Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 3 Day 141
“We have trifled with the name of God. We have taken ideals in vain, preached and eluded Him, praised and defied Him. Now, we reap the fruits of failure. Through centuries His voice cried in the wilderness. How skillfully it was trapped and imprisoned in Temples! How thoroughly distorted!” (Essential Writings pg. 90)
Rabbi Heschel could be describing this moment and, I believe, this is the wonder and awe of his prophetic voice. We live at a time where our awareness of the myriad of ways “we have taken ideals in vain” seems to elude us. We hear and spout ourselves great ideals of democracy, of freedom, of faith, and then bastardize them to the greatest extent we can, all the while extolling our faithfulness to them! The word vain comes from the Latin meaning “empty, without substance” and one English definition is “useless, producing no result”. This is such an apt description of what so many people do with the ‘ideals’ they espouse. We see this in our government, in our institutions of higher learning, in our ‘religious’ institutions, in our families, communities, etc.
As a Jew, the hatred that is happening in the world today against Jews by other people who experience hatred because of the color of their skin, because of their sexual orientation, is appalling, a sense of betrayal, a bewilderment. The extolling of Hamas under the guise of “freedom fighters” and they “care so much about the Palestinians and the people of Gaza” makes me want to scream, shout, knock some sense into these ‘well-intentioned’ idiots! Hamas, Radical Islam would kill LGBTQ+ people like dogs in the street, they massacred Jewish and non-Jewish young people at a concert dedicated to peace, they killed babies, raped women, and people validate their actions under the ideal of ‘freedom’; while Hamas and their Iranian puppet masters do not want anyone to be free! If this isn’t taking an “ideal in vain”, what is? Because they wrap themselves in what are Biblical ideals, calls from God without acknowledging where their ideals come from, the progressives like Tliab, Omar, Bowman, are all able to forget who marched with their ancestors for freedom and civil rights, who has stood for these ideals in all their affairs and, instead, abuse the Jews rather than speak about their issues with the government of Israel, with the ways Hamas has imprisoned the people of Gaza, etc. Because they are taking “ideals in vain” they cannot see the forest for the trees, they cannot acknowledge the both/and of this situation, and they are unable/unwilling to see a path forward that doesn’t mean Israel’s destruction as a Jewish State.
The evangelicals and other right-wing religious groups, including right-wing Jews, spout their love of God and of Christ, their adherence to the ways of the Bible, the New Testament, all the while the ways they act out their ‘ideals’ is “empty, lacking in substance” and they produce none of the results that Biblical ideals point us to. Rather than finding ways to live together in harmony, if not peace, these so-called ‘religious’ people bastardize the words of Christ and the Bible to “love your neighbor as you love yourself”, to “not hate your brother in your heart”, to “care for the stranger, the poor, the needy, the widow, the orphan”, they seek to divide us, they seek to bar and blame the stranger from our midst-up to an including Jews who they consider the strangest and the most culpable for societal ills, they continue to criminalize poverty and blame the poor people for their poverty because, in some circles, they say the people are unloved by God! While Biblical tradition says the gates of repentance are always open, the prophet calls us to return to the fold because God “will heal our backsliding and take us back in love”, these charlatans continue to make a life of faith into a theocracy with them being the autocrats in charge!
We, the people, have to end taking “ideals in vain” and admit that we may never achieve these ideals and we are not free to cease our pursuit of them. We, the people, have to end the tyranny of the left, of the right, and bring America, Israel, and, hopefully, the world away from the fringes, away from either end of the spectrum. This is not just a political necessity, this is a spiritual one as well. Without our acknowledgement that we will never be perfect, that the institutions we create to solve the dilemmas facing us will always make errors, that the people who create solutions to the problems we face will always have clay feet and show their imperfections, we can never truly move forward in getting closer to the “ideals” we hold dear. We, the people, have to take back our institutions from the ‘perfectionists’, from the people who erroneously believe ‘they can do no wrong’, from perpetrating the myth that the fact we have “taken ideals in vain” is okay because we are doing it. After all, the Supreme Court is taking a ridiculous case where someone says they are above the law because of their status, after all, justice for the wealthy is different than justice for the middle class and poor, health treatment is different depending on one’s economic status, etc. Yet, the “ideal” is “proclaim liberty throughout the land and to all its inhabitants therein”, it is “justice is blind”, it is “everyone an Image of God” and deserves their dignity respected and to be considered as having infinite worth. Seems like we have fallen way short of these ideals, hence the proof of Rabbi Heschel’s wisdom above.
We, the people, need to recover our essence of being, our basic goodness of being, our purpose for being created and alive. We have to surrender our false egos, stop taking our souls to the beauty shop so we look good on the outside. Each morning I wake up and say a prayer of gratitude to God for “returning my soul to me with compassion”, knowing today is new, I am fresh and I have to return to pursuit of God’s ideals, be one grain of sand better today and practice the ideals above a little more! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi