Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 138

“We live in an age when most of us have ceased to be shocked by the increasing breakdown in moral inhibitions. The decay of conscience fills the air with a pungent smell. Good and evil, which were once as distinguishable as day and night, have become a blurred mist. But that mist is man-made. God is not silent. He has been silenced.” (Essential Writings pg. 90)

Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above about “Good and evil” are as true today as they were when he wrote them some 73+ years ago! It seems as if society has lost its ability to distinguish between them. While it had “become a blurred mist” then, it seems as if they have become so blended together it is more difficult to distinguish them, it is  more like the early evening sky than only a “blurred mist”. Every one seems to have their own belief and understanding of what is “good and evil”, people proclaim their way is the only right way, what we learn in the Bible, what we learn about being decent, being human has become so distorted in the ways of so many that many people question their own vision of what is “good and evil”. We are so lost in the darkness of the early evening sky, we have lost our way and the ensuing angst, negativity, evil doings seem to be multiplying.

Social media gets a lot of the blame today because anyone can say anything and millions of people ‘see’ their lies and their obfuscation of truth, their denial of what is good and right, their upholding of evil ideas and ways for the benefit of their own power, their own bias’, etc. Yet, while this is true, we have been confounded by the “blurred mist” for a lot longer. Throughout the ages people have believed “might is right” and because of the belief in “survival of the fittest” also includes the people who can conquer another, who can imprison truth and good, who enslave those they fear, we have blurred the lines between good and evil for the millennia.

At Hanukkah we sing a song “Mi Yimalel” (who can retell) and it says “in every age a hero or sage came to our aid”. Today, “good and evil” have become so indistinguishable that, for a great many people, their heroes and sages are the perpetrators of blurring the lines between “good and evil” and, in fact, trying and, in many cases, succeeding to convince ‘their people’ that what is evil is in fact good! Be it Trump today, Pharaoh in the Bible, the Priests and Kings at the time of the prophets, Putin, Netanyahu, any of the dictators and despots of earlier times, all of these ‘leaders’ use subterfuge and mendacity to cover up the evil they perpetrate upon their people and their ‘enemies’. Their ‘enemies’ being anyone who stands up for good, who calls out the evil, who cares for and takes care of the poor, the needy, the stranger; who stands up against hatred and violence, who makes clear the line between good and evil.

We are in desperate need as a society for “the hero or sage” to come to our aid. We are in even more desperate need for us as a society to allow the ones who are here to be heard and heeded. Whether it is the Bible, the New Testament, the Koran, be it Rabbi Heschel, Dr. King, the Dalai Lama, Ticht Nhat Han, John Pavlovitz, Rev. William Barber, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Ernest Kurtz, M. Scott Peck, so many more, we have the “hero or sage” who can come to our aid-we just have to allow them to penetrate our hearts, our minds, our souls; we have to take off the armor surrounding our beings and “circumcise the foreskins of our hearts”, we have to “Hear Israel” by opening our ears and we have to surrender our need to be in power, our desire to live in self-deception, our longing to ‘be strong’. Our greatest strength is our ability to “fail forward”, to learn from our errors, make our amends repair the damage and set ourselves on the proper path for serving something greater than ourselves. The only path to achieving this way of being, the only path to hearing and following “the hero or sage” who comes to our aid is by doing our own inner work. We are constantly being called to look inside of our selves, to discern the deceptions, the lies, the mendacity we have allowed to take hold of our minds and emotions so we can heal them through our spirits. We have to engage in the process of spiritual healing, rise above our false pride, our need to be right, our love of blurring the lines between “good and evil”, blow away the mist that seems to blind us to truth and goodness.

The road of spiritual healing begins with an admission that we are sick, we have become so “fat” that we are unable to discern what is good and what is evil. We have become so obsessed with our own false goals and worship our own false gods, we have engaged in such mendacity as to believe “the one with the gold rules”, until we admit our erroneous thinking and acting, we can’t begin to heal. Once we have admitted our errors, we then need to let go of our old ideas even though we have deceived ourselves into believing these old ideas were good for us. We let them go by deepening our spiritual practices, immersing ourselves in whatever moral and spiritual path speaks to us, even combining some of them to make a practice we can live into. We then return to a state of moral living, of learning/re-learning the difference between “good and evil”, we end our blurring the lines by having a firm grasp on truth and decency. We practice being of service instead of being served, we see one another as divine images and respect the dignity of another human being as much as we are respecting our own dignity. We no longer need to prove our worth to anyone including ourselves, we just know we are worthy, we are equal and we are unique. We hear the call of the prophet, the call of our neighbor, the call of truth and the call of morality in all of our affairs. This is recovery, this is making “good and evil” “as distinguishable as night and day.” Doing this makes each of us “the hero or sage” we need today, the redeemer we are desperate for and the “freedom fighter” to lead us our of our self-imposed slavery and prisons. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark