Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 201

“The prophet is a person who suffers the harms done to others… All prophecy is one great exclamation: God is not indifferent to evil!…He is a God of Pathos.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 92)

We are all created in the Image of God, according to Genesis Chapter 1, we are also all descendants of the prophets, students of the prophets, no matter which faith we adhere to. Yet, we seem to have lost our ability to suffer “the harms done to others”, we have spent millennia being “indifferent to evil”, in our Churches, Mosques, Temples, in the street, in the halls of power and the halls of justice. We have lost our way so badly that we actually use God to justify our indifference, to justify our actions which do “harms” to another! We are so lost that the rule of law only applies to ‘those people’ (anyone not like us), the purpose of power is to enrich oneself and take advantage of everyone else, our religious institutions have become havens for ‘prosperity gospels’, right-wing fanaticism, left-wing radicalism, with truth and God being left out of the altar, out of the homily, out of the sermon, dismissed in the Holy Texts and Prayerbooks we use.

Being created in the Image of God is a statement of our relationship with God and with one another. We cannot say we are people of faith and treat anyone else as “less than” us, whether they are the same faith, a different faith, a different skin color, not as educated, etc. We are all “kin under the skin” and we all are called upon to “erase the margins” as Father Greg Boyle of Homeboy Industries teaches. Since we are all kinfolk, isn’t it time for us to welcome and embrace one another as long lost relatives rather than as enemies? Isn’t it time for us to stand with one another in healing the harms that have been perpetrated upon any of us? Isn’t it time for us to be the shield for those who cannot protect themselves, the voice for those who cannot speak?

God cries when the Egyptians are downing, according to a midrash/homily saying “My children are dying”. While God know and made their deaths happen, it was not done for us to cheer, it was done because the evil was too great, just as in Sodom and Gomorrah. When destruction has to occur this is not a victory for God, it is the acknowledgement that we have, once again, gone down the wrong path; we have, once again, been indifferent to evil and not suffered “the harms done to others”. Rabbi Heschel’s last sentence above reminds us that God suffers with us, God suffers when we are in exile, God suffers when any of us are lost, any of us are evil, any of us indifferent.

When the Speaker of the House of Representatives claims to live by the Bible and goes to New York City to undermine the rule of law, we are watching “indifferent to evil” in action and in full regalia! When authoritarianism is extolled as freedom, when “dictator for a day” is celebrated, we are seeing the demise of the call of the Bible to fight against evil, to end our fascination with power for the sake of power. When our colleges and universities are more interested in promoting a political agenda than in educating our young people to the myriad of possibilities available to them, we are on the precipice of ignoring the “harms done to others”, when ‘standing up’ for the terrorists takes precedence over standing up against rape, torture, murder, we are participating in and watching evil flourish.

We have the solution, it is right in front of us. Pathos-suffering, pity; the recognition of our own suffering because of our silence, because we have bought into being “indifferent to evil”. The recognition of the suffering of another because we have been “indifferent to” the evil we and society perpetrates upon them. Be it anti-semitism, racism, islamaphobia, anti-LGBTQ+, all of it is evil! What is amazing is how the ‘powers that be’ have turned those of us in these minorities against one another. When LGBTQ+ can celebrate Hamas as ‘freedom fighters’ and want the Intifada  to be worldwide when Hamas kills LGBTQ+ people in Gaza is beyond me, it points to the harms of being “indifferent to evil”. We had a coalition in the 1960’s that worked because it was based in Divine Pathos, in our Faith traditions. Today, because the leaders of our faith traditions have watered them down so much, the young people don’t care to adhere to them unless they validate their prejudices and their viewpoints.

We are in desperate need of hearing, reading, studying, living the words of the prophets, the words of the Bible. We have to return to being a people of Pathos, a people who refuse to be “indifferent to evil” anymore. We have to return to being the people who were willing to wander in the wilderness for 40 years so we could learn how to be decent, how to be connected to authenticity, how to Choose Life! It is not a hard turn, the difficulty is in making the decision to make this turn back to our authentic self, turn back to our divine image, turn back to the divine image in another human being. This is the call of pathos, this is the path of pathos, this is the way of faith, of kindness, of truth.

I have been fighting evil for a long time, before I engaged in it and since I have stopped engaging in it. I am and have never been indifferent to evil. Even when I was perpetrating it, I knew it and chose to be evil. I am remorseful for those times. And, I have spent the past 35.5 years standing against it, I have gotten myself into trouble because I have called out evil, wrong, because I refuse to be quiet in the face of evil. I am not right for ‘polite society’ and have no skills except to live into my prophetic inheritance and stand for what is right, good. Standing for pathos and kindness is the only solution to the bullies and the authoritarians who want to control everything and everyone, I have found. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark