Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 186

“Our standards are modest; our sense of injustice tolerable, timid; our moral indignation impermanent; yet human violence is interminable, unbearable, permanent. The conscience builds its confines, is subject to fatigue, longs for comfort. Yet those who are hurt, and He who inhabits eternity, neither sleep nor slumber.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 91)

Rabbi Heschel’s highlighted words above describe the state of affairs for most people. Many of us “build its confines”, meaning we continually put borders and limits on where our conscience takes us. This is how we are able to stay silent in the face of evil, hide our heads when wrongs are being done in ‘our name’ by governments, religions, family members, etc. By building these boundaries, we allow our consciences to be soothed by self-deceptions, we go along with the wrong doing and deceptions of another(s), we abdicate our responsibility to serve and engage in a “higher calling”. Building these boundaries, these “confines” we allow ourselves to be spiritually, morally, and ethically lazy. Be it the treatment of the sick, lame, elderly in Ancient Rome and Greece, the treatment of people in the Dark and Middle Ages, the hatred of Jews for the millennia, the enslavement of Blacks in America, etc, these are the results of building these confines, limiting our moral outrage, caring just for our own well-being.

Rabbi Heschel gives us a ‘reason’ for building these “confines”; “fatigue, longs for comfort”. Fatigue comes from the Latin meaning “tire out”. One of the English definitions is “a lessening in one's response to or enthusiasm for something, typically as a result of overexposure to it.” Our consciences have been exposed to the evils of slavery, oppression, anti-semitism, fear of ‘the other’, for so long that we seem to be unable to respond to them with anything but indifference. Looking at the phenomena of Trump’s popularity, hating the stranger proclaiming the goodness of terrorists and rapists in Gaza, the ho-hum towards Putin’s rape of Ukraine, harkens back to earlier eras, we still haven’t learned how to invigorate our consciences and stay true to our inner values.

Comfort comes from the Latin meaning “strengthen”, in English we use “the easing or alleviation of a person's feelings of grief or distress.” Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above is a warning and a call to us to not “strengthen” our inability to respond to the indifference our consciences have adopted, to not “alleviate” our bad conscience over the distress of another person/group nor “ease” our moral outrage at lies, deceptions, slavery, unkindness, etc. Yet, we continue to do this, we seem, historically and in real time, to be unable to express the moral outrage of the Prophets. Our conscience is in turmoil and we put different salves, ointments, etc to alleviate the turmoil because we are afraid to face the truth and act accordingly. We are unable to deal with the nuances and subtleties of living a life of “moral grandeur and spiritual audacity” as Rabbi Heschel said in a telegram to President Kennedy in 1963.

While some say that prophecy doesn’t happen anymore, I disagree. We have seen prophets in our time, like Rabbi Heschel, Rev King, George Orwell, and so many others. We have the words and deeds of the prophets of antiquity we can study and learn from. We have, within us, the fire of the prophets and we are called “descendants of the prophets”. Jesus’ words were his interpretation of the prophets words, using the same themes in his sermons. Western Morality comes from the Bible and the prophets proclaiming their value to those in power. Yet, we seem to easily forget, to “limit” our consciences, to allow them to “tire out” and seek to “strengthen” our indifference rather than claim our inheritance of “fire in the belly” from the prophets of old.

There seem to be so many causes in the world today and there is only one cause we need to be concerned with: our ways of dealing with our conscience. We, the people, have to take up the mantle of the prophets, we have to take up the words of the Bible, we have to take up the call of Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, Buddha, etc and take the next right action rather than the most expedient one. We have to imbue the courage of the prophets to do the bidding of our souls, our spirits rather than soothe our conscience seeking ‘comfort”. We are being called today, as we are every day, to stand for what is right and good, to take actions to ensure that everyone is treated with dignity and value, every person is seen as a divine need. We are commanded to free/ransom the captive, this applies to our selves, our consciences as well as to another human being. As we end our celebration of leaving the physical slavery of Egypt, we embark on the journey of leaving the spiritual slavery of a lazy conscience. This is what counting the Omer means this year.

My recovery is based in, and I continue to find, the ways I am in the spiritual slavery of a lazy conscience. In these years of recovery, I have kept the words and deeds of the prophets, Rabbi Heschel, the early Hasidim, my father and grandfathers as my north star. When I don’t, I am in danger of losing my moral compass. I am loud and the “fire in my belly” burns hot and explosive, something that is not accepted in polite society and some people recoil from. This saddens me and, in all these years, I try to temper it when appropriate and I don’t always succeed. I am afraid of indifference because, knowing my own history, I am acutely aware of how easy it is to fall into a lazy conscience and bad actions, comforting myself with mendacity and going along with negativity and deception. I cannot do this- I cannot go backwards. I would rather suffer the arrows of those who use my vulnerabilities against me than not heed the fire within. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark