Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 139

“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)

The last three sentences above send chills up and down my spine and my soul cries out for me to cut through “that mist is man-made.” They cause me and, hopefully, everyone to look at the myriad of subtle ways we add to the mist that causes good and evil to become so mixed up. Because of the pull of self-deception and our desire to be deceived, we make up stories that are not true, believe ‘facts’ that are false, allow feelings to become facts, and seek all manners of escapes from truth, reality, commitment, obligation, and God.

Our political process is one such “mist is man-made”, we have become so oblivious to the truth that the “spin doctors” are believed as truth tellers. We believe the falseness of the right-wing and left-wing commentators even though we know, deep in the recesses of our minds and our souls, what they are saying is not truth. While there may be some true things in what they are saying, they use the truth to tell lies, to ‘hook’ us into their conspiracies and their ‘side’. Both of these ‘wings’ are authoritarian, both use God as justifications, both allow alliances to be destroyed unless people go along with the lies they tell themselves and everyone else. This is one of the ways we have silenced God.

In our faith traditions, people continue to tell us what God wants all the while denying the foundational texts of their faith. 36 times in the Torah we are told to welcome the stranger, help the poor and the needy yet, many ‘religious’ Jews speak despairingly about people of another faith, people of different ethnicities, and bastardize the very teachings they claim to be the guardians of! They continually tell us ‘what God wants’ and in doing so, they are creating more “mist” and silencing God’s voice in favor of their own. Jesus never talks about abortion, he never says to make women less than men, he washes the feet of the stranger, he feeds the poor-yet so many ‘good christians’ have bastardized his words and silenced his voice in favor of their own “mist”-making and, again, silenced God with their own voice.

It is very difficult to cut through the “mist” that is “man-made”, it is very difficult to hear God amid the noise of our minds and inner life. Yet, we can do both when we are willing to be in truth, when we are willing to take the time to discern what is good and what is evil. We, the people, need the help of God’s voice, God’s teachings, to make these discernments and, we continue to believe in the superiority of our voices, of our thoughts. Seeing the world as it is, cutting through the “mist” is the path to freedom, it is the pathway to wholeness, it is the pathway to holiness.

We are told in Leviticus: “you shall be holy because I, the Lord, am holy”. I this commentary about this verse, Ramban says we need to hear this and take this in because it is possible to be a “scoundrel within the bounds of the Torah” and therefore we need to be told/reminded that holiness is our path, holiness is something that we already have within us and our job is to grow our holy soul so we do not create more “mist”, so we do not substitute our voice for God’s voice, so we end our incessant need to silence God.

We have witnessed throughout the millennia a myriad of ways people of all stripes and kinds have been “scoundrels” within the ‘law of the land’. In our recent history, we can look to Hitler and the Nazi’s who made the law of the land fit their desires with little or no pushback from the German people nor the clergy. We are witnessing here in the United States how the right-wing ‘fringe’ have taken over the Republican Party and even the Supreme Court is siding with them! Mike Johnson, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Rashida Tliab, and other members of Congress do everything they can to create more “mist” as a smoke screen to the truth, which is always messy. They continue to validate their points of view without ever seeking to see or hear the ‘rest of the story’. Trump and his thugs have taken “mist” making to whole new level, the media constantly denigrate Joe Biden for being 81 years old-a discrimination that even the progressives go along with, Netanyahu and his band of so-called religious parties have tried to make the legal process in Israel subservient to the political. Iran, Russia, China, and many other countries have legal systems and religious systems that are jokes. Yet, all claim to be speaking in the name of God-all speak only in the name of their self-interest which is the exact opposite of God’s call to us. Many people have silenced God because of the ways of these so-called ‘religious’ people.

In recovery, I and my fellow travelers recapture God’s call, we take the cotton out of our ears, we take the blinders off our eyes, we open our hearts and silence the constant noise of our heads so we can discern what is truth and what is good separating from the lies we have told ourselves, the deceptions of another we have bought into, and the evil we have perpetrated prior to our recovery. I have spent the past 35+ years undoing the evil I did, letting go of the self-deceptions and lies I bought into. I still make mistakes, I just don’t have to lie about them, I don’t hide from being who I am, as messy as this is. I have encountered many people who want to keep the “mist” as thick as they can so they can hide from themselves and everyone else their errors, their betrayals and, in doing so continue to silence God. Isn’t it time to end our “mist” making ways? God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark