Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 206

’We worry more about the purity of dogma than the integrity of love.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg 93)

After spending two days on the first half of this sentence and even though there is so much more to be said about it and how it is ruining our lives and our seeking to destroy our humanity, I want to turn to the last phrase above “the integrity of love”.

Rabbi Heschel’s use of italics points to the importance this idea has for him, and I would add, should have for all of us. “Integrity” comes from the Latin meaning “intact”, it is is defined in English as having “strong moral principles” and “unified” as well as “internal consistency”. In Hebrew the word used is “Shlemut”, which translates to “wholeness”. The “integrity of love” is first found in the Torah in Leviticus 19:18 “you shall love your neighbor as you love yourself”. This is, as I hear Rabbi Heschel today, the epitome of “the integrity of love”.

And, we are not as worried about loving our neighbor as we are about the “purity of dogma”, we are not as worried about the wholeness of our love for our spouses, children, friends as we are about our devotion to “the conventional notions of society”, the “dogma” of our particular cult/way of being. Whether it is a religious dogma, a social dogma, even the progressive dogma that claims to be for everyone. This is the great issue that has faced humanity since we came into being-how to be “internally consistent” in our love for another human being, how to “be whole” in our commitment and loving actions towards another and ourselves. We have struggled to see “love” as a strong moral principle that must be practiced in all of our affairs-even in war!

We live in a transactional society, love is a commodity not a principle. We give and withhold it based on our ‘feelings’ at the moment. We give and withhold it based on what we want from another human being, this is the draw of the authoritarian movement. There is no “integrity of love” in our society today for most people because of the transactional nature of love in our world. We see this in the way the ‘good people’ have embraced the terrorists of Hamas. We see this in the way the ‘religious’ people use the Bible, the New Testament, the Koran, etc as weapons of destruction and proof they are right rather than ways of living into “the integrity of love”. We see the transactional nature of love in the ways institutions are willing to abandon their principles to conform to some ‘standard’ set by people who sit on their boards with no real knowledge of the day to day needs of the people they are serving-either their customers or workers, be it for profit or not-for-profit.  We are witnessing the tearing down of so many moral principles found in our Holy Texts, that while never followed perfectly gave us grounding for a way to be better human beings each and every day.

Our need to call another person, another group “vermin”, “not human”, “blood poisoners” etc are indicators of how far away from ‘the integrity of love” we are. This need also reflects back on us how self-loathing we are as individuals and as a society. Our inability to “love our neighbor” calls into question our ability to “love ourself”. Think about this: we have to be commanded to love both our neighbor who we know we need and to love ourself! How radical is this? We have evolved so much that we have bypassed much of what makes us human, our  need for authentic connections, our need to be authentic, our need to be needed and our need to be aided by another.

We use love as a weapon, treating our ‘loved’ ones as investments, as reflections of ourselves so if they embarrass us, if they defy us, if they make us uncomfortable, we withhold love from them. We proclaim it while we act in the most unloving ways. We have seen children who have forgotten to honor their parents-not necessarily love them-in the ‘divorce my parents because they are toxic’ movement that is happening today. We have seen the ‘progressives’ abandon the Jews who have been allies with them forever because the Jews are the same as ‘whitey’, the same as ‘the man’. We see the takeover of someone’s creative endeavor by ‘the suits’. We see the fidelity proclaimed by the authoritarian leader to the people with his/her fingers crossed behind his back. We are in the throes of losing our freedom to be who we are because we lack “the integrity of love”.

I have been thinking about this for a long time. I had issues with my mother and I would never abandon her. We had an agreement- we didn’t always agree with one another, we didn’t always like one another and we would never stop loving one another. We saw each other as wounded human beings doing the best we could with what we had experienced and where we were in the moment. I have had the same experience with people who have harmed me, who have berated me, who have supported me and helped me grow. “The integrity of love” that I have for humanity is more in line with the Biblical command today than ever before, it keeps growing within me and allows me to live without resentments and with compassion. My relationship with my wife, Harriet, is one of “integrity”. Our love is whole, it is internally consistent, it is based on the morality of love and we are a unified couple with our individual ideas, needs, thoughts, etc. My relationship with my siblings is the same as is my relationship with my daughter, Heather, and my grandson Miles. We practice radical love whether we agree or not, whether we have hurt one another inadvertently or not. Practicing this principle in all my affairs leads me to more empathy, more compassion, more “love my neighbor” so I can “love myself” as God loves all of us. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark