Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 4 Day 21
“To define religion primarily as a quest for personal satisfaction, as the satisfaction of a human need is to make of it a refined sort of magic. Did the thunderous voice at Sinai proclaim the 10 words in order to satisfy a need? The people felt a need for a graven image, but that need was condemned. The people were homesick for the fleshpots of Egypt. The said:: “Give us flesh”. And the Lord gave them spirit, not only flesh.”
We seem to have it backwards these days, and maybe this has been true throughout the ages, religion/spiritual disciplines does not need humanity, humanity needs religion/spiritual disciplines! While many churches and synagogues, mosques and temples work hard to ‘sell’ themselves as having the answer, the truth is that we keep asking the wrong questions, as I wrote about earlier (see Year 4 Day 2). In today’s quotation, I hear Rabbi Heschel reminding us not only about the wrong questions, he is demanding that religious institutions not supply the wrong responses to inane questions. I hear his calling out to us to stop with our incessant pursuit of satisfying all of our ‘needs’, especially those that are desires in disguise. I hear him also reminding us that satisfaction is not a long-term solution. As it says in Deuteronomy 8:10: “Eat, be satisfied, bless”-telling us that just as we will get hungry again during a day, satisfaction is a fleeting experience and not to be pursued. What is to be pursued is responding the demand of another, responding to the demand of one’s own soul, responding the demand of the universe. Humanity needs religion, spiritual disciplines precisely because we have a propensity to lie to ourselves, engage in both self-deception and the deception of another(s). Listening to the hack politicians blame ‘the other party’ for the wildfires in Los Angeles and the responses to them is an example of people using their religion, their power to satisfy their personal need for power and meanness rather than satisfying the needs of the people who have been indelibly harmed and scarred.
Listening to these ‘good christian folk’ is what has made religion so irrelevant for so many, because they are using it to satisfy their personal need for power, certainty, and ‘rightness’. “The thunderous voice at Sinai” did not “proclaim the 10 words to satisfy a need” is true in the context of defining need as an inauthentic desire. “The voice” did not have to satisfy a need of its own, rather they “10 words” came forth to help humanity learn to live better with itself as a single entity and as a collective, with one another. “The 10 words” begin with and end with a call to seek truth, to not lie to oneself about one’s desires being needs, to realize there is more to living than satisfaction, there is service to something greater than oneself-whether one is religious, spiritual or neither! Helping one another is a basic need that resides within each of us, in our core being, and the denial of this need is what leads to the seeking of satisfaction of desires at the wreck and ruin of another soul and of the individual’s own soul. This is the tragedy that happens when we engage in “to define religion primarily as a quest for personal satisfaction”. Religion, a spiritual discipline is a quest for finding purpose and meaning in our lives and help another(s) find the same for themselves.
Yet, over and over again throughout history and in this moment, we find people who claim to be ‘religious’ making “a graven image” of God, a false image so they can have power and control, so they can gain wealth and fame, so they can rule their corner of the world rather than seek to improve it. When anyone claims that a politician is “the anointed one of Christ”, when anyone in power says if you want to know what I believe and how I live read the Bible and then does everything he can to demonize the poor, withhold aid to those in need and lock up/deport the stranger as well as deny his obligation to “proclaim liberty throughout the land and to all its people therein” by denying the right to vote to so many, by practicing racism in the most subtle of forms, by leading people who proclaim “Jews will not replace us” and calling them ‘good people’, we can see how they are using “religion as the satisfaction of a human need”, which is to use as “refined sort of magic”.
And they have been successful which makes the words above all the more important to heed and to live into. We, the People are being called to hear the condemnation of our feelings that we “need a graven image”. We, the People are being called to remember our response to “the 10 words”: “We will do and then we will understand/listen”. We, the People are being given the gift of practicing the principles of our religion, of all religious life, in real time, right now. Whether one is religious, spiritual, agnostic, atheistic, doesn’t matter, what matters is our determination to live into the spirit that is within us. It is imperative to acknowledge our spiritual and intuitional wisdom that resides and calls out to us from our inner life, from our ‘guts’, from our divine image, higher consciousness. These words above are a calling to all of us to stop making a mockery of religious life, either by the ways we bastardize religion in our search for “personal satisfaction” and making religion nothing more than “ a refined sort of magic”, and by the ways we ignore the principles and demands of religion through our denial of it as a valid way of being. By responding to “the 10 words” in any way other than to wrestle with how to live into them is why we are so dissatisfied, why the rich keep needing to get richer and more powerful, why they are willing to bow down to Trump and kiss his ring-because they have no moral compass, they seek to protect themselves from facing themselves in the mirror by surrounding themselves with sycophants and by being close to power. Jews who do this betray a core teaching of the Talmud: “Be careful [in your dealings] with the ruling authorities for they do not befriend a person except for their own needs; they seem like friends when it is to their own interest, but they do not stand by a man in the hour of his distress.” Yet, these ‘Torah Jews’ keep ignoring historical proofs of these words.
In my recovery, I have sought to learn and study, teach and exchange words of the Bible, the core principles of my religion and recovery in order to be a better human being. In making this my goal, any and all success’ are the result of improving my inner life’s confusion, hearing the call of my soul and my intuition, following the path I hear and see to take. This means I have to own up to my own errors and not own up to yours, I have to be responsible and not blaming nor do I accept your shaming of me. By remembering religion is not magic, it is a pathway to a richer and more meaningful life, I get to love my life, live my life and love my neighbor as I love myself. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark