Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 4 Day 32
“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)
The truth of the words above is meant to have all of us take a breath, pause our usual way of being and look at the ways in which we betray our self, betray our moral compass, betray our spiritual health through our unwillingness to “get indignant or overly excited” over what the prophets had “breathless impatience”! What is it in our make-up that makes human beings either buy into or accept “acts of injustice, manifestations of hypocrisy, falsehood, outrage, misery” when it is perpetrated by them, their ‘side’, and upon another human being they want to have power over, are afraid of, or because of their racist, anti-semitic, homophobic, anti-Muslim attitudes? Yet, when they think the same thing is happening to them, they cry and scream bloody murder! We humans are an interesting lot, aren't we?
Of course the prophets were hysterical about the idolatry, the mendacity, the injustices happening around them. They were people of faith, they heard the words of the universe/God in their souls and they were unable to constrain themselves. They did “not belong in polite society” because they are raucous, loud, unbending and in your face. Hence the hatred of them and their words both by the people in power and some of the populace as well. Sort of like someone purporting to be Jewish and hating the stranger, spitting on the poor and needy, forgetting to redeem the captive, enjoying the enslavement of another human being like Pharaoh did in Egypt. This way of being an anti-prophet is like calling yourself a Christian and having contempt for the downtrodden instead of mercy, lording one’s power over the populace and putting the ‘leper’ into camps along with the Jew, the Black, the Hispanic and letting them out only to serve the people in charge. Being silent instead of being outraged would be like calling oneself an American and denying freedom to all, changing the Constitution at the whim of the President, smashing the rule of law, calling domestic terrorists “good people”, calling Anti-Semites, “good people”, hanging with self-proclaimed Nazis and saying how much you love everyone.
The question posed by Rabbi Heschel’s writing above is: Why are we NOT outraged at these actions? What is our excuse for the denial of “unalienable rights” to “those people”? How do we reconcile a two-tiered justice system, one for the ultra-rich and one for the rest of us? How do we make it okay for our own hypocrisy and the hypocrisy of “our side” and falsely scream Hypocrite to people who are not “our people” when they do the next right thing? What is the mechanism by which we are in acceptance and promotion of the misery people feel today and throughout history-as long as it isn’t us feeling it? What stops us from realizing “a minor, commonplace sort of injustice assumes almost cosmic proportions” because of the ripple effect it has and how it reverberates throughout the land?
There is only one thing that stops us from realizing all these things, there is only one thing that prevents us from seeing our own hypocrisy, mendacity, willful blindness, indifference to evil; our spiritual immaturity! We have spent so much time and effort on the raising of our minds, bodies, reasoning and we have forgotten to raise up our spiritual health-this is true today and has been true throughout human history. Each time the Rabbis of old made the people of the Bible out to be right and perfect, ie King David, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, etc they denied us the gift of seeing ourselves and growing our spirits- how can one compete with perfection? How can one strive to be perfect when one knows how imperfect one is? Hence the need for the Spirituality of Imperfection which is what the Hebrew Bible truly is. Yet, most human beings are woefully unaware and willfully blind to their need for spiritual growth, spiritual maturity. We watch people pray with fervor, speak in tongues, praise Jesus, study the Talmud, go to services, listen to the Preacher/Rabbi/Imam etc and not be moved to “hysteria” by our own perpetrating of “injustice”, “hypocrisy”, mendacity, etc. Our willful blindness, our indifference to the evil we perpetrate is the reason we find ourselves in the situation we are in: an Episcopal Bishop, praying for mercy, kindness, love in Jesus’ name is vilified, hated on, sent death threats/wishes, called “nasty” by the President of the United States, and at least one Congressman wants an American Citizen deported for repeating the requests, the teachings of Jesus! It would be like a Jew saying there should be one law for the citizen and stranger alike being called anti-American!
We, the People are being called upon to STAND THE FUCK UP! We have to become hysterical at the desecration of our Constitution, the bastardization of the Bibles of both Christianity and Judaism, the complete undermining of our spiritual traditions and our own spiritual health. “Righteousness, Righteousness you shall pursue” is a commandment found in Deuteronomy 16:20, we are not expected to obtain it, to ‘catch it’ rather we have to be on the path of righteousness. We are not expected to be perfect-this is a Greek/Roman/Christian/Rabbinic construct, not one of God’s commandments. We, the People have to learn to say NO to our lower angels that give us the ‘right’ to ignore the suffering, the hypocrisy, the injustices done to another by ‘our side’, by us. We can only do this through maturing our spirit, growing our inner life and being responsible for the inheritance that the prophets have given to us, be responsible to the words and deeds of our ancestors from Abraham to Moses, from Judah to King David, from the prophets to Jesus, from the Baal Shem Tov to Reverend King and everyone in-between. This is the call of today’s words, this is the call of the Ineffable One, this is the call of our inner life, our souls. Will you answer it today?
I have heard this call forever. My father taught me to hear it and I ran from it like Jonah and I fell into the ‘big fish’s belly’, also called prison/addiction. Responding to the call, being hysterical over injustices, not accepting ‘they were not ready’ as an excuse for someone’s overdose, very loudly calling out bullshit on myself and another, is the result of my own spiritual growth. It is a hard life, it is a lonely life, at times, and it is the only one worth living for me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark