Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 290

National Month of Repentance

“At issue is not an eschatological vision, a utopia at the end of time, or a kingdom in the beyond. Rather, we are talking about the present, the world that has been bequeathed to us, a kingdom of everyday life. We have to choose God as king, we have to ‘take the yoke of the kingdom of God upon ourselves.””

Continuing to immerse ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s writing from 1936 in Berlin, Germany-the hotbed of anti-semitism, Jew hatred at the time, on the eve of Yom Kippur, we experience his deep belief that we all need to be in the here and now. Thinking about the place and the time he is writing about, I am hearing him call out to people who want to live in the future and/or the past, that we have to be right here, right now. T’Shuvah, Yom Kippur is not about anytime but the present, God has no sense of time-everything in God’s world is in the moment and we have to wake up, open our eyes to this truth.

He is also telling us to end our euphoric recall, like the Israelites in the Bible had of the flesh pots they used to sit around and eat out of in slavery-cut the crap people! We are in the world that was created a long time ago and has evolved into what it is today both because of our presence and God’s presence. Rabbi Heschel is calling upon us to be here now as Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass teaches. We are being reminded to see and deal with “a kingdom of everyday life”-what a wonderful phrase. While many of us see life as mundane, waiting for Shabbat, waiting for the Sabbath, waiting for ‘our ship to come in’, Rabbi Heschel is calling out to us to see our everyday living as “a kingdom” a realm where we have rule and dominion and we get to “choose God” as sovereign, we willingly choose to “take the yoke of God upon ourselves”.

Rather than “make America great again”, rather than “destroy Hamas” or call them “Amalek”, rather than choose Putin over Zelensky/Ukraine so Russia can get the territory it conquered in another time back again, or ‘the South will rise again”-making slavery a way of life again in the United States; the teaching above reminds us going back in time is ridiculous, trying to recapture some grand false vision of the past is antithetical to living in the world we have, the world that God has given to us. Instead of thinking about ‘how can I cause the “end of days”’, we are to be considering how do we act in accordance with the best interests of the universe, humanity, the animal kingdom, and ourselves!

Each day, when we say the Shema, when we express gratitude, when we study and Holy Text, when we say a rosary, go to the Mosque, we are taking “the yoke of the kingdom of God upon ourselves”. This “yoke” is a surrender, an acknowledgement that we are not the end all/be all of the world. It is a surrender in that we say we are not always right, we don’t know everything and there is a force more powerful, more intelligent, a power greater than ourselves to whom we are responsible, to whom we have to be in service to. While for many this idea is anathema, it is the truth I hear Rabbi Heschel reminding us of. Being in the present, serving something greater than ourselves, seeing the spark of the light, the divinity in each and every person-whether they show it or not, is the call I am hearing this morning. In a place like Nazi Germany, in a place where the ‘good christian folk’ are loving their Jew-hating, Jew-blaming selves, where these ‘good christian folk’ are proclaiming their allegiance to Christ while subjugating and killing his family(he was a Jew after all), while going against all of his teachings, Rabbi Heschel is saying live here now!

What a great way to look around and see how we “take the yoke of the kingdom of God upon ourselves” today. When we want to go back, we are not doing this. When we want to live in the future, we are not doing this. When we scapegoat another group of people, another person, we are not doing this. When we blame another for our errors-ie ‘you made me do this’, we are not doing this. When we traffic in lies and deceptions, we are not taking this “yoke” on. When we pray with no awareness that prayer is to change us, when it is a rote action, we are not doing this. When we proclaim our need to study all day in Yeshiva and watch the death of our citizens for a war that the Rabid Rabbis and Right-wingers want so they can have power and control, we are not taking “the yoke of the kingdom of God upon ourselves”. When we perpetrate the lies of the internet so that schoolchildren have to be subjected to daily bomb threats and Haitian Immigrants have to fear for their safety, we are not taking this “yoke” “upon ourselves”!

We, the people, living in the present, taking “the yoke of the kingdom of God upon ourselves” have to look back upon this past year to see our responses to these same situations that have been going on for a long time and take responsibility for our part. “But we didn’t do anything” is the refrain of most people and this is the problem! Living in “a kingdom of everyday life” and choosing the “yoke of the kingdom of God” makes it imperative to DO SOMETHING to stop the lies of the people in power or seeking power who want to take us backwards, to stop the deceptions of the people who are following them like lambs to the slaughter, to stop the senseless hatred of one another and the promotion of this hatred so one person/group can have power. We, the people, have to take a close look at ourselves, at our own actions and inactions which have, wittingly and unwittingly promoted these lies, this violence, this desecration of God’s Name and of our Image.

It is hard to be present, it is also the only way to live well. There is no ‘big score’ that will save me, no house, car, vacation, job, person who will make my life ‘easy’. The only way I have been able to live well is by choosing and accepting the “yoke of the kingdom of God”, knowing that there are times when I take it off, there are times when I decide which way to turn even though the ‘driver’ of the wagon wants to go straight. Yet, I return to giving up the reins, to hearing the call of the universe and cleaning up the schmutz  I have put into my inner life. It is excruciating to see the errors I make, the subtle ways I lie to myself and how I try hard to make my wishes my reality rather than living in “a kingdom of everyday life” and responding in my unique way and adding my gifts to the solution for whatever presents itself today. This is the power of T’Shuvah-returning to adding good to the world. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark