Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 197

“There is an evil which most of us condone and are even guilty of: indifference to evil. We remain neutral, impartial, and not easily moved by the wrongs done unto other people.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 92)

Leaders in every religion, in every country have been wary of the prophets, for each group that was ‘in power’ were concerned that the people would rise up and follow through on the words and deeds of the prophets. This would, in their opinion, lead to the demise of the Judaism they believed in and practiced. While the prophets could not condone being “neutral, impartial” to wrongs done to someone else, people in power seek consensus, ‘peace’, and to keep the status quo in place. The second and third generation of those who led revolutions do not want the study of the prophets, they do not want the “indifference to evil” to end.

Living in today’s world where so many people protest and riot, stand for their values, principles, it is easy to think that “indifference to evil” doesn’t exist. Yet, it is alive and well especially in these groups of people who have claimed their identity as their politics, claim their ‘religious’ beliefs to be the only true ones, believe their right to power is absolute. When we look around the world and see the poverty, hunger, oppression, wars, mistreatment of the stranger and the poor and do nothing, just shrug our shoulders and say “what can I do, I am only one person”, we are condoning and being guilty of “an evil”. We cannot vote this out, we cannot legislate this evil out of existence, we have to root it out from inside of us.

We are guilty of  this “indifference to evil” in our country when we “stand idly by the blood of our brothers”, when we fail to “love our neighbor as we love ourselves”. When we ‘go along to get along’ with actions and ways we know in our hearts and our guts that are wrong. When we “follow the majority” to do evil, we are guilty, when we believe we are ‘helping’ another by punishing them for their beliefs and using our power to deny them freedoms and rights, we are guilty. When we worship at the altar of power and dominion and are deaf to the cries of the widow, the orphan, the stranger, and the poor, we are guilty. When we ignore the wrongs done in our name by our leaders, by our ‘group’, we are guilty. When we have one law for ‘our kind’ and another for ‘those people’ we are guilty.

When we make excuses for ‘our people’ when they invade the privacy of another person/group we are condoning the “indifference to evil”. When we turn our backs on the pleadings of the beggar on the street, when we make homelessness a crime, when we are more worried about tourism than the plight of the poor, we are condoning. When we listen to the denigration of a group, participate in the ‘jokes’ about Jews, Muslims, people of color, etc, we are condoning. When we we watch the decimation caused by war, by terrorism, by prejudice and blame the victims, we are condoning “indifference to evil”. When we make excuses for rape and murder, terrorism and hatred we are condoning. When we remain neutral in the face of any and all evils we are condoning “indifference to evil”.

The condoning and participating in this evil begins within each individual. It is a sign of a terrible spiritual malady that has reached epidemic proportions. All of us have a ‘knowing’ of the next right thing to do, all of us have within us ‘a moral compass that points true north’, and to go against these drives is a choice. Be it because of ‘societal norms’, an immature soul, an uneducated spirit, fear, desire of power, etc is immaterial. As the Talmud teaches, what we didn’t learn as children, even if we were not circumcised, we have to learn ourselves and even circumcise ourselves as adults. There is no ‘clean up’ for our guilt or condoning of our “indifference to evil”.

Rabbi Heschel’s words in 1963 ring true today as they did when the same ideas and calls for action rang true then and in the times of the prophets. The Bible gives us the same prescriptions for dong good, standing up for what is right and moral, and calling us to task for our “indifference to evil”. It is time for all of us to check ourselves for how we remain “neutral, impartial” to evil, to the wrongs done to another(s). It is time for us to raise up our souls, our spiritual maturity and seek the help of physicians of the soul. It is time for our clergy to end their prejudices, stop promoting hatred and evil towards those ‘not like us’. It is time for all of us to understand that every one has infinite dignity, each of us in needed and our greatest inner need is to love and be loved, to need and be needed, to find ways to live together instead of finding ways to dominate and decimate one another. We need to ‘grow up’ and take our proper places as human beings and be human.

I was a practitioner of evil and I was indifferent to the evil I perpetrated. I did not hear the call of my soul nor the souls of another until 43 years ago, when my daughter was born and even then, it took me another 8 years to act upon the calls I was hearing. Since then, I have refused to be indifferent to evil! I have done wrongs to others, without a doubt, I just haven’t been indifferent nor justifying (at least not for long) of my misdeeds. I have engaged in spiritual maturity and have had a spiritual guide since 1987-I am aware of my ability to lie to myself and to hide from myself so I continue to work with a sponsor and a spiritual guide to stay right-sized and follow my own moral compass. I am never done with spiritual growing. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark