Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 4 Day 31
“Their breathless impatience with injustice may strike us as hysteria. We ourselves witness continually acts of injustice, manifestations of hypocrisy, falsehood, outrage, misery, but we rarely get indignant or overly excited. To the prophets a minor, commonplace sort of injustice assumes almost cosmic proportions.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg.10)
We are all inheritors and descendants of the prophets, yet we continue to make hard right turns to our ancestors the Romans, Greeks, Israel that was lost to Assyria, Judea that was destroyed twice because of injustice and other acts which no one got “indignant” or had “impatience” with. It is fascinating to watch our consistent turning to the fascist tendencies that reside in all of us, the need for certainty, power, control, eternal life, etc that cause us to see another human being as either an object for our rise to power or an enemy, obstacle to our drive for wealth and power! At the same time, we are stunned when someone else sees us as their “enemy” or treats us as an “object” to get what they want. While it is easy to blame “those people”, it is more important to look inside of ourselves and see how we do this as well. Before we have the right to complain, to correct someone else, we have to do our own Chesbon HaNefesh, our own accounting of our soul and repair both the damages we have caused by our inner fascist tendency and have a plan to use the energy from this tendency for good and for freedom. This is true for the autocrat and the progressive, the Christian and the Jew, the Muslim and the Buddhist, it is true for all of us and very few of us are engaging in this work.
Bishop Mariann Budde is in the news for being a preacher! She is being skewered by people whose fascist tendencies are on full display just because she acted as a steward of Christ’s teachings, she acted in accordance with being a descendant and student of the prophets. Bishop Budde is the real deal, she stood up to the bully with love and kindness, with a plea for mercy and a call to their better angels and she has received death wishes, calls to be deported (although she is an American), and called “nasty, not smart” by the very man, DJT, whom she asked to display mercy!! She, like the prophets before her, like MLK, like Rabbi Heschel, like Rabbi Prinz, like the people who spoke out for justice in re: civil rights and Vietnam, is the “radical” according to the “fascist” within the individuals in the MAGA movement. While Bishop Budde does not see what she did as courageous because she was just being the steward of Christ’s words and deeds, teaching the Biblical commandments and tenets of her faith; yet in today’s world, once again, doing this is an act of heroism and act of treason to those who indulge their inner fascist.
As I said above, the far right and the far left, all people who live in the extremes, are indulging their ‘inner fascist’, their bully, their need to be right and to exclude which in itself is an injustice of major proportions! The ridiculousness of identity politics on both the right and the left is both extremes say they are “speaking for the people” and “in line with the democratic values of the United States” which is the farthest thing from the truth. They have to do this, however, because to see the reality of their words and deeds, to see how they are as exclusive as any Country Club, would shatter their ‘rightness’, crumble their ‘victimhood stance’, dissolve their ‘patriotism’ into what it all is; bullshit! The ego strength of both sides cannot withstand their being wrong, hence grudges, talking at or past one another, coming together only when they hate and blame the same people/group. This is what happens when we, the inheritors of the prophets, the descendants of the prophets pay more attention to our “inner fascist” which we also inherited.
We, the People have a stark choice in front of us, one that Bishop Budde’s homily, prayer has brought us face to face with. Which wolf are we going to feed? Do we continue to give fuel to our ‘inner fascist’? Do we continue to associate with people who spew hatred, retribution, lies, racism, and be influenced by them or worse be silenced by our fear of them? Do we act like the Republicans in Congress seem to be acting-acquiescence because of fear of being pushed out of office, denying the oath they swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States, to be loyal to their constituents needs, the needs of Proclaim Freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants therein? Or do we do something different? Do we feed the wolf that says: ‘I am a descendant and inheritor of the prophets of Israel, I am an inheritor of the law of Moses, the Teachings of Jesus, the brilliance of Mohammed, the higher consciousness of the Buddha. My inheritance has given me the strength and pathway to do what is right and good, not for any personal gain, rather because my soul is compelling me to’? Do we feed the wolf that embraces our ‘inner fascist’ and helps transform its energy to do more good, to feed more people, to welcome more strangers, to help more needy people, to be more just, to show more mercy, to walk more in the footsteps of our faith/moral principles? We, the People have to make these decisions each day, they are a daily commitment and we need to stay in the present so we don’t fall back into our old ‘bad habits’. We, the People are being given the light and the sign, the leadership and the path to stand with the divine in each individual, follow the call of our inner conscience/soul, and, as Rabbi Hillel says: “In a place where there are no humans, be human.” This is the example that Bishop Budde put in front of us and we all need to follow her-full stop!
I wrestle with my ‘inner fascist’ each day, for the past 37+ years, it hasn’t won the day-thank God, thank all of you! I believe we are descendants and inheritors of the prophets and it causes me great anxiety and pain when I act differently than they would/did. I feel the call and the pull of standing up for what is right and good, just and holy so strongly that I am dismissed as a ‘niche Rabbi’, a ‘lunatic who can only minister to addicts’, a ‘sideshow not to be taken seriously or called upon in polite society’. I fought against these labels for a long time and now I embrace them. I don’t want to be in ‘polite society’ where the ‘inner fascist’ of the ‘right people’ is ignored and/or celebrated-as Jonathan Greenblatt has done for Elon Musk. I am a ‘niche Rabbi’ because I don’t believe in ‘half-truths’, I hear the call of the Torah in my own way and am unafraid to say it. I don’t have a lot of friends nor am I in great demand; which is okay because I am my friend, I am in demand for my people and I want to be me. “God is my Shepherd and I lack nothing” (23rd Psalm). This is my truth-God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark