest. While humanity has progressed in philosophy, mathematics, sciences, medicine, etc, we seem incapable of understanding the call of God, the ways to improve the quality of life for ourselves and for one another because we have hardened our conscience so much that we deny the true understanding of what we hear.

When we hear the cry of the enslaved and forget/ignore that when anyone is enslaved we are all enslaved, we do “not understand”. When we denigrate the call of the poor for help, we do “not understand”. When we hear the call of the stranger and we put up barriers to help them, we do “not understand”. When we hear the call of ‘one who is not like me’, ie women, people of color, people of different faiths, and believe we should control them, we should deny them freedom of choice, deny their free will, we do “not understand”.

When we see injustice happening around us and do not care because “I was not” them, as Martin Niemoller writes, we do “not perceive”. When we see the lies of people who engage in anti-semitism and believe the lies of the far left/far right, we do “not perceive”. When we see the hatred and strife between people, between nations and we do nothing to make peace, we do “not perceive”. When we see the ravages of history and continue in the same path, we do “not perceive”. When we see the building up of authoritarians and believe we will benefit from their ‘goodness’, we do “not perceive”.

How is this possible? “His heart fat, his ears heavy” seems to say it all. Be it Moses, the prophets, the Psalmist, spiritual teachers throughout our history, all warn us of this curse; all rail against this basic human drive which many people believe is a sanctuary against the onslaught of God’s calls to us, a hiding place for us to be able to ignore God’s demands and the cries of another human being for help. Even though, time and time again, we have to answer for our hiding, for our hiding of God’s will, God’s teachings, we have seen the destruction of societies, the destruction of countries, the destruction of people’s lives, be it in Ancient Rome, Europe, the Middle East, Japan, etc and we continue to plug our ears with fat and put weights on our eyes. We are witnessing the destruction of truth and facts throughout the world, in America, in Israel, in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Russia, in Turkey, in Hungary, etc. Yet, rather than clean out the fat in our ears, we put more in by giving oxygen and life to the lies of the despots, the authoritarians, the deceivers. Rather than take the weights off of our eyes, we seem to be adding to them by giving credence to the ‘men of god’ who proclaim they are fighting a ‘holy war’ for God’s principles, be it when life is viable, be it ‘this is all our land’, ‘might makes right’, ‘if I want to take it, I am entitled to it’, etc.

We have to end our fear of truly understanding what we hear, of really taking the fat/wax out of our ears and understand that we are engaged in an internal battle between our desires and God’s will, between our inauthentic needs and the call of our soul, between the lies we tell ourselves and are spread into the world and the truth we know in our hearts, in our inner life and we need to put out into the world. We need to stop being fearful of seeing what is truly in front of us and behind us, we have to re-imagine what life will be like when we live in truth, when we follow the ways of God, when we engage our soul’s perception and vision and end our false need on egotistical and false visions.

We can only do this if and when we surrender our need to be right, let go of our need to look good, look strong, look holy. When we take the fat out of our ears and the heaviness off of our eyes, we can see that we are already holy, as Leviticus 19 teaches us. We will understand our strengths and perceive how to use them for the benefit of God, of another(s) and of ourselves. We will hear and understand how to be a little more good each day. We will see how we can sharpen our understanding and our perception a little more each day through prayer, study, acts of kindness, acts of T’Shuvah, etc. We will understand our ability to grow along spiritual lines makes us better human beings, we will perceive paths to wholeness and peace, seeing everyone as divine reminders and not need to denigrate one another to ‘feel good’ about ourselves. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark