Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 4 Day 17

“To be an iconoclast of idolized needs, to defy our own immoral interests, though they seem to be vital and have long been cherished, we must be able to say No to ourselves in the name of a higher Yes. Yet, our minds are late, slow, and erratic. What can give us the power to curb the deference to wrong needs, to detect spiritual fallacies, to ward off false ideals, and to wrestle with inattentiveness to the unseemly and holy?” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 7)

Continuing on from yesterday, the words in bold describe our situation, what we need from within ourselves and from our spiritual disciplines and clergy, and our need to be aware of both “the unseemly and holy”. The first sentence in bold above is so descriptive and obvious that too many of us do not pay attention to the truth of it and become enamored with “our minds”. Some people believe they are “stable genius’”, others believe they are the smartest people in the room because they are so rich,  still many others sit idly by not caring about and holding dear to their “idolized needs” and “immoral interests”. By the time these idlers finally recognize the scope of ruin and destruction of their freedoms that the “stable genius” and ‘smartest guy in the room’ have wrought, it is too late and they become even more locked up in their own prisons because they are more erratic, they are slower because they can’t fathom the betrayal by their ‘savior’, by ‘the anointed one’, their clergy, by their misplaced faith in the grifter and con artist. This is true in politics, it is true in financial matters, (think Bernie Madoff), it is true in our family units when parents betray their children by trying to make them into their image and children betray parents by trying to make them into the images they want rather than the ones they are.

Writing in 1958, the questions Rabbi Heschel ask give rise to the question how good were the “good old days”? What are we trying to go back to with the MAGA movement? Do we really want quotas on Jews entering colleges and grad schools again, do we really want different bathrooms and drinking fountains for people of color? Do we really want to promote hatred and support dictators? Do we really want to continue to defer to the “wrong needs” just because someone else does? Do we really want to believe the lies of the ‘christian nationalists’? Do we really want to bow down to the authoritarian/populist in front of us? Do we really want to go along with what our parents say ‘just because I said so’? Do we really want to be denied the right to read the books we need to and want to? Do we really want to ignore the injustices in front of us and the ones that have perpetrated before, in our name? Do we really want to bow down to the Pharaohs and keep making bricks for their Towers, for their Spaceships, for their Electric cars? Do we really want to just give up and be overwhelmed by “the unseemly” and be inattentive to what is truly “holy”? These questions asked some 67 years ago are in need of our responses right here, right now. The issue is whether we are aware of these questions, whether we are willing to respond to them and what are our responses. Looking at what is happening, it seems people are, once again, giving the ‘right’ responses to the ‘wrong’ questions!

There is only one source that “can give us the power to curb…detect,,,ward off… and wrestle… This source is us, it is within each and every one of us. The source is our soul, our higher consciousness, whatever one calls the part of us that sees through our ‘third eye’, that knows in our guts, through our gut instinct, what is true and real and what is false and phony. The source is always with us, the issue is whether we are going to stay lazy and be “late, slow and erratic” in our use of our “knowing” what is right and what is wrong.  The issues in front of us call for “moral grandeur and spiritual audacity” as Rabbi Heschel wrote in his famous telegram to President John F. Kennedy in 1963. This call is been reverberating throughout the universe since the first human was created/evolved and continues to echo to this day. Yet, too many people ignore the call, refuse to hear or understand the echo, believe it is too difficult to go against the grain of societal norms, believe the spiritual fallacies their ‘idolators/clergy’ tell them (as happened before and during the destruction of both Temples in Jerusalem), and come to worship “the unseemly” and ignore the “holy”. Rabbi Heschel is describing the spiritually ill human being that we have become, just as Maimonidies did in his treatise: The Eight Chapters where he describes a spiritually ill person and the spiritual healing needed for that individual.

At issue for We, the People, is our inability to experience our spiritual maladies, our inability to see the three fingers pointing back at us when we point out someone else’s ‘errors’ which often are just someone speaking truth when we don’t want to hear it. We, the People, are in desperate need of spiritual healing so we can let go our “false ideals”, stand up to Pharaoh and his/her “wrong needs” like Moses and Aaron did, reject the “spiritual fallacies” of our priests, rabbis, imams, ministers like the Prophets did in the Bible, and, like Jacob, wrestle with our evil inclinations so we can see that “God is in this place and I, I did not know it”. We, the People, can do this, it will take work, hard work because we will have to reject the societal norms, we will be standing out on a limb and, not have a lot of allies and fewer friends because people hate being told the truth, they would rather hear ‘white lies’, ‘half-truths’(whatever these are), actual bullshit that makes them feel good. Rather that “not stand idly by the blood of your brother/sister/neighbor”, most people are content and happy to be lied to-as Rabbi Heschel says which he learned from the Kotzker Rebbe, self-deception is a major disease! We can recover our hearing so we can respond to the echo of Ayecha-where are you, we can engage in spiritual healing by visiting a TRUE physician of the soul, not the charlatans that are advertising bullshit and promising roses. The question is are you willing?

I have been accused of being a bully, an “iconoclast”, an asshole, not politically correct, etc. I am relentless in the search for truth-no ‘half-truths’ for me. I am a breaker of old ideas and societal norms when they are built on lies and subterfuge. I am an asshole because I don’t let people “off the hook” when their spiritual health is at stake, I do not follow the ‘proper rules of decorum’ in the way I am. All of this has left me more on the outside and it is okay because what it would take to be part of the “country club” crowd(besides a lot more money than I have) is not worth it. What it takes to be part of any group that is more concerned with how it looks than what are they doing, is not my jam nor my crowd. I am not willing to pay the price of admission to be ‘like the Ben-G’Virs’. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark