Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 4 Day 60
“He is told to abhor self-complacency, to enjoy freedom of choice. He has been given life and death, good and evil, and is urged to choose, to discriminate. Yet freedom is not only the ability to choose and to act, but also the ability to will, to love. The predominant features of Jewish teaching throughout the ages is a sense of constant obligation.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 13)
The phrase “self-complacency” is defined to mean: “a strong sense of satisfaction with yourself especially when this prevents you from having sympathy or empathy for another”. WOW, can you imagine living like this?! We see this all the time and here is Rabbi Heschel some 60+ years ago, calling us out on our behaviors. We encounter so many people who live in this manner-even those who are not so happy, so wealthy find they have a “strong sense of satisfaction” with what they are doing and are kept down by society, by someone else-hence the blame game never ends. When our elected officials living in self-complacency, as they are right now, they think nothing of passing a resolution to cut the services to the poor, to the needy-after all, these are ‘god-fearing men and women’ who read their Bible every day and nothing gets through their thick shields, their souls. Rather than “enjoy freedom of choice”, many people would rather stay in their self-complacency. This is the bane of our existence-the belief that “only I can fix it”, because buying into the self-complacency of another leaves us open and vulnerable to the whims, the horrors of their behaviors with no ready defense against it, as we have seen throughout history.
Yet, “freedom of choice” seems to produce undo anxiety in people. We are a species who do not want to be told what to do by some God and we are willing to be sheep to the shepherds that have presented themselves like; Attila the Hun, the Pharaohs of Egypt, the Emperors of Rome, Ferdinand and Isabella, Hitler and the Nazis, Stalin, Putin, Ayatollahs, Trump, Musk, Bibi. Look where being sheep has led us-only to destruction, despair, war, and then, finally, to revolution and a new opportunity to “enjoy freedom of choice”. As Rabbi Heschel says above: we “have been given life and death, good and evil” which is found in Deuteronomy 30:19. The call is to “choose life” which entails freedom to find out we made the wrong choice and repair the damage we have done because of it, change our ways, learn from our mistakes and have a plan not to repeat them again. Yet, those who self-complacent and those who are spiritually immature that follow them like lap dogs, don’t believe in their ability to be wrong, admitting they make a mistake is anathema to them and, these are the people who have led humanity into great wars and massive destruction. And people hear the same things over and over again from Attila til now and “when will we ever learn”, a Pete Seeger refrain, is the question We, the People have to ask ourselves.
We are also being called “to choose, to discriminate” which is an important coupling of ideas. Discriminate is defined as: “recognize a distinction; differentiate” and perceive or constitute the difference in or between. In Hebrew, the word for discriminate also means to examine, to test, to check, as in “check one’s heart”. In the words above as in Deuteronomy, we are being told that to “enjoy freedom”, to “choose”, we also have to know what we are choosing. While it is within our power to choose evil, while it is within our power to go along to get along, the mandate, the demand from God, from our Higher Consciousness is to “choose life”. This means we are being “discriminate” in our choices, we are letting go of our “self-complacency” which we need to “abhor” otherwise the magnetic pull seems so strong we are unable to resist, and we need to be guided by the principles of freedom-community, love, concern for one another, caring for the needy and poor, healing of the sick, accompanying the dead, celebrating the bride and groom, seeing the basic goodness of being in people and rebuking them when they are not living up to these principles as well as experiencing someone rebuking us as love and deep faith in our ability to be better, to live into our divine image, to our soul’s calling.
Throughout history “to discriminate” has meant keeping people out, putting people into camps and groups that don’t deserve the same as we do. From antiquity till now, this is how people have ruled and kept order-making an outside bad guy so no one will challenge my authority, my ruling. We see this with making ‘migrants’ vermin, Palestinians ‘animals’, Jews ‘vermin, blood poisoners, nazis’, Ukrainians ‘war-mongers’, etc. When people speak like this, when the progressives paint white males as the enemy, when white males paint civil rights, freedom of choice as evil doings by ‘those people’ they are purposely not using their powers “to discriminate” and are deep in their “self-complacency.
We, the People are being called, our inner strength and maturity is being ‘tested’ in this time as it has been for our ancestors in their times. 100 years ago, during the “roaring 20’s, there were undercurrents of “evil”, of “self-complacency” happening that no one paid attention to, that were considered ‘lunatic fringe’ that came to power in the ’30’s and spread throughout the world-remember the German Bund, Lindbergh praising Hitler, Father Coughlin, Henry Ford and his Protocols of Zion? We are witnessing similar hatred and power grabs by Trump, Musk, the so-called Republican Party, Putin, Orban, Xi, Bibi, etc and it is one of our “enormous responsibilities” to stand up and say NO. We, the People have the opportunity to do T’Shuvah for the errors of our ancestors, to learn from their mistakes, to fail forward from 100 years ago. We, the People have within us the ability and the desire to CHOOSE LIFE, we have the command to do this in the Torah, now we need the courage to follow the call of our souls, the longings of our hearts and the knowing of intuitive mind-making our rational mind a servant of these three entities instead of the leader. This is the challenge for us, to live in wonder, radical amazement, “to be maladjusted” to conventional wisdom and see what truly is so we are not fooled again, we do not follow the leader to meanness, to hatred, to evil.
I have dedicated my recovery to “enjoy freedom” and “to choose, to discriminate”. I am not always right-I learn, I fail forward, doing a little better the next time. I refuse to shut up about what I see, I refuse to become deaf to what people see in me, I continue to CHOOSE LIFE. I will always fight the despot, the evil in myself and in another-it is hard and not always wanted and I continue to do this. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.