Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 3 Day 268
“General studies are taught on a high level of learning, while religious education is satisfied with cliches buttered with sentimentality. As a result, religious instruction acquired in childhood fades when exposed to the challenge and splendor of other intellectual powers in an age of scientific triumphs.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 53)
“Israel is always right”, “America, love it or leave it”, “Bibi is the strongman we need”, “MAGA is the American way” “It is written in the Torah”, and other such B.S. comes to my mind after reading the quote above. Our religious education is so bad, our spiritual growth so stunted, we aer fail to hear, see and change the ways our religious education is taught. This is true in all denominations of Judaism-we have dumbed down religious education so badly that the main reason to go to Hebrew School is for the Bar/Bat Mitzvah money and party. In more ‘traditional’ circles it is to learn the ‘right’ way to perform deeds that have no inner meaning and ‘follow the rules’ as laid out by the Rabbis, both from the time of the Talmud to the Rabbis of their communities-all of whom paid/pay more attention to their holding power, adding to the ‘glory’ of the Mitzvah than they do to the inner life of the child, of the parent, of the individual Jew.
“You have to stay Jewish so Hitler doesn’t win” “Israel is our homeland and we can’t talk against it for fear of the non-Jews anti-semitism”, and other phrases like these were ones the “baby boomer” generation grew up with. Our fathers’ had served in World War II and seen or heard from people who were there the accounts of the Concentration Camps, we listened to and/or watched in horror the Eichmann trial and heard what the Nazis and their collaborators had done to Jews and non-Jews so being Jewish was a badge of honor rather than a stigma and when we went to Hebrew School and to Services-boredom and pap was served in vast quantities. The timing of this paper was at the time when I was getting ready to study for my Bar Mitzvah and I had been in Hebrew School for 4 years already, going over the same “cliches buttered with sentimentality”.
Rather than delve into the inner meaning and lives of our Biblical figures, religious education is still content with serving up “sentimentality” and “cliches”. We see this in the current younger generation of Jews participating in the protests and calling for a world wide Intifada. We hear it in their condemnation of Israel-full stop. We see it in the myriad of addictive activities, substances, process’ they are engaging in and their need to blame someone else for their spiritual maladies. We all suffer from spiritual maladies and blaming someone else never helps. The problem is they go to therapists, alcohol, drugs, ‘medicine’ like psilocybin, to solve what are issues of meaning and purpose. The last place they would go is to a Rabbi, to a physician of the soul, because of the lack of “challenge and splendor” of their childhood religious education.
This brings about an even greater problem. Because of the lack of “challenge and splendor” of their childhood religious education, even those who continue to engage in Jewish pursuits live at the surface of Jewish thought and meaning for a long time. Because we do not teach our children how to use intellectual rigor in their Jewish education, because we fail to help our children see and wrestle with the spiritual insights of Torah and the Bible, we fail to teach them how to “Shema”, how to hear the voices inside of them clearly, how to deal with their “earthly desires” in ways that don’t harm them or another(s), how to grow from homo sapiens to being human. This is the greatest tragedy of the ridiculous and stupid practices that are being called “religious education”. Rabbi Heschel was railing about these practices 60+ years ago and the Rabbis didn’t listen and we have closed our ears and our souls even more since. My generation did not do what we said we are going to do and what we were/are called to do: “You shall teach them diligently to your children, shall talk of them when you sit in your house…”(Deuteronomy 6:7)! We talk about sports, the Olympics, the ‘news’, the election, etc and we fail to engage in the more difficult and nuanced conversations with our children, young and older, about how to live in a world that is neither black nor white, neither all good nor all bad, where there are no perfect answers only responses in the moment and the ‘wars’ that rage within our inner life-a voice calling for us to ‘get ours’, a voice calling for us to “help the poor and the needy’, a voice calling for ‘beating the crap out of our ‘enemies’ and a voice seeking to find a way to coexist without conflict, if not in peace.
The questions that are abounding now re: Israel, the U.S, the world are the same ones we have always faced. The responses are nuanced and there are no all good nor all bad-yet without good foundational religious education, we fluctuate to the extremes and call our enemies our friends and our friends, our enemies. Bibi’s refusal to hear President Biden’s warnings is Biblical. In the Book of Samuel 1, we learn the story of Naval, who was so mean, who could not care about anyone except himself and his needs, when his wife saved his life and told him about what almost happened to him and his household, “his heart died within him and he turned became as stone”, he died 10 days later. When our religious education is poor, when we don’t “teach our children” how to wrestle with opposing truths, when we fail to help them raise up their inner lives, we set them up to be as obtuse and as unfit for leadership as Bibi is now. King David, on the other hand, does “Shema”, he has an idea, an impulse and when someone, in the case above, the wife of Naval, Abigail, tells him the truth, he changes course and acknowledges her wisdom and is grateful for her interference. Isn’t it time for us to be more like King David and hear, listen and understand the workings of our inner life, heal our spiritual maladies with the help of our Rabbis and teachers? Isn’t it time for us to stop the pap and “cliches buttered with sentimentality” we give our children and prepare them for the rigors of being human by truly educating them spiritually?
I was unprepared for what life was to hand me and I went to ‘religious school’ through high school. I am still learning how to deal with “life on life’s terms” through my studies and learnings with another(s). It is always interesting to me that I still have the spiritual maladies that brought me to destroy the love my family had for me and today, because I have people who are “physicians of the soul” in my life, I can turn back from these maladies, know they are mostly healed and I don’t have to ‘pick the scab’ that has formed over them. Instead, because of the spiritual and religious education I have received from teachers, from other learners, from the Ineffable One, I keep growing and living better each day. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark