Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 270

“Another malady is the intellectual irrelevance of tradition to the person, the collapse of communication between personal problems of the individual and the message of our heritage.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 53)

I am continuing to write on this essay of Rabbi Heschel because of the relevance it has to our situation today and as we approach Tisha B’Av, the day we commemorate the myriad of destructions that have befallen the Jewish people because of our errors, our not living into the ways of the Bible rather than living according to the Rabbis, I believe our lack of spiritual education and the sad state of Jewish education as well as the worship of “Idols in the Temples”, which is the title of this essay, has to come to a halt for all of us to flourish and thrive. This Tisha B’Av, this Elul, this High HolyDay Season let us all take up the mantra of “We are not going back”!

Rabbi Heschel is describing the situation we are still facing, in the first sentence above. We are still so engaged in either saying “these are the words of God written by the finger of God” or “ this is a nice myth and who cares” that we continue to miss the intellectual, the spiritual relevance of the Bible, of our tradition to an individual human being. When we continue to say it is about the “People Israel”, or “the Christian Nation” or “the Muslim Nation” etc we fail to recognize the individual, we are melding the personal with the global, the individual is no longer important, what is important is “the group”, “the heritage the way I want it to be”, in other words, when there is intellectual irrelevance the opening for authoritarianism is greater. When Judaism is no longer engaged in what is good for the individual human being, when we are not recognizing the infinite worth and honoring the dignity of another person created in the Image of the Divine, it becomes fertile ground for the ‘I can solve it all’ strongman leader and we all know where that leads to-destruction and devastation, the fall of the Temple twice, the loss of our homeland for almost 1900 years, the growth of an industry called anti-semitism or ‘blame the Jews’.

The Bible is a road map for how to live well and the myriad of ways we fail to do this. The Bible is replete with the errors of human beings, the jealousy of Cain that is still alive and well today, like the “Age of Grievance” by Frank Bruni discusses. We have seen since the beginning of humanity the “personal problems of the the individual” and how the Bible continues to deal with these issues. It begins with living in the Garden of Eden and that doesn’t work, then the first offering causes jealousy between siblings and the death of one brother and then the realization of the crime by Cain and his crying out for mercy. We see the “personal problems of the individual” continue to impair the connection to the soul of the individual as well as the connection to something greater than ourselves landing us in Egypt-the narrowest of places where we allow ourselves to become enslaved and subjected to the harsh labors of taskmasters. As I am writing this, I realize how our religious education is not helping us leave Egypt, it is sinking us more and more into the narrow places of either total obedience to what the ‘right-wing rabbis’ say or a reaction formation to what they say and throwing the baby out with the bath water.

We have the opportunity to use our heritage, the Bible to solve the “personal problems of the individual” by applying the lessons learned of how we sink into slavery, into egotistical actions, how we fail to connect to our souls, a higher power. We also have the paths to wholeness that the Bible gives us, “love your neighbor as yourself”, care for the stranger, the poor, the needy in your midst”, “do T’Shuvah every day”, be like King David who could admit his errors and repent and hear the truth from another person when he wanted to do something wrong, etc. We are given an inside look at how both Cain and Jacob wanted to kill the good within them, Cain did when he killed Hevel, mist, that surrounded him and Jacob ran away from the parts of him that he despised, goodness, simple truth, loyalty that Esau represents. We have so many examples of jealousy and hatred, we have so many examples like Jonathan and David of love and commitment, we have the warnings of Nachmonidies: “don’t be a scoundrel within the bounds of the Torah”. Yet, we continue to “dumb it down” in our religious schools and in our Synagogues, we want to give the people what they want rather than give them what they need. The Rabbis who are leading the revolution forward and helping the young and old grow their spiritual lives, deal with the “person problems of the individual”, are both hailed and fired! It is hard for the wealthy to admit they need to heal themselves because they have let their success cover their “personal problems” and when they are pointed out to them, they get so angry that they are seen for being less than perfect, they have to get rid of the one who peeks them.

We are in desperate need of recovering the lessons of the Bible that help the individual heal from within. We see what the different “personal problems of the individual” have wrought in our political, business, and personal lives. We are witnessing what happens when these problems are hidden from sight, not dealt with and then leak out into daily living. We see these leaks in our social media, we see them in people like Elon Musk and the MAGA crowd, we see them in AOC and her “squad”, we see them in the right and left wings of thinking, of politics, of religion. We have lost our way to the middle as Maimonidies suggests, we are suffering from a myriad of spiritual maladies and not seeking spiritual physicians. It is time for us to admit to the “personal problems of the individual” and use our heritage to heal them, it is time for Rabbis to re-assert themselves as spiritual physicians and stop sending people to therapists for their spiritual issues.

My rabbinate is one of spiritual healing for myself and for another. I have spent the last 35+ years preaching spiritual healing to people in the pews and to the Rabbis who lead them. I am grateful for the many people who learn with me, who teach me, who help me grow along spiritual lines. Recovering the lessons of our heritage in order to deal with the “personal problems of the individual” has been the message of my life’s work and I have been called a “niche Rabbi” because of this. Till today, I bristled at hearing this and writing this makes me cry that more colleagues are not joining me in my “niche”. I am grateful to my teachers who keep helping me see how to use our heritage to grow my spiritual health! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark