Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 217

“What is lacking is a sense of the monstrosity of inequality.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg 93)

These words can help us realize that our “sense of monstrosity” is alive and well as we have seen throughout the ages. We see outrage in people all the time, in fact, the very people who perpetrate “inequality” have this sense of “monstrosity” in the fabric of their being. “Who do ‘they’ think they are to believe ‘they’ are equal to us?” Is a battle cry among those perpetrators of “inequality”. One can fill in who ‘they’ are based on their own prejudice and contempt for equality. We see this in the chants of “Jews will not replace us”, we see this in the clearing of the streets in Washington DC so the President can have a photo op with the Bible that he has upside down, that his ‘Jewish’ daughter gave him a King James Version of instead of the Hebrew Bible. We see the outrage of the MAGA crowd at being denied a dictator, so far. We see the outrage and anger of the progressives that Jews think they deserve anything but anti-semitic rhetoric from them. We see and hear the outrage, the “monstrosity” of people whenever a group seeks, demands equality, whenever a group that has been marginalized seeks  a seat at the table. This is true now as it has been throughout history.

It is true on a global level, it is true on pure ideological levels, it is true with some supposed ‘religious’ levels. It is also true on personal levels. Far too often we think of people who are in the “helping professions” as ‘the help’ and treat them as such. In today’s world teachers are supposed to pass their students with good grades no matter what their work has earned. In private schools headmasters have been known to change the grades of some students when their parents call to complain. Teachers in all schools, public and private, are treated with contempt and disrespect by the parents of the students and blamed when their children refuse to learn because after all ‘it is your job to teach them’. Just as clergy, especially Rabbis are blamed for kids dropping out of religious school after their Bar/Bat Mitzvah because ‘it won’t help them get into college’, or ‘they don’t see the point’, and, of course the old standby, ‘you don’t make it fun for them’. All the while these parents who don’t go to Temple, don’t practice their faith in their home, believe the Rabbi should be their hired help for lifecycle events because they are the donors, they are the members. This is a very personal way of practicing “the monstrosity of inequality” which then reenforces the same practice in the political, ideological, business, ‘religious’ levels of living.

We can end this way of being, however! We have the wherewithal inside of us to end our “lacking a sense of the monstrosity of inequality.” We can learn from our history, we can learn the lessons the Bible, the myriad of spiritual texts we have come to teach us. We can remember just as God came to redeem the Israelites from Egypt, so too can we redeem the people suffering from the inequality from another. Just as we are told to redeem our kinsman, we can redeem those who perpetrate inequality from their stinking thinking and addictive actions. Just as we traveled the wilderness to reach Mt. Sinai and ‘heard’ the ‘voice’ of a power greater than ourselves, we can rise to a higher consciousness and practice “radical kinship”. Just as all the slaves who wanted to left Egypt, so too can we “erase the margins” which are arbitrarily erected to keep ‘them’ out and ‘down’. The Declaration of Independence called upon King George and all of us to realize that “all men are created equal” that we all have “unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. This declaration, which was the basis on which this country was founded, repeats the call in Leviticus to “proclaim freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants therein”. This declaration, which under assault from the right and the left, gives us the antidote to “the monstrosity of inequality” that even our founding fathers could not get past.

The solution resides within us, as all solutions do. We, the people, have to stop seeing life through a lens of ‘where’s mine’, through the eyes of ‘they are trying to take it from me’, through the lie of ‘not enough/better than’. We, the people have to redirect our vision, put on a new pair of glasses and see our part in the troubles that plague our world, our communities, our personal lives and no longer seek to blame and keep ‘them’ down. We are responsible for what happens in our homes, in our countries and in the world. No one is blameless and no one is the only one to blame. When we are being responsible, we are acknowledging our ability to respond rather than have knee-jerk reactions, we are saying yea to the call for goodness and equality, we are judging each case on its own merits without fear nor favor, we are standing with people instead of above them. We, the people, have to resolve within ourselves that we are good enough, that everyone is good enough and we all have a call and a desire to rise above our baser instincts of competition and “inequality”. We, the people, have to be outraged at “inequality” rather than a passive or active participant in it.

I hear my father’s outrage when Black men were making less than White men for the same job and how his raising the wages of Black men working for him caused the White men to quit and us being called N…lovers! I hear my father’s outrage at the anti-semitism being practiced in Cleveland, Ohio and across America even though he, and many other Jews, fought in WWII. I hear my father’s voice telling all of us to always say hello to people because we are no better nor worse than anyone else. I hear my father’s voice scolding his brother and still helping him no matter what. I hear my father’s outrage when he saw injustice and I hear my father’s voice telling me what the next right action to take is. I hear it clearer and clearer in the past 35 years and one of my amends at his grave was for blocking his voice and teachings over the first 20 years after he died. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark