Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 3 Day 148
“More grave than Adam’s eating the forbidden fruit was his hiding from God after he had eaten it. “Where art thou?” Where is man? is the first question that occurs in the Bible. It is man’s alibi that is our problem. It is man who hides, who flees, who has an alibi. God is less rare than we think; when we long for Him, His distance crumbles away.” (Essential Writings pg.91)
Rabbi Heschel speaks to the foundational issue facing humanity since the time of Adam. The first sentence above truly says it all; grave comes from the Latin meaning “heavy, serious” and, used as an adjective it denotes “giving a serious concern”. More concerning than disobeying is Adam’s hiding. More “heavy and serious” is our hiding from our own errors, yet we seem incapable of learning from Adam’s experience as well as our own past experiences.
We begin hiding as children, when we are too afraid to admit we did something wrong. We continue to hide our missteps and from our disobedience through adolescence and into adulthood. We offer numerous and mendacious excuses for our wrongdoing in order to validate ourselves and blame another(s), because we are too afraid to be seen as less than perfect, we are too unwilling to be responsible and truly look at ourselves. In the wake of the Shoah, here in America, we continued to have Jim Crow laws, we continued to ‘keep those people in their place’, we continued to have quotas on Jews for college admissions, we continued to promote white power in the subtlest and not so subtle ways. When called out on it, we hid, we made excuses, we blamed our victims! Sound familiar?
Adam had a choice, to stand up and be responsible or to hide and he chose hiding. One would think, after hearing this story for the millennia, we would do T’Shuvah for Adam, for ourselves, yet we persist in hiding and, in an act of extreme hubris, we proclaim our innocence and make believe we are not hiding. We are so lost, so spiritually sick as Maimonidies writes about, we have convinced ourselves as to our openness and our spiritual health! We proclaim our allegiance to God, to the principles of the Bible all the while we are hiding, we are obfuscating the truth, we are unwilling to own our part and be responsible-choosing to make the ‘other’ person at fault.
Our so-called ‘religious’ members of Congress do this by proclaiming erroneously that the Bible forbids abortion and yet, they refuse to help the needy, the poor; they continue to vilify the stranger and seek to make it harder and harder for people ‘not like them’ to vote! Rather than “proclaim freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants therein” they restrict freedom for another(s) and expand freedom for themselves because “this is what god wants”, I do not capitalize God here because they are idolators, charlatans, and their hiding from God is so odorous. It is frightening to witness how “grave” their hiding is and how their hiding reverberates throughout the world, into the worlds above.
Hiding is so embedded in the fabric of our being, we are so enmeshed in hiding that most of us are unable, unwilling to make ourselves aware of it. “What will the neighbors think” is a way of being that begins when we are children, “poor me” gives us the ‘right’ to take advantage of another(s) because we ‘deserve’ it. “What am I without money”, what am I without my status, my role” are phrases we learn at our family tables and in our schools, in our work life and in our religious institutions. Tevye, the milkman, says it perfectly: “when you’re rich they think you really know” to describe some of the benefits given to the wealthy. They get the best seats, they can show up when they want to, their voice is heard and followed regardless if it is true and appropriate precisely because we hide from God, we hide from one another, we hide from ourselves!
We have played the “hide and seek” game for so long and so well, we have lost our desire to “seek”. The “grave” situations we face in our world, will democracy hold fast or be overtaken by autocrats and their lies, will terrorists be believed and honored for their terrorism, their murders, their rape and capture of women and children, will “advice of counsel” continue to be more important than doing the next right thing, etc; are the direct result of our plunging into hiding. In the Shoah, people hid to survive and then were afraid to speak of their horrific experiences for fear of being shunned by the world, it took Elie Wiesel to break the silence. In the first sentence above, Rabbi Heschel is breaking the silence of our hiding, describing the serious concern we should have about the hiding we engage in now.
We, the people, have to uncover our hiding places through the practice of T’Shuvah, of doing our own inventory, of healing our fractured souls, of shutting up our intellects that give us the rationale to continue hiding. We have the path forward and, because of the deceivers mendacious lies about what the Bible says, how the Bible can show us a path to truth, to being open and to being free, we refuse to take the paths that God has given us. In recovery, we are no longer closed, we are open books, knowing that telling our stories of hiding can and does help another come into the light. Our being responsible for our errors, making public confessions, we reverse the errors of Adam and humanity, we begin the process of “trudging the road to happy destiny”, we are able to see and live into the purpose and passion our souls direct us to. Are you willing to come out of your hiding place and make rapprochement, healing or do you enjoy your stuckness? God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark