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Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 208

“That God may be more intimately present in the slums than in mansions, with those who are smarting under the abuse of the callous.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 93)

Hearing these words in my ears and in my head makes me realize that authoritarianism’s draw for people has been fostered by ‘religious zealots’ and so-called ‘spiritual leaders’ for millennia! Clergy has used God as a weapon and, as the prophets so beautifully stated, catered to the people “in mansions” and joined forces with “the callous”! The push/pull of authoritarianism and democracy, of abuse and freedom have been the crucible of humanity forever-we have sought to quiet the inner war for freedom, the inner need for connection to something greater than ourselves with authoritarianism from a leader, from a clergyman, by being ‘master of the house-making our wife and children do what we say. We have started wars in the name of God when it is really for our own drive to live “in mansions”. We are afraid to go to the slums, we are unwilling to meet the prophet Elijah, who is said to live in the slums, with the abused, and yet, we speak of ‘religious values’.

Some people “in mansions” have been involved in cleaning up the slums earnestly, they have donated, volunteered, and they go home behind their gates each night. Father Greg Boyle, founder of HomeBoy Ind. and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, teaches us that we have to “erase the margins” and practice “radical kinship”. Both of these ways of being are paths that the Bible gives us, they are the examples Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, Buddha teach us, so why does it seem so difficult for us to follow in these footprints? Because we believe that power, prestige, wealth will ensure certainty for us, that we can ‘beat the odds’ and ‘be protected’ by God because, as the prosperity gospel lies to those who follow it, God loves the rich and if you are poor, it is because God doesn’t love you so much. What rubbish, what bullshit and what a way to promote God being “intimately present…in mansions” rather than live into the words of Rabbi Heschel above.

Contrary to populist belief, God is not white! God doesn’t favor the rich, the white person, etc-God is the creative force in the Universe that many of us refer to as “the Ineffable One” this force being too much to even describe. We, the people, have the obligation to use this creative force to build bridges, cure diseases, “proclaim freedom throughout the land and to all its inhabitants therein”. We have majored in and gotten Doctorates in how to use this creative force to wreak havoc on those we declare our enemies, we use this creative force to create chaos, promote lies and engage in both deception of another(s) and self-deception. Populism is a euphemism for authoritarianism, the populist leader is another way of describing Pharaoh, and the promoters are the courtesans and bootlickers we have seen surround these tyrants always.

The worst activity is the participation of the clergy! They have gone along with the forceful enslavement “of the heathens” who have their own faith, their own religious traditions and, the ‘good white christian man’ decides to ‘save them’, when they don’t need saving! “God may be more intimately present in the slums” comes from the Biblical tradition that 36 times says “take care of the stranger, the poor, etc”, it comes from the Haggadah which tells us to invite the hungry and the needy into our homes, it comes from being relegated to slums and ghettos for 2000 years and hated for longer. The Black Ministers who are calling for a Cease-Fire and blaming Israel have forgotten that it was not Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran who walked with Rev King. They have forgotten that Hamas is a terrorist group of thugs who murdered, raped, kidnapped Jews and non-Jews on Oct. 7th and do not want to Cease-Fire, they want Israel to surrender to their terror! Instead of seeing how the leadership of Hamas live “in mansions” while their people are relegated to slums, these spiritual leaders decry the Israelis, the Jews. The deaths in Gaza are horrendous-full stop. We have to find a solution that no one wants, that everyone gripes about because then, we will be able to recognize Elijah who lives in the slums, proclaim freedom for all, and make the world a kinder place for all of us.

As a child, my father and my grandfather had business “in the slums” of Cleveland, Ohio. The people who had business around them, the people who worked for my father, the people who did business with my grandfather and father, were always welcomed. I remember my grandfather giving people their clothes that he had tailored, dry cleaned, etc when they needed it even though they couldn’t pay for them. I remember going into stores around my grandfather’s store and people smiling at me because I was Abe’s grandson. The people who worked for my father, who lived in the slums, came to our home every month to check and see what needed to be done for years after my father died. Both of these men knew God is “more intimately present in the slums” and they honored the divine image of the people around them-in the slums and in mansions. They erased the margins everyday of their lives.

I am acutely aware of the times I have had to go to people “in mansions” for donations so we could continue the work of Beit T’Shuvah. I also realize my bombastic attitude towards people “in mansions” who like to ‘look good while doing bad’ and how I have tripped myself up because I have no filter when I see this happening. I have catered to those “in mansions” and, in a few instances, denigrated my spirit by deceiving myself into believing “God was here”. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 207

’We worry more about the purity of dogma than the integrity of love.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg 93)

The more I have been sitting with this sentence, the more I have come to accept that love is either “unconditional” or it is not love. For us to not worry about “the integrity of love” more than “the purity of dogma” is, I have come to realize, at the root of all our problems today, yesterday and, without spiritual healing, tomorrow.

The call to “love your neighbor” has no conditions on it, the call to “honor your parents” has no conditions on it, the call to “love Adonai” includes every fiber of our being, so love, as defined in the Bible is unconditional and it should be in our lives also. As Ram Dass said at a lecture one time: “I can put someone out of my home, just not out of my heart”. We have confused desire with love, we have confused sexuality with love, yet, for love to be “intact”, to “love” with a wholeness of being, we have to accept that love and like are different, that acting loving no matter how one feels is the manifestation of the call of our souls to connect to and live into the command “to love your neighbor”.

Yet, we seem to subjugate our “integrity of love” for the “purity of dogma” that we have come to adhere to. The ‘good christian folk’ who tried to overthrow the 2020 election and their groupies that have signed on since then, aka the Republican Party, are more concerned with “dogma” than “love” even though Christ preached love and tolerance, cared for the stranger and the poor, the leper and the outcast. The ‘good jews of ultra orthodoxy’ while purporting to be ‘torah jews’, actually do the opposite of what is called for in the Bible, hating their neighbors, even Jewish ones if they don’t adhere to the “dogma” they have set down. The Ayatollah, MBS, et al are not interested in the “love” of the Holy Koran, they are interested in the power they can derive from it, the control over people they can use it for.

We are witnesses and participants in the triumph of “dogma” over love in our court system, in our halls of government, in our Temples, Mosques, Churches, in our homes and in our schools. Yet, we refuse to stand up for “the integrity of love”! This truth infuriates me today as I assume it did Rabbi Heschel some 61+ years ago. History is, it cannot be taught with a prejudicial viewpoint and truly be history, the Holocaust happened-period, full-stop. Yet, to keep “the purity of dogma” for some people/groups, we have Holocaust deniers! Slavery was rampant in America from before we became a nation until well into the 20th Century in a myriad of ways that continue up to today-no amount of denial by Desantis, Abbott, et al can change this fact-yet the “purity of dogma” for them crushes “the integrity of love” that their faith tradition teaches. Alito, Thomas et al being more worried about the donors who treat them to a great life-style than the law is another example of “dogma” over “love”.

The heart of this tragedy, I believe, is in the family. We are in danger of losing what makes humanity strong and great, the family, because we have put “dogma” over “love” even there. Herein is the place to practice unconditional love. No matter how often my family disagreed with one another, love prevailed. No matter how disparate we are in our political, religious views, love prevails. No matter how much we disagreed with another group, my father taught us to respect and treat those with whom we disagree with respect and love.

For love to prevail, we have to never shut off the possibility of connection returning between one another. For “the integrity of love” to be front and center for all of us, we have to know that our disagreements are for the sake of learning, they are to teach us to be open to new ideas. In their concern for “the purity of dogma”, even the great Rabbis of old caused hatred strife like Rabban Gamliel who excommunicated Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Yochanan who’s exiling of Reish LaKish sent him to an early grave and he was miserable the rest of his life. All this suffering, all of this loss of ideas, ways to live well, sacrificed for the sake of “the purity of dogma”. Interestingly, both of these sets of Rabbis were brothers-in-law, they were family-yet “dogma” overwhelmed “the integrity of love” they had for both their sisters and their in-laws. How often have families been torn apart by some argument that could have ended in “let’s agree to disagree” instead of walking out on one another? How often have families, communities, friends, countries been torn apart because of our inability to admit that “the integrity of love” is more important than “the purity of dogma” that we think is life or death.

In my recovery, I work tirelessly to not “put someone out of my heart”, even if I can’t associate with them anymore. I work very hard to wish my enemies well and pray for them as the Big Book of AA suggests. I know that I have to be open to the ideas and ways of another so I can learn. I know that I have to call out the immorality around me, the lies people tell to another(s) and to themselves, I have to search my self daily to root out my lies and self-deceptions. I am dedicated to raising up “the integrity of love” in all my affairs, to have “dogma” take a back seat because I am not sure that any particular “dogma” is correct and I know “the integrity of love” is always right and good. I uphold the wholeness of love by being whole inside, by living with integrity, wholeness, living a life that is line with the divine, not hiding from my inner demons and healing their need to defeat me and overtake me. I live into “the integrity of love” by giving people the benefit of the doubt, by being sad when another is so stuck they can’t see the harms, the betrayals they are committing and pray for their return. I have welcomed back many and been welcomed back by many over the years and this is how we live into “the integrity of love”! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 206

’We worry more about the purity of dogma than the integrity of love.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg 93)

After spending two days on the first half of this sentence and even though there is so much more to be said about it and how it is ruining our lives and our seeking to destroy our humanity, I want to turn to the last phrase above “the integrity of love”.

Rabbi Heschel’s use of italics points to the importance this idea has for him, and I would add, should have for all of us. “Integrity” comes from the Latin meaning “intact”, it is is defined in English as having “strong moral principles” and “unified” as well as “internal consistency”. In Hebrew the word used is “Shlemut”, which translates to “wholeness”. The “integrity of love” is first found in the Torah in Leviticus 19:18 “you shall love your neighbor as you love yourself”. This is, as I hear Rabbi Heschel today, the epitome of “the integrity of love”.

And, we are not as worried about loving our neighbor as we are about the “purity of dogma”, we are not as worried about the wholeness of our love for our spouses, children, friends as we are about our devotion to “the conventional notions of society”, the “dogma” of our particular cult/way of being. Whether it is a religious dogma, a social dogma, even the progressive dogma that claims to be for everyone. This is the great issue that has faced humanity since we came into being-how to be “internally consistent” in our love for another human being, how to “be whole” in our commitment and loving actions towards another and ourselves. We have struggled to see “love” as a strong moral principle that must be practiced in all of our affairs-even in war!

We live in a transactional society, love is a commodity not a principle. We give and withhold it based on our ‘feelings’ at the moment. We give and withhold it based on what we want from another human being, this is the draw of the authoritarian movement. There is no “integrity of love” in our society today for most people because of the transactional nature of love in our world. We see this in the way the ‘good people’ have embraced the terrorists of Hamas. We see this in the way the ‘religious’ people use the Bible, the New Testament, the Koran, etc as weapons of destruction and proof they are right rather than ways of living into “the integrity of love”. We see the transactional nature of love in the ways institutions are willing to abandon their principles to conform to some ‘standard’ set by people who sit on their boards with no real knowledge of the day to day needs of the people they are serving-either their customers or workers, be it for profit or not-for-profit.  We are witnessing the tearing down of so many moral principles found in our Holy Texts, that while never followed perfectly gave us grounding for a way to be better human beings each and every day.

Our need to call another person, another group “vermin”, “not human”, “blood poisoners” etc are indicators of how far away from ‘the integrity of love” we are. This need also reflects back on us how self-loathing we are as individuals and as a society. Our inability to “love our neighbor” calls into question our ability to “love ourself”. Think about this: we have to be commanded to love both our neighbor who we know we need and to love ourself! How radical is this? We have evolved so much that we have bypassed much of what makes us human, our  need for authentic connections, our need to be authentic, our need to be needed and our need to be aided by another.

We use love as a weapon, treating our ‘loved’ ones as investments, as reflections of ourselves so if they embarrass us, if they defy us, if they make us uncomfortable, we withhold love from them. We proclaim it while we act in the most unloving ways. We have seen children who have forgotten to honor their parents-not necessarily love them-in the ‘divorce my parents because they are toxic’ movement that is happening today. We have seen the ‘progressives’ abandon the Jews who have been allies with them forever because the Jews are the same as ‘whitey’, the same as ‘the man’. We see the takeover of someone’s creative endeavor by ‘the suits’. We see the fidelity proclaimed by the authoritarian leader to the people with his/her fingers crossed behind his back. We are in the throes of losing our freedom to be who we are because we lack “the integrity of love”.

I have been thinking about this for a long time. I had issues with my mother and I would never abandon her. We had an agreement- we didn’t always agree with one another, we didn’t always like one another and we would never stop loving one another. We saw each other as wounded human beings doing the best we could with what we had experienced and where we were in the moment. I have had the same experience with people who have harmed me, who have berated me, who have supported me and helped me grow. “The integrity of love” that I have for humanity is more in line with the Biblical command today than ever before, it keeps growing within me and allows me to live without resentments and with compassion. My relationship with my wife, Harriet, is one of “integrity”. Our love is whole, it is internally consistent, it is based on the morality of love and we are a unified couple with our individual ideas, needs, thoughts, etc. My relationship with my siblings is the same as is my relationship with my daughter, Heather, and my grandson Miles. We practice radical love whether we agree or not, whether we have hurt one another inadvertently or not. Practicing this principle in all my affairs leads me to more empathy, more compassion, more “love my neighbor” so I can “love myself” as God loves all of us. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 205

’We worry more about the purity of dogma than the integrity of love.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg 93)

Continuing with the them in the first part of the sentence above, in Hebrew, the word “Dugma”, translates as “example, pattern, prototype, model-not absolute and not perfect. Only in English have we bastardized the word to mean what we want it to for our power needs/grabs. By making “the purity of dogma” a prerequisite for any position of power by whatever group one belongs to we have eliminated our search for truth, for validity, for connection.

We have substituted adherence to ‘the purity of dogma” for true authentic connection. We are so afraid of saying the wrong thing to ‘the leader’ or to the other ‘followers’, we deny our own truth, we deny our opinions and our desires, we deny our authenticity and our own connection to something greater than ourselves. We have replaced God, spirit, universe, nature with “the purity of dogma” being our higher power.

I, like all of us, have witnessed this in our politics, in our religious institutions, in clergy, in work, in our country clubs, in our streets, on our college campus’ and in the halls of governments across the globe. “Purity of dogma” can get authoritarians elected, look at Nazi Germany in the 1930’s. The most educated and open country in Europe with all types of scholars and thinkers, was susceptible to the “purity of dogma” of Hitler and his thugs. In Israel, another forward thinking and innovative country, the people are fighting against “the purity of dogma” of Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben’G’vir, et al. In America, the jury is still out-we are waiting along with the rest of the world to see if “the purity of dogma” that Trump, the Heritage Foundation, the Republican Party are pushing will take a greater hold than it already has.

Our religious institutions also are promoting a “purity of dogma”, be it on the right or the left. One has to adhere to, or at least give lip service to, the dogma presented at the church, temple, mosque, one is going to or be ostracized and shamed. In the fundamentalist religious institutions, no matter progressive or conservative, not being into “the purity of dogma” will result in expulsion and, if one has children, a spouse, they will either be shunned by the community or the one who has doubts about the dogma will be banished from the community and not allowed contact with their children and spouse! “The purity of dogma” is so concerning that allowing ‘those people’ into our neighborhood is dangerous. It is so concerning to some that “those people”, ie anyone not like us, are an existential threat to our safety, our way of life, etc. And there are clergy who promote this, once a women told a group of women that she, a member of the Conservative Jewish movement, that she doesn’t let her children have play dates at the homes of members of the Reform Jewish movement because they could be fed cheeseburgers, because her Rabbi had told her so!

The protestors on college campus are so caught up in “the purity of dogma” most of them are unable to articulate what their slogans mean, what the truth of the current situation in the Middle East is, that Hamas, who they are celebrating,  murdered and raped women and children and this is cool with these “progressives” because it is in the name of ‘freedom’. Following this logic, I am curious as to why they are so against white supremacists who believe their killing black people is in the name of freedom and “purity of dogma”? I imagine that Asians and Latinos go along with the people who hate them and want to kill them because they are doing this in the name of freedom and “purity of dogma”?

Of course my statements are ridiculous, yet, they are logical conclusions of the actions of the protestors, they are the logical conclusions of the actions of the clergy, of the politicians who declare “dogma” above truth, above kindness, above compassion, above communication, above learning from one another. This is how far done the road to hell we have travelled as a result of “the purity of dogma”: Putin kills Navalny, MBS kills Jamal Khashoggi, Hamas murders and rapes Israelis and other nationalities breaking a cease-fire, Putin invades Ukraine, Assad gases his own people, nothing happens-Israel responds to an attack on their people proportionally greater than 9/11 and Jews are condemned, the UN gives aid and comfort to terrorists, and the deaths of civilians is promoted by Hamas, the deaths of these civilians is tragic, and Israel is blamed because Hamas won’t accept a Cease-fire and Qatar keeps giving them money and safe harbor- all in the name of “the purity of dogma”.

I am searching my self to see where I have been too dogmatic to accept the truth and validity of another way of being, another path that suits someone else better than the one I am on. I am, and believe, always have been, open to these other paths. I also know my dogmatic stance involves freedom, involves openness to something new each day, to not being stuck in yesterday or tomorrow. I know I have been an example of how to be in recovery and do one’s own thing. I know I have been denigrated because I have not and do not agree with everything in the Big Book, the Bible, the Talmud, the New Testament, etc. I am an nomad who belongs in every situation I find myself in, I know that the ones that are unhealthy for me, I leave because I no longer want to be around “the purity of dogma” that someone is spewing. I believe the “purity of dogma” comes from fear and ignorance, from a need for power and control. To the people who continue to protect “the purity of dogma” that they and their friends spew, I have compassion and sorrow for you along with my prayers that you will wake up one day and repent. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 204

‘We worry more about the purity of dogma than the integrity of love.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg 93)

Rather than hear and possibly heed Rabbi Heschel’s words above in 1963 up till now, his words are even more true and widespread now than they were when he wrote them! No matter what spiritual discipline one follows or studies, there are members within all of them who are more concerned and worried about the “purity of dogma” than anything else. They are the ones who have “segregated God”, seek to make the sacred, their dogma, Uber Alles for everyone in everyday life.

“The literal meaning of dogma in ancient Greek was "something that seems true." These days, in English, dogma is more absolute”(vocabulary.com).  How far have we fallen into the abyss of self-deception that we twist a word that demands we explore more, “something that seems true” into an “absolute”! Rather than return to the original meaning and wrestle with the truth, we have taken the lazy person’s path and just made it absolutely true, because of our need to be certain, because of our fear of mining the depths of inquiry and, of course, our desire to be deceived and lulled into knowing The answer. We are witnessing the fruits of “we worry more about the purity of dogma” in the move to authoritarianism on both the left and the right, the ‘covering one’s ass and the ass of the boss’ at all costs, the filing of lawsuits for our own errors against anyone and everyone who has deep pockets, the need for scapegoats to blame for our sins as opposed to admitting our sins and putting them on the head of a goat that we send to the wilderness in order to separate ourselves from them.

Be it Putin or Tliab, the Ayatollah or Bibi, Trump or Xi, the 2025 project people or the Alito/Thomas coalition, all of these people have a “purity of dogma” that they are protecting at any and all costs. This is for their very survival emotionally, egotistically, and spiritually. They are not the people Rabbi Heschel nor I are speaking to; we are speaking to the followers, to the people who are, in essence, their victims and the  victims of their own self-deceptions, the victim of some misguided belief that certainty is possible and good. Herein is the issue for me today-will we let go of our need for certainty and purity so we can engage in the wrestling with our inner lives with the desires of our earthly inclinations and our higher inclinations, and one another as Rabbi Harold Kushner, z”l, calls our inner war?

It is crucial for all of us to remember any “purity of dogma” is man-made and a disguise for control. The Rabbis of the Talmud could not agree on one way, hence the myriad of opinions and ‘arguments’ in the Talmud and since then. The High Priest was to offer  his own sacrifices for his sins and missing the marks each year at Yom Kippur because he made errors and needed to admit them. The Orthodox who claim to be ‘following God’s will”, those who study day and night in Yeshivas and only seek to be more ‘pure and dogmatic’ are denying the truth of the words above. The far left Jews who call band together with the protestors calling for the demise of Israel and Jews because Hamas is so wonderful, deny the truth of the words above.

There is more ways we “worry more about the purity of dogma” in our daily living. The Republicans who go to New York to support Trump rather than actually do the “people’s business” in the “people’s house” are more interested in “the purity of dogma” of Fox News, Trump, Heritage Foundation, etc than in what is best for the country. The myriad of people who run companies and institutions who cover up their misdeeds because the “purity of dogma” is more important than truth, they are worried about the ‘optics’ more than the truth, more than love. These good people, who do much good in the world and bring great inventions and discoveries to light, who help the needy and spread good works are also able to lie to themselves that the “ends justify the means”.

We have seen the coverup of the sexual transgressions by Priests, Rabbis, Imams, for years and years and it still happens today. We have heard of the cover-up of the Santa Susana Nuclear Accident in 1959 and even since it’s revelation has been downplayed. The city of Simi Valley and especially the neighborhoods surrounding the lab have been found to have high levels of radiation in the groundwater and when things like the Woolsey Fire of 2018 occur radiation spreads. Yet, the people who run Brandeis Bardin camp, which is a great camp, say nothing to the people who have been there, do no studies to see if their campers were impacted with higher levels of cancers, etc because they were swimming, eating the fruits and vegetables grown on the land there. The dogma of keeping secrets, not ‘airing our dirty laundry in public’, not being shamed and not being sued overrides “integrity” for these powerful people. “Purity of dogma” is the “crime of the millennia”.

I have always been a dogma breaker, as dogma is used today. I have always sought to investigate that which “seems to be true” to test the validity and then use this way of being to enhance my life and the lives of another(s). I believe deeply in finding the middle ground. I do have my passionate way, the voice I inherited from the prophets and when I use it people think that I am too radical, too difficult, and too dangerous. I have ignored this in pursuit of truth, not always being right, just pursuing it and losing my place and some people. Yet, I have to be true to me, follow my higher inclination and live with integrity rather than dogma. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark.

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Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Herschel's Teachings - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 203

“Our tragedy begins with the segregation of God, with the bifurcation of the secular and the sacred.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg.93)

I am writing about this for a second day because it has haunted me over Shabbat. Bifurcate comes from the Latin meaning “two-pronged” and segregate comes from the Latin meaning “apart from the flock”. What is happening today is an amazing phenomena, God has been segregated from the words of the Bible, from Jesus’ teachings, from the call of the prophets and set apart from God’s flock by using God to validate the very actions, policies, treatment of another human being that is called evil/wrong in our Holy Texts. The use of God to hate women and make them subservient to the whims of men, be it reproductive health care or working, goes against the ways of the Bible when God said the daughters of Zelophehad could inherit. The use of God to say that white people are favored by God is a bastardization of Moses’ race, Jesus’ race, the race of the people who left Egypt, etc.- since they were in the Middle East, we can safely assume they were not ‘white’ people. Calling immigrants, legal and/or illegal, vermin, blood poisoners while trying to sell “God Bless America Bibles” is one of the greatest examples of the ‘new christian ethos’-doing the exact opposite of what the Book you are selling is telling you to do.

We are seeing “the segregation of God” in this new way when Mike Johnson says “the Bible is my worldview” and then goes to New York to support Trump and castigate the rule of law, the Judge’s daughter, etc, this is an example of segregating God for his own purposes, not for God’s purpose. When he is described as “being comfortable with authoritarian social control and doing away with democratic values”, we are witnessing God being torn apart from God’s flock for the sake of ‘christian nationalism’. We are also witnessing the ‘progressives’ who segregate God away from the Jews, away from people of wealth, away from ‘those’ people, the ones who disagree with them. This phenomena of “the segregation of God” is happening on both ends of the political spectrum and in both right-wing and left-wing Churches, Temples, Mosques. What happened to understanding and living the principles of the Bible in all our affairs? This too has been segregated because we have taken God out of our everyday living, we have segregated God to validate what we want to be holy, our power grab and to validate our authoritarian desires and actions.

The prophets did not see, hear, nor understand a “two-pronged” approach to living. For them, what was done in the Temple was merely the physical manifestation for public consumption and learning of what human beings do in their everyday life. The fusing of the secular and the sacred is the foundational reason for the Mitzvot, for our moral codes. Caring for the stranger, the widow, the poor, the orphan; not standing idly by the blood of your brother/sister/neighbor; not taking bribes as judges; honoring parents; redeeming the captives; loving your neighbors; are not only for Temple worship, not only for how we act in Church, they are the epitome of fusing secular and sacred, they are the calls to end our “bifurcation” and “practice these principles in all our affairs”. Moses exhorts us to “Choose Life”, to not follow the majority to do evil, to not run after the false prophets, etc because the Bible knows how seductive “segregation” and “bifurcation” are, how easy it is to be deceived by the sowers of these ways of being and, when they use God and the Bible to validate themselves, how difficult it is to reject their claims-hence good people believing Trump’s authoritarianism will be good for them and the end of democracy as we know it will be good for the country!

We are in another deep spiritual decline-for all the talk of God by the charlatans and the deceivers, for all the religious cloaks Hamas and the ultra-orthodox Jews wrap themselves in, for all the pages of the Bible the Republicans are selling, for all the flags people are wrapping themselves in, for all the taking over of buildings the far left protesters are doing. From the time of Pharaoh and Moses, through the Judges, the Kings, the prophets, till today, people have tried to separate the secular and the sacred, they have practiced the “segregation of God” even in the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim nations of antiquity, with the exception of King David. While David is an imperfect hero, he also wrote the psalms, he could admit his own wrongdoings, he could and did ask for forgiveness. While he was a tremendous warrior, the case can be made that his fighting was for the sake of heaven as well as for himself and his country. We are being called by this teaching to stand up and say NO to “the segregation of God”, NO to the “bifurcation of the secular and the sacred”. We are being asked to once again put them together, to merge secular and sacred, to bring Godliness into all our affairs and live the principles of Godliness, of decency, of compassion, truth, love.

My recovery is based in healing the split in my inner nature, the thief and the prophet, the drunk and the visionary. Bringing God into all my affairs, all my decisions has allowed me to have freedom of choice-I do not always choose the Godly way, I make mistakes- and without bringing Godliness into my way of thinking and being, I would still be stuck in some addictive way of being. I have engaged the secular and the sacred in every moment I can, whenever I am present in this moment, I am not bifurcating them. When I am able to see the Divine Image in another human being, I am not segregating God, when I am able to have pathos and compassion for the suffering of the people who hate me, I am not segregating God. When I choose to do the “next right thing” I am merging secular and sacred. I am grateful for my teachers, family, friends, fellow learners and even those who argue, exile, etc me for helping me heal my inner split. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 202

“Our tragedy begins with the segregation of God, with the bifurcation of the secular and the sacred.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg.93)

Rabbi Heschel’s words above come after he reminds us of a “white preacher” who said in condemnation of any clergy being involved in the Civil Rights Movement with the words: “the job of the minister is to lead the souls of men to God, not to bring about confusion by getting tangled up in transitory social problems.” This is indicative of the “tragedy” he is speaking about. While this was true in the ’60”s, it is even truer today.

We hear many preachers condemn the social problems we have today and using God to validate the error of those who want voting rights for all, the words on the Statue of Liberty to once again be true, the spirit of the Declaration of Independence to finally take precedence, the Constitution to be upheld and understood in today’s world as a dynamic document rather than a static one for only one era. Many clergy today are supporting the ‘status quo’ as they did in the past, many clergy are actively engaged with the “segregation of God” that we know and hear in the Bible, in the New Testament, in the Koran.

God, as the prophets tell us, is very involved in the world. God is not segregated from us, there is no “bifurcation of the secular and the sacred”. In the Bible, God sends the flood because humanity had become so corrupt that “men of renown”  were taking any of the daughters (we do not know how young they were) they wanted. These “men of renown” had polluted the earth so badly the entire world had to be cleansed. God speaks about the widows, the orphans, the strangers, and the poor, 36 times in the 1st 5 Books of the Bible, more than anything else. God comes to the prophets and sends them, often against their own will, to tell the people to return to Godliness, to leave the “bifurcation” they have cultivated so well.

The prophets railed against the Priests the most. Isaiah tells them their sacrifices as not needed and, basically, bullshit because of the ways they act towards the people in need. They are castigated by the prophets for their “segregation of God” . These people throughout the ages, the clergy, the priests, who should know better than anyone how involved God is in our world, how much God cares about the doings of the human being, how much God wants us to be human, have constantly tried to separate the sacred and the secular, have believed their power, which they want greatly, comes from segregating God to the Church and being the arbiters of what God wants ‘the people” to do. This behavior is exactly what the prophets railed against then, Rev King and his fellow clergy railed against in the ’60’s, and we hear from a few brave souls today.

It takes all of us to call out the clergy who continue to segregate God from the every day actions of people. It is a lie that someone can be ‘pious’ because they go to Church, Temple, Mosque, daily/weekly, they pray and study daily and they cheat people in business, they believe ‘those people’ are poisoning the blood of the ‘good folk’, they agree with detention of people who are trying to find a better life here in America, they rail against the ‘godlessness’ of people who practice compassion, pathos, love towards all-“hating the sin and loving the sinner”. We, the people, have to call out these charlatans standing on the Altars and those in the pews who have the power to make these lies become our reality. We, the people, have to end the “segregation of God” whether we believe in God or not! We, the people, have to rebel against these deceivers in the Clergy, in the Government, in the Courts, in the Colleges, in the streets. We, the people, have to engage in the call that has been resounding throughout the spiritual world and the physical world: “Let my people Go”!

In Judaism, as I understand and practice it, the commandments are the paths to combining the “secular and the sacred” rather than bifurcating them. Every time we do an action, we can say a prayer, a gratitude, experience joy for doing the next right thing. We bring God into our lives when we wake up and throughout the day we are able to remind ourselves of the myriad of opportunities that present themselves where we can help another human being. Kindness, truth, love, obligation, return, repentance, forgiveness, concern, caring, are the choices we are taught in the Bible to take. We are given the consequences of our actions when we choose selfishness, when we choose to relegate God to the Temple and not the everyday. None of them are good! Yet, we have to read the Bible anew each year so we do not forget our responsibilities and our connection.

In my recovery, I have not segregated God from my living nor have I bifurcated the “secular and the sacred’. I have made mistakes, I have used my inaccurate understanding at times of what God is calling for, I have mistaken, at times what is sacred and what is secular, I just haven’t separated them nor believed that God is not present in all my affairs. I know “that no human power can save me…and God could and would if God were sought” as it says in the Big Book of AA. I also know that living with Godliness involved in my actions, not separating secular and sacred is an unpopular way of being. It causes people to be suspicious, to seek the chinks in my armor, to denigrate me when I make my errors and even more when I call them to account. It is a hard life to not engage in “the segregation of God”, to not bifurcate the “secular and the sacred”. Enobling the common is the goal, according to Rabbi Heschel. I am grateful that I do this more often than not. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 201

“The prophet is a person who suffers the harms done to others… All prophecy is one great exclamation: God is not indifferent to evil!…He is a God of Pathos.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 92)

We are all created in the Image of God, according to Genesis Chapter 1, we are also all descendants of the prophets, students of the prophets, no matter which faith we adhere to. Yet, we seem to have lost our ability to suffer “the harms done to others”, we have spent millennia being “indifferent to evil”, in our Churches, Mosques, Temples, in the street, in the halls of power and the halls of justice. We have lost our way so badly that we actually use God to justify our indifference, to justify our actions which do “harms” to another! We are so lost that the rule of law only applies to ‘those people’ (anyone not like us), the purpose of power is to enrich oneself and take advantage of everyone else, our religious institutions have become havens for ‘prosperity gospels’, right-wing fanaticism, left-wing radicalism, with truth and God being left out of the altar, out of the homily, out of the sermon, dismissed in the Holy Texts and Prayerbooks we use.

Being created in the Image of God is a statement of our relationship with God and with one another. We cannot say we are people of faith and treat anyone else as “less than” us, whether they are the same faith, a different faith, a different skin color, not as educated, etc. We are all “kin under the skin” and we all are called upon to “erase the margins” as Father Greg Boyle of Homeboy Industries teaches. Since we are all kinfolk, isn’t it time for us to welcome and embrace one another as long lost relatives rather than as enemies? Isn’t it time for us to stand with one another in healing the harms that have been perpetrated upon any of us? Isn’t it time for us to be the shield for those who cannot protect themselves, the voice for those who cannot speak?

God cries when the Egyptians are downing, according to a midrash/homily saying “My children are dying”. While God know and made their deaths happen, it was not done for us to cheer, it was done because the evil was too great, just as in Sodom and Gomorrah. When destruction has to occur this is not a victory for God, it is the acknowledgement that we have, once again, gone down the wrong path; we have, once again, been indifferent to evil and not suffered “the harms done to others”. Rabbi Heschel’s last sentence above reminds us that God suffers with us, God suffers when we are in exile, God suffers when any of us are lost, any of us are evil, any of us indifferent.

When the Speaker of the House of Representatives claims to live by the Bible and goes to New York City to undermine the rule of law, we are watching “indifferent to evil” in action and in full regalia! When authoritarianism is extolled as freedom, when “dictator for a day” is celebrated, we are seeing the demise of the call of the Bible to fight against evil, to end our fascination with power for the sake of power. When our colleges and universities are more interested in promoting a political agenda than in educating our young people to the myriad of possibilities available to them, we are on the precipice of ignoring the “harms done to others”, when ‘standing up’ for the terrorists takes precedence over standing up against rape, torture, murder, we are participating in and watching evil flourish.

We have the solution, it is right in front of us. Pathos-suffering, pity; the recognition of our own suffering because of our silence, because we have bought into being “indifferent to evil”. The recognition of the suffering of another because we have been “indifferent to” the evil we and society perpetrates upon them. Be it anti-semitism, racism, islamaphobia, anti-LGBTQ+, all of it is evil! What is amazing is how the ‘powers that be’ have turned those of us in these minorities against one another. When LGBTQ+ can celebrate Hamas as ‘freedom fighters’ and want the Intifada  to be worldwide when Hamas kills LGBTQ+ people in Gaza is beyond me, it points to the harms of being “indifferent to evil”. We had a coalition in the 1960’s that worked because it was based in Divine Pathos, in our Faith traditions. Today, because the leaders of our faith traditions have watered them down so much, the young people don’t care to adhere to them unless they validate their prejudices and their viewpoints.

We are in desperate need of hearing, reading, studying, living the words of the prophets, the words of the Bible. We have to return to being a people of Pathos, a people who refuse to be “indifferent to evil” anymore. We have to return to being the people who were willing to wander in the wilderness for 40 years so we could learn how to be decent, how to be connected to authenticity, how to Choose Life! It is not a hard turn, the difficulty is in making the decision to make this turn back to our authentic self, turn back to our divine image, turn back to the divine image in another human being. This is the call of pathos, this is the path of pathos, this is the way of faith, of kindness, of truth.


I have been fighting evil for a long time, before I engaged in it and since I have stopped engaging in it. I am and have never been indifferent to evil. Even when I was perpetrating it, I knew it and chose to be evil. I am remorseful for those times. And, I have spent the past 35.5 years standing against it, I have gotten myself into trouble because I have called out evil, wrong, because I refuse to be quiet in the face of evil. I am not right for ‘polite society’ and have no skills except to live into my prophetic inheritance and stand for what is right, good. Standing for pathos and kindness is the only solution to the bullies and the authoritarians who want to control everything and everyone, I have found. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 200

“One may be decent and sinister, pious and sinful.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 92)

Continuing the theme of “indifference to evil”, Rabbi Heschel reminds us of the dual nature of human beings, a divine inclination and an earthly one. We are never ‘one way’. This sentence comes to remind us to not fall into the trap of self-deception, the thinking that because I am a “decent” guy I don’t have to question myself, I don’t have to do T’Shuvah, inventory of my actions, I can ‘cruise’ through life because I’m a decent person. This type of thinking is the root of so much evil being perpetrated and ignored throughout history and especially in today’s world.

In the Book of Leviticus, Chapter 19, we are told “You shall be holy, because I your God am holy”. In the myriad of commentaries on this verse, one stands out for me, that of the Ramban. Moses ben Naimon was a 13th Century scholar and leader in Spain, his commentary on this verse in Leviticus speaks to the need for this commandment; we had already been called a nation of priests, we were told we are a holy nation, we had been given so many ways to be holy-why were these words necessary? The Ramban answered: “because it is possible to be a scoundrel within the bounds of the Torah”. His ability to see the truth of the “pious” at times, to know that people could use the laws and ways of Judaism to pervert the very goals and service they are meant to express lights the way for all of us.

We are being called to account in the words above, in the Biblical stories, in the study of our history as human beings, and we seem to do everything we can to evade our own accounting. Being “sinister”, aka evil, while also being “decent” happens with and without intention. There are many people who try and come across as decent human beings, on the ‘right’ side of causes and do so for their own good, for their own gain and, once they have gained the wealth, the power, the reputation, they go about their lives serving their needs rather than the needs of another, they betray the very principles they swore to uphold in the beginning of their search. They knew their intentions from the beginning and just did what they had to in order to get their hooks in and exert their power. These are the people who go to Congress to serve their own need for power and control, these are the people who go on Boards in order to gain power and control, these are the people who take over companies and institutions to make them over in their own image. Some people do this because they buy into the deceptions of another(s) that this is the only way that will ensure long-term success, so they are “decent and sinister” unintentionally.

Those who are “pious and sinful”, however, have a special place in hell, I believe. These charlatans pound the Bible, pound the New Testament, pound the Koran, etc and when their pounding is challenged, they pound their challengers and they pound the table. Piety and sin are not strangers to one another, while being pious is supposed to help us overcome our sinful natures, we have found the “pious” are fundamentalists in disguise, people who want to use their piety for control, for power, to destroy their ‘enemies’ whom they label as enemies of God, of Spirit, because, after all, only the “pious” know what God wants. These people have committed more evil in the name of God, started more wars in the name of God, than their secular counterparts. While they know better, while they are aware of the teaching of the Ramban, they continue to be scoundrels in the bounds of the Torah. They continue to bastardize the texts to fit their personal pushes for power and control, wealth and prestige. There is no text that shows Donald J Trump is sent by Jesus. There is no text that says abortion is a sin. The text used against abortion actually is a polemic against pedophilia. Yet, these “pious and sinful” people continue to spread their lies, hold onto their power and lead people away from spiritual health, away from a real connection with God, a real connection with their fellow human beings!

We are told to do T’Shuvah one day before we die and since we don’t know the day of our death, we should do it everyday. The Church suggests confession at least once a week, the recovery movement  says we should “continue to take personal inventory”. We are in need of doing this type of self-reflection and self-inspection often because we know the depths of our self-deceptions, Rabbi Heschel has taught us that “self-deception is a major disease”. The Bible knew this and every spiritual discipline has some path to returning after making mistakes. The problem with the “decent and sinister” and “the pious and sinful” is their willful blindness to their own self-deceptions, their inability to admit their errors and repair the damage from them. We have become a society; 1) that values deceptions rather than truth, 2) that is intolerant of errors and those who make them, 3) refuses to admit their spiritual maladies and seek spiritual healing for them. Hence we will continue to be plagued by the “decent and sinister” and the “pious and sinful” like Mike Johnson, the rest of the Republicans seeking to tear down the rule of law and our democracy.

I work hard each day to be “pious” in that I am devoted to nurturing my own spiritual growth and that of another. I live a life of decency and I take my own inventory daily. I am well aware of my own self-deceptions and my need to be on top of the signs that point to my being “sinister and sinful” because they are subtle and deadly. I let go of resentments as quickly as possible and keep allowing them to flow through and out of me as they arise. I am grateful each day for life and for all that I have, good things and troubling things. These are some ways I keep self-deception at bay. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 199

“Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself; it is more universal, more contagious, more dangerous. A silent justification, it makes possible an evil erupting as an exception to become the rule and being in turn accepted.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg.92)

Since Biblical days, we have been warned about “indifference”, we have been told to take an active part in our lives, to not be tourists in our own journey of living. The mitzvot are obligations that are, in many cases, attributed to God; yet, upon closer examination, in light of the teaching above, I believe we can see the mitzvot as obligations attributed to our welfare, to our not being indifferent, not being overwhelmed by “a silent justification”.

Hearing Rabbi Heschel’s words and allowing them to penetrate my mind, body and soul, forces me to look at all of the “silent justifications” that society uses to promote the evil that is constantly being perpetrated upon the earth, upon another human being, upon ‘those people’, etc. Given the context of Rabbi Heschel’s words, the “silent justification” for racism, for anti-semitism, for Islamaphobia, for anti-Asian, anti-LGBTQ+, etc has made “possible an evil erupting” and we seem to be unable to stem the flow of hatred and violence from this eruption. In fact, as is said above, the “silent justifications” we use in business, tax evasion by the wealthy, hatred of and by spiritual disciplines/religions, as well as those mentioned already, have “become the rule”, terrorists being called ‘freedom fighters, rape of Jewish women thought to be okay by these ‘freedom fighters’ praise by the silence about it by such luminaries as Joy-Ann Reid and other ‘our women’s rights’ leaders,  prove how these evil eruptions are “being in turn accepted”!

The prophets were hated in their time because they would not stay silent. The Bible is full of people and stories of people who would not stay silent in the face of evil. Moses was so aware of the evil possible by human beings, he was so concerned about humanity’s leaning towards “indifference to evil” that he extolled us to CHOOSE LIFE. Yet, as we see throughout history, these words fall on deaf ears, Jesus’ exhortations do the same as do Mohammed’s, Buddha’s, etc. We are so spiritually bankrupt that we are unable to too broke to pay attention to the evil around us, we are in acceptance of evil being the ‘way of the world’, just ‘the way we do business’. This is both sad and infuriating, it points out the shortcomings of our religious and spiritual educations, the lack of spiritual maturity and an UnGodlike acceptance of what is. “Indifference to evil” is not the normal state of affairs in God’s world, “silent justification” is not how we are instructed to be in the Bible, in the universe. We, the people, have to take a stand, we have to end our indifference, we have to end our silence and we have to speak and act in the spirit of the prophets. We are never to lost to return, we are never to far away that we cannot call out for help. We are never to immune to the wonder and awe of living, of the universe that we cannot be touched. We, the people, have to make a commitment, a decision, to “lift up our eyes and see’. See what is true and right, see how the mitzvot, the teachings of our spiritual texts lead us out of our “silent justifications” and our ways of making “an evil eruption…to become the rule and being in turn accepted”.

Over 3400 years ago, we were told: “Don’t stand idly by the blood of your neighbor”, “don’t run after the majority to do evil”. Around 200 years ago we were taught: “what is hateful to you, do not do to another human being” and “Do unto others what you would have them do unto you”. None of these teachings have any quarter for “silent justification”. None of them allow for “an evil erupting as an exception to become the rule”. The only reason this has happened is because we have stunted our spiritual and moral growth. We have become so utilitarian that we have shaped our spiritual teachings and our morality to what we need to do for ourselves right now. We hear and participate all the time in finger pointing-accusing others of that which we are guilty of-as Goebbels taught and authoritarians of today, the Republican Party since Gingrich, have raised to an art form. We also hear from many ‘progressives’ and Democrats their prejudices against ‘whitey’, against ‘those Jews’, against people who have made it because of their own hard work and are no longer considered ‘underdogs’. In other words, for our own political and social gain-the middle is being clobbered and the poles are fighting together against those of us who are against “silent justification”, against “evil…becoming the rule”, against the acceptance of “indifference to evil” as the norm.

Living into the words and teachings of the Bible, of Rabbi Heschel, of our history, has allowed me to leave the world of “indifference to evil”. I have no more “silent justifications” that work to assuage my guilt, my conscience when I perpetrate harm and negativity onto another. I am deeply remorseful for the harms I have perpetrated, I am not here to clean up my messes by denying them, by trying to make them not messes. I cannot stay silent while another(s) engages in their own “indifference to evil” nor their inability to see their “evil…becoming the rule” in the ways they live their lives. After 20 years of being the evil Rabbi Heschel is talking about, I have dedicated the last 35.5 years to being the opposite. I have inherited a tradition that causes me to speak out, I have inherited the DNA of my father to speak out loudly. Each and every day of my recovery has been spent in seeking out my own indifference and rising above it, and reaching out to help another human being rise above their own indifference and see the evil that we all have come to accept as the rule. Optics, Money, everyone else is doing it, are no longer excuses for our “silent justification”. We are descendants of the prophets, lets speak and act as they did. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Path for Spiritual Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 198

“Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself; it is more universal, more contagious, more dangerous. A silent justification, it makes possible an evil erupting as an exception to become the rule and being in turn accepted.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg.92)

“Indifference”, as I have said before, comes from the Latin meaning “not differing, not deferring”. The English definition is: “lack of concern, sympathy, interest” it also adds “unimportant”. Seeing evil as unimportant is a very dangerous way of living, it brings us to an unawareness of the preciousness of life, the utilitarian nature of life and the ease with which we can blame, shame, destroy another human being, another group of people with our words, our deeds, our evil ways. Remember, the first brother killed the second brother just because he was mad that ‘God liked you better than me’. And, we have been killing one another ever since to show how strong we are, how evil has infected us with its contagiousness and how society has, throughout the ages, accepted this as a way of being.

“Insidious” comes from the Latin meaning “ambush” and the English definition “spreading and working in a hidden and injurious way” and when combined with the definition of “indifference”, I hear Rabbi Heschel warning us, informing us that we are being, we have been “ambushed” in a secretive manner and we have become unable to defer to truth, we have become unable to differentiate between good and evil. This warning has gone unheeded since the time of the prophets, since Biblical times and seems to have been ignored and refuted even more in our times. In fact, given the ‘alternative facts’ bullshit, the denial of people who have been helped by the laws of the Great Society and their need to overturn them so no one else can benefit from them, the denial of “one law for the stranger and the citizen alike”, the bastardization of the Golden Rule, etc the “insidiousness” of our “indifference to evil” could be reaching new heights.

What is it that prevents us from hearing and heeding this call of Rabbi Heschel, of the prophets, of Rev King, of the Israeli Hostages, of the Ukrainians being held in Russia, the cries of women in Iran, in Afghanistan, in America? It is, I believe, our inability to cure ourselves from the “universal” and “dangerous” disease of “not deferring” to what is, to not differentiating between truth and fiction, between freedom and slavery, between holy and profane. While this is an age-old problem, it is a crucial one to deal with right now-with the proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the rise of terrorism, the fear of the demagogues, the willingness of some to be infected with “indifference to evil” and then spread their disease to as many as they can. We have been “ambushed” by a disease that is “spreading and working” in secret and is so subtle that most people are totally unaware of their journey to ‘the dark side’. It is so bad that dialogue, debate, facts are of no avail when seeking to make rapprochement with someone who is suffering from the “contagious” nature of “indifference to evil’.

We see this in Campus Protests today, there is merit to the suffering on both sides of the war in Gaza, no one who is rational, who is not suffering from a spiritual malady wants innocents to be killed, starved, tortured, raped, babies killed, etc. The protests are not, however, saying anything about the cause of this war, Hamas, except to extol terrorism, to cheer the rape of women and men, the killing of babies in their cribs, the taking of hostages against international rules. The protests are calling for the goals of Hamas and Iran to be fulfilled, they are giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States as well as our ally Israel. While there is plenty to argue with Israel about, it is Hamas who has turned down every cease-fire negotiation by Qatar and Egypt. It is Hamas, like the PLO did,  who turns down every opportunity to end the conflict, to stop the terrorism, to find ways to live in co-existence. This is who the protests are defending! This is how “insidious” the “indifference to evil” has become, that our ‘best and brightest’ on our college campus’ have become unable to differentiate between good and evil, between truth and propaganda. They have been “ambushed” by the “hidden injurious way” of mendacity, deception and self-deception.

These college students and their outside agitators, sponsors, are the symptoms we see today, this spiritual malady is prevalent in the Justice System that favors rich people who can delay justice for themselves while pushing a rush to judgement for their ‘enemies’. This spiritual malady is present in the economic disparity, the ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ agendas. It is so “insidious” that even good people who heed these warnings, who are dealing with their own spiritual malady are incapable to reaching another and changing the course of our world, it seems.

As one who used to spread this “indifference” through lies, through subterfuge, I know the power of this “insidious” disease. I have fought against it in my recovery and, I know, my fight has been so loud and so over the top at times that people dismissed me. I also know that I have been dismissed because the people I was railing to, the people I was calling to, did not want to heal their spiritual malady because the spread of “indifference” was good for their ‘bottom line”, be it financial, political, personal. I am not immune to this spiritual malady, so I write every day, I pray, I watch my actions and I work with people who know me and can help me stay on the “right path for me”. I pray you have people to help you. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s Teachings - A Daily Path for Spiritual Growth

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 197

“There is an evil which most of us condone and are even guilty of: indifference to evil. We remain neutral, impartial, and not easily moved by the wrongs done unto other people.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 92)

Leaders in every religion, in every country have been wary of the prophets, for each group that was ‘in power’ were concerned that the people would rise up and follow through on the words and deeds of the prophets. This would, in their opinion, lead to the demise of the Judaism they believed in and practiced. While the prophets could not condone being “neutral, impartial” to wrongs done to someone else, people in power seek consensus, ‘peace’, and to keep the status quo in place. The second and third generation of those who led revolutions do not want the study of the prophets, they do not want the “indifference to evil” to end.

Living in today’s world where so many people protest and riot, stand for their values, principles, it is easy to think that “indifference to evil” doesn’t exist. Yet, it is alive and well especially in these groups of people who have claimed their identity as their politics, claim their ‘religious’ beliefs to be the only true ones, believe their right to power is absolute. When we look around the world and see the poverty, hunger, oppression, wars, mistreatment of the stranger and the poor and do nothing, just shrug our shoulders and say “what can I do, I am only one person”, we are condoning and being guilty of “an evil”. We cannot vote this out, we cannot legislate this evil out of existence, we have to root it out from inside of us.

We are guilty of  this “indifference to evil” in our country when we “stand idly by the blood of our brothers”, when we fail to “love our neighbor as we love ourselves”. When we ‘go along to get along’ with actions and ways we know in our hearts and our guts that are wrong. When we “follow the majority” to do evil, we are guilty, when we believe we are ‘helping’ another by punishing them for their beliefs and using our power to deny them freedoms and rights, we are guilty. When we worship at the altar of power and dominion and are deaf to the cries of the widow, the orphan, the stranger, and the poor, we are guilty. When we ignore the wrongs done in our name by our leaders, by our ‘group’, we are guilty. When we have one law for ‘our kind’ and another for ‘those people’ we are guilty.

When we make excuses for ‘our people’ when they invade the privacy of another person/group we are condoning the “indifference to evil”. When we turn our backs on the pleadings of the beggar on the street, when we make homelessness a crime, when we are more worried about tourism than the plight of the poor, we are condoning. When we listen to the denigration of a group, participate in the ‘jokes’ about Jews, Muslims, people of color, etc, we are condoning. When we we watch the decimation caused by war, by terrorism, by prejudice and blame the victims, we are condoning “indifference to evil”. When we make excuses for rape and murder, terrorism and hatred we are condoning. When we remain neutral in the face of any and all evils we are condoning “indifference to evil”.

The condoning and participating in this evil begins within each individual. It is a sign of a terrible spiritual malady that has reached epidemic proportions. All of us have a ‘knowing’ of the next right thing to do, all of us have within us ‘a moral compass that points true north’, and to go against these drives is a choice. Be it because of ‘societal norms’, an immature soul, an uneducated spirit, fear, desire of power, etc is immaterial. As the Talmud teaches, what we didn’t learn as children, even if we were not circumcised, we have to learn ourselves and even circumcise ourselves as adults. There is no ‘clean up’ for our guilt or condoning of our “indifference to evil”.

Rabbi Heschel’s words in 1963 ring true today as they did when the same ideas and calls for action rang true then and in the times of the prophets. The Bible gives us the same prescriptions for dong good, standing up for what is right and moral, and calling us to task for our “indifference to evil”. It is time for all of us to check ourselves for how we remain “neutral, impartial” to evil, to the wrongs done to another(s). It is time for us to raise up our souls, our spiritual maturity and seek the help of physicians of the soul. It is time for our clergy to end their prejudices, stop promoting hatred and evil towards those ‘not like us’. It is time for all of us to understand that every one has infinite dignity, each of us in needed and our greatest inner need is to love and be loved, to need and be needed, to find ways to live together instead of finding ways to dominate and decimate one another. We need to ‘grow up’ and take our proper places as human beings and be human.

I was a practitioner of evil and I was indifferent to the evil I perpetrated. I did not hear the call of my soul nor the souls of another until 43 years ago, when my daughter was born and even then, it took me another 8 years to act upon the calls I was hearing. Since then, I have refused to be indifferent to evil! I have done wrongs to others, without a doubt, I just haven’t been indifferent nor justifying (at least not for long) of my misdeeds. I have engaged in spiritual maturity and have had a spiritual guide since 1987-I am aware of my ability to lie to myself and to hide from myself so I continue to work with a sponsor and a spiritual guide to stay right-sized and follow my own moral compass. I am never done with spiritual growing. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s Teachings - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 196

“A prudent man is he who minds his own business… particularly when not authorized to step in-and the prophets were given no mandate by the widows and orphans to plead their cause. The prophet is a person who is not tolerant of wrongs done to others, who resents other people’s injuries.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg.92)

The last sentence above sends shock waves through the “prudent” person! It is disturbing to the status quo of both the days of the prophets as described in the Bible and to the status quo we are living in this moment. When so many wrongs are being committed in the name of ‘we, the people’, when the values upon which the United States was formed are being so maligned and misused, the actions and descriptions of the prophets can be our salvation. The challenge for ‘we, the people’ is to be disturbed enough and disrupted enough to take different actions.

We are in a time, again, where the “wrongs done to others” is commonplace. We see them and commit them daily. When we ignore people because we are ‘too busy’, we are so into our own thoughts and feelings, we can’t even say hello to people we walk by, we are ignoring the divine image of another human being. When we are so sure we are ‘right’ and ‘they’ are ‘wrong’ we can’t even carry on a conversation, we are so intolerant of another point of view, we are wronging both the other person and ourselves. We are guilty of the ‘sin’ of ignorance.

When people are discriminated against because of the color of their skin we are perpetuating “wrongs done to others” since before the founding of our country. We, the people, have the duty to grow beyond our prejudices and our narcissistic tendencies to live up to the spirit of the Declaration of Independence-“all men are created equal”. We have been “tolerant of the wrongs done to others” for far too long. This was the focal point of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s. It needs to be the focal point of changing the ways we live today. When voting rights, civil rights, “love your neighbor as you love yourself” are trampled on for some, they are ruined for all. Yet, we seem to be incapable of grasping this truth, we seem to revert to being Pharaoh and his Egyptian followers towards anyone we think we can dominate. In our seeking of power and rule, we tolerate “wrongs done to others” as a right instead of a crime.

When we proclaim our nation should be a ‘Christian Nation’, we decimate one of the founding principles of our Bill of Rights-freedom of religion. When we make the press “the enemy of the people” we do the same with freedom of the press. When we spread lies about people because they are Jews, Muslims, etc we are denying our heritage and our lineage. Christianity and Islam are offshoots of Judaism, different and holy. To deny the need and the right of Jews, Muslims, Christians to believe and practice their spiritual paths is to deny history and to deny Godliness. In this denial, many have become “tolerant of the wrongs done to others” and revel in their intolerance!

The protests of today, unlike those in the 60’s are not in support of freedoms, they are in support of terrorists. There are many issues in the current conflict in the Middle East that have merit on both sides. One issue that has no merit is the rewriting of what happened to initiate the current conflict-Hamas’ terrorism, Hamas’ murdering of Jews in their beds, raping women, killing babies and taking hostages both alive and dead. The protestors against supporting Israel and proclaiming terrorists as ‘freedom fighters’, calling for the extermination of Jews and the end of the State of Israel are not engaging in the principles that were at the forefront of the Anti-Vietnam War nor the Civil Rights movements of the 1960’s. Our need to make moral equivalence is another way we “tolerate the wrongs done to others” and it needs to stop or else we will cause the collapse of freedom here and around the globe.

The problem is we have retarded rather than advanced the teachings and the spiritual principles of the Bible and the prophets. We have become adjusted to the conventional norms and mental cliches of society, of the strongman, of authoritarianism. We use ‘reasoning’ against ourselves and against people ‘not like us’. We have lost our ability to live in wonder and awe. We have become ignorant and revel in our ignorance. Rather than being “maladjusted to” the norms of society, rather than seeking to increase our individual and communal knowledge and wisdom, we are retarding them in the name of ‘country’, ‘religion’, etc. We are in desperate need of regaining our moral compass’, we are being called to live up to the best of Biblical wisdom and teachings, not bastardize them for our own benefit. Be it the far right in Israel, the terrorists and/or the far left progressives, all are seeking to use the Jews as scapegoats for their push for power, both use lies and deceit in their drive to have rule and dominion over human beings, and both are seeking to annihilate the dictate to “proclaim liberty throughout the land and to all its inhabitants therein.”

I am guilty of being “tolerant of wrongs done to others” and committing wrongs myself. I have made my amends and do a little better each day. I have also railed against the wrongs and found myself hated and loved, depending on the wrong I rail against and the people who hear me. I do not apologize for speaking out about these wrongs. I do have the sensitivity of the prophets and, as I grow along spiritual lines, I find myself more like the prophets in that I do “not tolerate wrongs done to others” by myself nor by another. It is not a popular way of being and I accept my loneliness as a good price to pay for being able to live with my self, with God, and with you. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Spiritual Guide for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 195

“A prudent man is he who minds his own business… particularly when not authorized to step in-and the prophets were given no mandate by the widows and orphans to plead their cause. The prophet is a person who is not tolerant of wrongs done to others, who resents other people’s injuries.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg.92)

Rabbi Heschel demands we take a stand and declare ourselves in the passage above. I hear him nicely asking the question-what type of person are you choosing to be. It is a choice to be prudent, to mind one’s own business, to wait to be asked and/or “authorized to step in”. It is not a ‘wrong’ choice according to societal norms nor according to many traditions which tell us “to stay in your own lane”. Not putting our nose in another person’s business is a well-known and well-worn phrase. “Prudent” comes from the Latin meaning “foreseeing/attending to”. Choosing to see the future and attending to one’s current needs doesn’t seem like a ‘bad’ choice at all, especially if one is not asked to intervene!

Yet, I hear the contrast and the discernment of Rabbi Heschel. I hear the call to choose whether we are going to be “prudent” or take our proper place as descendants of the prophets. “Widows and orphans” are accustomed to people not hearing them, they have accepted their plight and, through experience, know that people are not wont to “plead their cause.” The choices put before us by the above writing is clear, what is not clear is our acknowledgement that we have to make a positive choice rather than allow our default choice to rule us.

We are living in a time, once again, where the “widows and orphans”, the poor and the stranger are crying out to God and to us. They are exhausted from the discrimination based on color, religion, ethnicity, and, most of all, political mendacity. We hear politicians continue to lie and harangue us about ‘those people’-the stranger, the poor, making them criminals along with Jews and Israelis being usurpers in their own land and throughout the world! We are living in a time where the spiritual sickness of the “prudent” person is being lauded and applauded. Where the spiritual malady of mendacity is being called truth, where annihilation is being praised and authoritarianism is seen as a good solution. Herein lies our dilemma, the souls of our youth and their parents are diseased because they have been left to atrophy, we have not raised the souls of people while raising their minds, bodies, emotions. We have left the most important element in being human, our souls, to the wind; no wonder our youth and the ‘progressives’ believe Jews are bad, no wonder they believe terrorists are good, raping of women and mutilation of babies is appropriate when they are Jews. No wonder the far right and left have found agreement in their anti-semitism and no wonder Jews are unable to respond except with emotional and physical responses. We have a spiritual malady in our society that is running rampant-one of it’s names is ‘being prudent’. Another name is ‘optics’, another name is ‘moral equivalence’, still another is ‘political correctness’.

The prophet doesn’t wait for an invitation from those who are being oppressed, those who are being discriminated against because the prophet is compelled by the “fire in the belly” they experience at the sight of injustice and deception. We all can see the injustice and prejudice, the cancer of the soul and the spiritual ailments that people are suffering right now. Yet, too many of us are being complacent with our ‘empathy’ and ‘sympathy’ for the ‘underdog’. Too many of us are so tired of the ‘political correctness’ that we start to go along with the authoritarian who promises us ‘real freedom’, who promises us that ‘men will be in charge again’, etc.

This is why the choice I hear Rabbi Heschel put before us to be so crucial now as it always has been. Prudence will allow us to survive, we have Germany as an example-people didn’t get involved when they came for the Jews and, as Martin Neimoller said: “when they came for me, there was no one to care”. We are descendants of the prophets, Jew, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, etc-all of us have the wisdom and actions of prophets in our history and in our holy texts. We, the people, have to make a choice to use the examples of the prophets to heal our spiritual maladies and the spiritual sickness of our world. We, the people have to “make a decision” to serve our higher self, to serve a higher calling than our own ‘safety’. We can do this, there are physicians of the soul to help us, we can demand a better spiritual upbringing by our Houses of Worship and we can implement the call of the prophets into our daily living.

I have failed when confronted with this choice in earlier years. I was “prudent” and cared only about “mine”. I wasn’t brought up this way and it was only after I allowed my soul to atrophy that I spent the years from 17-35 in spiritual sickness. Upon being arrested and knowing I was going back to prison it hit me that there was some greater purpose for me and I had to sit in prison until I could figure it out. With the help of many physicians of the soul I found my way back to being a descendant of the prophets, to allowing the “fire in my belly” to take charge and speak up for the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the poor, the outcast and the criminal, the one in need of spiritual healing and the ones who have been harmed. My way of butting in has not always been appreciated and, truth be told, not always appropriate nor have I always spoken in ways people can hear. Yet, I have not let injustice reign, I have not been “prudent”, I have paid the price for this way of being and I have healed much of my spiritual sickness because I haven’t been “prudent”! God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 194

“Indeed, the major activity of the prophet was interference, remonstrating about wrongs on other people, meddling in affairs which were seemingly neither their concern nor their responsibility.”(Insecurity of Freedom pg. 92)

Rabbi Heschel is reminding us of who “will plead the case of the helpless” in days gone by. I also hear him remonstrate us as well. The word “interfere” comes from the Latin meaning “to strike between”, in the English it means “to prevent”. “The major activity of the prophet was” to strike between/to prevent “wrongs on other people”. What a concept, what courage, what a calling, what a way of living into the principles of holiness, of Godliness, of seeing every human being as having equal dignity and worth.

While the time of the prophets has gone, according to some, their words and their deeds are very much alive in the souls of everyone! We, people of faith,  are all descendants of the prophets, thereby having the same calling to run “interference” for those who are wronged, regardless of faith, creed, ethnicity, color. We are being called to continue the work of the prophets instead of retarding their work. We are being called by the universe to stand up for what is right and true, to leave behind the false claims of the authoritarians and the deceivers, go past our fears “to prevent” the further erosion of the rights of another, to “strike back” against the wrongs being perpetrated in the name of authority and perverted ‘justice’. We are in the midst of the same affairs as the prophets were and it is now our privilege to respond in their name, in our own way.

When protestors in this country are chanting the same slogans as terrorists in the Middle East, we are in trouble. When people in government repeat the same propaganda as Vladimir Putin, we are in danger. When the Supreme Court parrots and decides cases based on power and ‘christian nationalists values’ our democracy is in danger. When Jews are blamed for the ills of the world, when minorities seeking a better life are blamed for the crime in the United States, we are hearing the breaking of glass as happened on Kristalnacht. The warnings are here, we can see them as clear as day when we study history, when we immerse ourselves in the stories of the prophets. The question Rabbi Heschel is posing, as I hear him today: will we respond to today’s crisis’ as the prophets did ‘back in the day’?

“Remonstrate” means “to plead in protest” which is what the prophets did and what we are in dire need of. When we put together “interference, remonstrating” we find a path for our energy, a way to express what we know to be true and right, what is just and righteous. We have to “meddle in affairs which were (are) seemingly neither their (our) concern nor their (our) responsibility.” It is time for us to wake up and realize the cause of everyone who is wronged is everyone’s cause. The need to stand in the breach between the powerful and the powerless is everyone’s need. The call to respect the dignity and value of every person no matter their status nor wealth is everyone’s call. It is beyond time for us to take seriously the lives of the prophets, the teachings they have left behind, the words of divinity they preached and the actions they took.

Their protest was a protest against tyranny, against mendacity, against deception, against bearing false witness and the practice of “Avodah Zarah”, idolatry. They pleaded in opposition to the authoritarians and the liars and, while they did not carry the day, their words are still with us. Their way of being and acting are a clarion call to us to take action, to stand in between the powerful, the despots, and the people who are being taken advantage of, the people who are being wronged mercilessly.  “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country” is a phrase in typewriting class and it is a phrase the prophets could have spoken. As Rabbi Hillel says, “if not now, when?”

We, the people, have to get over our fears and take the next right action. Getting over our fears doesn’t mean getting rid of them, it means climbing over our fears, acknowledging them and making a decision to serve a purpose greater than our fears. We, the people, have to end our need to be right, our hunger for power at any and all costs. We, the people, have to rise above our desire to be deceived and our wish to deceive, so we can see what really is happening. We, the people, have to remove the blinders, stop putting lipstick on a pig and stand up for and stand with those who are wronged. We have to “meddle” in the affairs people tell us to stay out of, we have to be responsible to right the injustices people in power are promoting and we have to say NO to those charlatans in our own time.

I have heard this call of Rabbi Heschel for years. I have done my best to run “interference” for people who have been wronged by the system, by life’s happenings. I have stood up in protest and meddled in “affairs that were neither my concern nor responsibility” according to some. I love the ideas above because it reminds me we are all “our brother’s keeper”. We all call God “Our Father” so we are cousins, brothers, sisters, etc-we are all “kin under the skin”. Which means I/we have to stand up for and stand with our brothers and sisters when they are attacked, I/we have to stand up for and with one another when anti-semitism, hatred, authoritarianism first rears their ugly heads. I/We have to rebuke our kinfolk when they fall under the spell of the deceivers. It hasn’t made me popular and I can live with myself and the universe. Now is the time for action and you are the actors needed. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Teachings- A Daily Spiritual Journey

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 193

“Those who neither exploit nor are exploited are ready to fight when their own interests are harmed; they will not be involved when not personally affected. Who shall plead for the helpless? Who shall prevent the epidemic of injustice that no court of justice is capable of stopping?”(Insecurity of Freedom pg. 91)

The last two sentences above are the questions that have haunted humanity for time immemorial. 36 times in the first 5 Books of the Bible we are told to care for the stranger, help the poor, give voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless. Most of the stories in the Bible re-iterate this theme, either showing how to fulfill this mitzvah or how people don’t fulfill it. From Cain’s question: “am I my brother’s keeper” to God’s response: “the bloods of your brother cry out to me”, we have hear the call to “plead for the helpless”. As Rabbi Heschel says in his interview with Carl Stern; “God is waiting”, waiting for us to answer the call, I believe.

People of all faiths want the Messiah, either to return or come for the first time, and yet, we do everything we can to keep the Messianic Era away. God demands justice, Abraham demands justice from God, the prophets call us to return to being a just society, God calls us back constantly and consistently and we continue to further “the epidemic of injustice” rather than “prevent” it. So, we wonder why God has abandoned us when it is us who has abandoned God! We are waiting to be saved rather than saving one another with justice, mercy, righteousness. Rather than pursue righteousness as we are told to do, we have perverted justice by bribing the judges with loyalty to a political bias which blinds their eyes to truth. “No court of justice is capable of stopping” its own prejudice and, once it accepts the bribes of gifts, money, ‘friendship’, power, etc, is unable to stop the “epidemic of injustice” it brings upon itself and the people it is supposedly serving.

There are a myriad of stories about Elijah the prophet, who will herald the coming of the Messiah, and all of them have him living as a poor person, on the street, a beggar, a leper, etc. Since we have all these stories why hasn’t the Messiah shown up, you might wonder. Well maybe it is because Elijah is never treated with any respect, any care, there is no one to plead for his helplessness, there is no one to stop the injustice of raiding the homeless encampment so the ugliness of our actions that create homelessness, the injustice of locking people up for no serious reason, etc doesn’t permeate our senses and we change our ways.

Of course the answer to Rabbi Heschel’s questions above are the same as the answer to God’s questions in the Bible. Who among us will be like Judah, who among us will be like King David? Both of these leaders were able to admit their errors and do T’Shuvah. They are the examples of excess and doing what they want to just because they can and then having their errant ways showed to them and they repent-“She is more righteous than I” is Judah’s response to Tamar showing him his error. “I have sinned” is King David’s response to Nathan’s accusations. They both had the power to deny, deny , deny-yet they had the spiritual maturity and depth to admit their errors and not do the same thing again.

The only people who can “plead for the helpless” is us! The only people who can “prevent the epidemic of injustice” is us. We, the people, have to answer this call, we, the people, have to take the next right action and end the cries of the helpless, we have to cure the epidemic of injustice that has overtaken the world. And, as with everything else, it begins with our inner life.

We have to end our incessant need and obsession with ‘optics’! The Rabbis were overly concerned with “Maris Ayin”, how things look. People in power and those not in power are concerned with how things look, individuals are worried about how they look in the eyes of the people in the country clubs, beauty parlors, etc. We are obsessed with wearing the “right” face for the moment rather than being real and engaging in the truth of what is. Rather than hear the actual cries of the helpless, many people plead the case they want and call it pleading for the helpless. Rather than “prevent the epidemic of injustice” that the courts are both incapable of stopping and they are promoting, people obsessed with “optics” will defend their choices and their injustices as good and holy! “God told me that you are an abomination because _____ and it says so in the Bible” is a popular refrain of people who obsessed with optics, with power, with promoting injustices and creating a greater “helpless” population.

As one who felt helpless and unheard much of my life, these questions go right to the heart of my existence. My father was my champion, his death left me without anyone to plead to me and for me. The injustices I saw and the ones I conjured up turned me sour and I became a weaver of pictures and lies to get what I wanted, to take advantage of another and, though I told myself they had more than me, they were helpless in their own ways and I took advantage of their vulnerabilities. My bombastic style is probably a result of not being heard, of feeling helpless and a result of knowing how to speak to people in ways they can hear, knowing that I am responding to the fire in my belly and knowing I am trying to reach another person-the helpless one and the one promoting injustice. I am grateful for the ability to plead for the helpless before God, before the courts, before the rich and powerful. I am saddened for the ones I lost and the ones I did not see. I am remorseful for any injustices I promoted and/or did not try to stop and I am grateful for the lives I have helped to save and the souls I have helped to return. Let’s all “plead for the helpless” and stop the “epidemic of injustice” a little more today. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 192

“Those who neither exploit nor are exploited are ready to fight when their own interests are harmed; they will not be involved when not personally affected. Who shall plead for the helpless? Who shall prevent the epidemic of injustice that no court of justice is capable of stopping?”(Insecurity of Freedom pg. 91)

Immersing ourselves in the questions and statements above, hopefully, wakes us up to who we are and who we can/will become. Between yesterday’s quote and today’s, Rabbi Heschel is giving us four ways of being in the world: exploiter, exploited, one who only gets involved when personally affected, and, the unmentioned one, one who stands for what is right and just independent of courts, public opinion, etc., ie, the prophetic voice that will not be silenced.

I am seeing this as four parts of every person, just as we describe 4 children in the Haggadah, and we liken them to four aspects of ourselves, so too do we all have within us an exploiter, an exploited, an self-interest only, and a prophetic action part. Rabbi Heschel is asking us to see who we are in this moment, how to use our prophetic voice to help another, how to use our Moses to control our inner Pharaoh, how to stand for ourselves and not only for ourselves. As Rabbi Hillel said some 2000+ years ago: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?”

The events of the Civil Rights movement called upon us all to declare what ‘camp’ we were in-selfish, racist, victim, caring human being. We did this with our actions because we knew just words were not enough, words have been used to confuse, obfuscate, deceive for so long, they had to be put into action-much like prayer is not about the words we say, it is about the actions we are moved to take because of our prayers. Just as the events of the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s were a continuation of the confrontation between Pharaoh and Moses back in Egypt, so too are today’s events a continuation of this confrontation. In every age, democracy and freedom are in peril, and exploitation and selfishness are in play as is the call to rise above our narcissistic tendencies and live into being descendants of the prophets.

We are engaged in this confrontation across the globe. There are no perfect heroes, there are some people who are very engaged in being as despicable and as enslaving as Pharaoh, however. Putin, Ayatollah, Orban, Sinwar, all are reaching out to take the crown of “hardest heart” away from Pharaoh and put in on their heads. Trump, the Republican Party, the christian nationalists, Netanyahu and his band of right-wing thugs all are vying to take the crown of control and personally enriching on the backs of everyone else from King George. All of these people are engaging in the ways of the exploiter, the controller, the authoritarian, the despot, and the ones standing up against them are being called all sorts of names and are having every weapon at the disposal of these exploiters used against them. They are cunning: they have engaged a whole lot of young people to do their bidding by chanting slogans to annihilate the Jews, wipe Israel off the face of the earth, deny the right to vote to the people who will vote against them, deny the control of their bodies to women so they can be ‘barefoot and pregnant’, deny the right of immigration to people who are in the same straits and have the same hopes and dreams that their ancestors had when they emigrated to the US!

Today is Yom HaShoah, the day of remembrance of the 6 million lives lost in the Holocaust, it falls in the middle of the dates of Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Many people are unaware of how many mini-uprisings there were, how many people had their own standing up for those who were being exploited, how many righteous gentiles there were. Today is a day of remembering what can happen, how cruel the exploiter can be to ‘their own people’ as well as to those they have chosen to exploit. Every KKK’er has infected their children and their neighbors with hatred and lies which continues to be passed on. Every Freedom Rider has infused their children and their neighbors with hope and commitment which continues to be passed on. Rabbi Heschel and Dr. King infused and continue to infuse many of us with the knowing of what can be when people work together for the common good, when we gather together in truth, with a desire to make the world better, to cure the cancer of the soul of prejudice, to clear up our eye disease of bigotry.

This is the inner work that I am many of us in recovery engage in every day. I have to look at my self and do my own inventory, my own daily T’Shvuah because I am aware of how my own inner exploiter creeps in, how my need to be relevant makes me ripe for being exploited, how I am sometimes afraid to speak out for fear of reprisals. Most of all, I need to be sure that my loud, at times obnoxious, prophetic voice guides me in all my affairs. I have to ensure that I am speaking for the exploited and “the helpless”. I have to stop believing that Justice for All is a value that our courts really believe in much less all of the people in this country or across the globe. I have to stand up for the spiritual truths, the values that ensure we will continue to “be human” as Rabbi Heschel demands. I have to join with the myriad of people all over the globe who want the Palestinians to live in peace and prosperity, who respect and understand that Israel cannot live with Hamas being next door to them, who see a person of a different color and embrace them as an image of the divine. I have to do my part and not let the other ‘parts’ of me interfere with doing the next right thing. I need to live into being a descendant of the prophets. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Teachings so We Can Live a Little Better Each Day

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 191

“As a rule, those who know how to exploit are endowed with the skill to justify their acts, while those who are easily exploited possess no skill in pleading their own cause.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 91)

This sentence describes a situation that has happened throughout the history of humankind. It is a deeply disturbing truth and realization for most people so we tend to ignore it and, eventually, be brought down by it.

“Exploit comes from the Latin meaning “unfold”, “skill” comes from the Old Norse meaning “discernment” and “justify” comes from the Latin meaning “do justice to”.  Rabbi Heschel’s use of these words in the sentence above gives us a glimpse into the disruption of the Biblical commands to “do justly”, “love mercy”, “care for the stranger, the poor,…” by “those who know how to exploit”. I believe these Biblical teachings, which are reiterated throughout the Bible in story after story, are the acknowledgement of the ability of some who are capable of “unfolding” the story and able to see the loopholes of a situation, and then telling us not to! Yet, here again, another teaching from the Bible gets swept under the rug by many who claim to be ‘god-fearing people’, while their actions prove them to be God-denying people!

Watching the myriad of ways some people defend the ‘skill’ of Donald Trump to skate the ‘long arm of the law’ for so long, to defend his illegal actions since running for the Presidency in 2016, saluting and cheering for him to be “dictator for a day”, etc is watching people trying to “do justice to” what is illegal, immoral, and deeply unreligious and not spiritual. Yet, there are millions of people who are doing this right now, there are many top Republicans who know Trump is dangerous and his winning will probably end democracy as we know it, yet Bill Barr, Mitch McConnell, et al say they will vote for him. They will use their “skill” to “justify” what they know is wrong, just as they have done throughout their political careers, even though they swore oaths to defend and protect the Constitution against all adversaries, foreign and domestic. These people are engaging in a high-wire act “to justify their acts” and all they seem to care about is themselves not their duty to the oaths they have taken, not their duty to engage in the Biblical commands above, not to follow Jesus’ examples-only their self-interest.

This issue, described some 60+ years ago by Rabbi Heschel is the same one we are facing today. It is a little subtler because of social media, it gets more blurred and the exploiters can hide their exploitation a little better, as it is said, “a lie travels the earth while truth is getting its boots on”. The people who know better, like Barr, McConnell, et al, “justify” their actions with ‘party loyalty’ and other such bullshit when they are being loyal to themselves only-they are only afraid of what Trump will do to them if he wins-so rather than ensuring his defeat, they hedge their bets and use their “discernment”, their ability to manipulate the truth, to “justify” going against the teachings of the Bible they claim to revere! This is how devious and destructive our ability to “exploit” the truth is, our “skill” to manipulate facts and our creative ways to “justify” unholy and illegal behaviors, like keeping the Black person down, denying voting rights to citizens, having one law for citizens and another for strangers, proclaiming liberty only to ‘our people’ and denying to ‘those people’, etc.

This is where we are today, as we were in the 1960’s. The protests on College Campus’ are not the same as those of the late 60s and early 70’s. We were against the war in Vietnam, we were not supporting the communists, we were not cheering on the terrorism of the Communists, unlike the protestors today. We were not calling for the extermination of the United States, we were not calling for the end of a people nor a state-we were calling for each country to determine for themselves what type of government they wanted. Today’s protests are funded in a large part by Qatar, Saudi Arabia through the ‘chairs’ they endowed and they are calling for the end of Israel as a state, for Jews to be pushed into the ‘river and the sea’, they are supporting the horrific torture, murder, kidnapping and cease-fire breaking of Hamas and calling they ‘freedom fighters’ while they use their own people as human shields, deny them good living so they can build tunnels and use the Billions of Dollars they receive to live in luxury in Qatar, Gaza and wherever else in the world they want to. And these ‘protestors’ use their “skill” to “justify” these murderers and convince the innocents on campus to join them and these “easily exploited” don’t even know they have a different cause to plead!

This sentence is so impactful for me precisely because I have been the exploiter and the exploited. I have used my “skills”, my discernment, to “justify” my actions as a thief and a con man. I would say “you can’t cheat an honest person so the people I conned had larceny in their veins”, and other such bullshit. I am still remorseful for those justifications and those actions. I have paid back the people I know I stole from and I have given an extra 3-5% in charity these past 35+ years as restitution to the Banks, insurance companies, etc that I stole from. I also have not tried to “exploit” another human being for my benefit in my recovery. I have “exploited” a weakness in another person in order to help them see truth, the light, a decent path forward, just not for my benefit, my greed. I have been on the receiving end of another’s exploitation of my vulnerabilities, of my way of being and, I am responsible for my own actions, of using their skills to justify ‘taking me down a peg’ or two. I hold no resentments, only sadness for those who have exploited my nature, my kindness, my vulnerabilities and ask for forgiveness to the universe for the myriad of times, prior to Nov 1988 I exploited another. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 190

“Righteousness must dwell not only in the places where justice is judicially administered. There are many ways of evading the law and escaping the arm of justice.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 91)

Thinking about these two sentences almost makes wish for a time when the first one was true! Even “in the places where justice is judicially administered”, righteousness does not necessarily prevail. We have lost our ability to “not accept bribes”, to not allow politics on either extreme of the spectrum not influence the righteousness that true justice calls for. We are living in times where it increasingly difficult to find righteousness in our daily affairs, in our judicial proceedings, in our political life and in our economic dealings.

The colleges who are negotiating with students to end investment in Israel are not acting from righteousness, they are acting from fear; fear of confronting the truth of the ways they have been educating students. They are willing to support a terrorist organization, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, to placate a minority of students and faculty. While we can debate the policies of Israel all day long, we cannot deny the fact that Hamas, the PLO, the PA have rejected every cease-fire, every offer of a two-state solution that has been presented to them. By doing this, the progressives have made them into ‘poor victims’ who rape, torture and murder innocent Israelis in the their beds, women, children, babies, men, young and old or at a music festival celebrating peace! This is whom the colleges are saying are the ‘righteous ones’ by their acquiescence to the ridiculous demands of so-called students and their outside agitators. Where is the justice for the people who were murdered, where is the justice for the women who were raped, where is the justice for those still held captive-against International Law and Hamas has never been brought up on charges, while Israel continues to be denigrated. A little double-standard maybe-oh no-we Jews are always the problem, we are always the scapegoats-for the far right and far left. Where is the justice here? Where is the righteousness in the world courts, in world opinion, on our college campus’??

On a more personal plane, the justice system has always been easy to manipulate if you are a person of wealth and, if you are a victim of a terrible childhood at times. Just as in Ancient Greece and Rome and in every country since antiquity, justice is about what can be proved and what can be evaded. In Ancient Israel, the purpose of justice was to find the truth without fear nor favor, without regard to the status of the people in front of the court. Today, we witness the specialization of lawyers in denying responsibility, in evading the letter and/or the spirit of the law, and their absolute conviction that people who have enough money to afford them are entitled to a different justice than people who can’t! The courts go along with this theory as well and righteousness is no longer the goal of justice, truth is no longer the goal of justice, only winning is the goal! Innocent people are wrongly convicted and guilty people are let free, Antonio Scalia in defending a decision to allow a patently innocent man be executed said: “due process had been followed-guilt or innocence is of no concern to me”. This Supreme Court Justice, some 20 years ago in a talk I attended, confirmed that righteousness and truth have no place in our judicial system anymore. Donald Trump’s constant assault on the rule of law, the Supreme Court’s enabling him to delay, delay, delay all show how far we have fallen since Biblical Days when Truth and Righteousness were the goals of every case before a court.

On an even more personal plane, many of us have relinquished doing what is righteous in favor of ‘getting ahead’. I have heard people brag often, and I have done the same, of how they ‘got over’ on someone. As a con-man, I celebrated every ‘score’ I made and never once considered the damage to righteousness and truth I was making. We are raising generations of people to believe they can be and do anything-rather than raise them with the obligation of “do justly”, the call of the Bible to “pursue righteousness”, knowing we will not achieve it totally and, as Rabbi Tarfon says: “we don’t have to finish the work and we are not free to invalidate it!” Each person is needed to do the inner inventory and see how each of us has evaded being righteous, evaded the law and escaped justice/accountability.

Earlier in this section of this book, Rabbi Heschel spoke of “extenuate personal responsibility”. I am disturbed because this is another subtle example and way we ‘thin out’ our personal responsibility. I have made things okay because I can find a validation in the law and, even in the Torah or Talmud. I have evaded being righteous through making excuses about ‘the greater good’ rather than the truth and what is just and righteous. While these have decreased to a minimal over the years of my recovery and my immersion into the Bible, I cannot deny them otherwise I will repeat them. I have looked at my evading justice and righteousness each year through my daily and yearly inventory, doing the necessary T’Shuvah/Amends and not worrying about what another has done to me. If they are unable to step up to their part, I feel sad for them-not resentful. This is one of the ways I continue to grow in “do justly” and pursuing righteousness. It isn’t always easy and it is always simple. I believe it is time for all of us to stop “extenuating personal responsibility” and take our proper place in our world. It is time for all of us to end our need for approval through manipulation, our incessant drive to ‘get over’ and ‘be #1”, to buy the deceptions of another so we can be accepted. It is time for us to leave the mendacity of the terrorists, the lies of their allies, the hatred of one another, the denigration of any and all people. This is America, This is Biblical life to me. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark

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Immersing Ourselves in Rabbi Heschel's Teachings - A Daily Spiritual Path for Living Well

Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 189

“Most of us are content to delegate the problem to the courts, as if justice were a matter for professionals or specialists. But to do justice is what God demands of every man; it is the supreme commandment, and one that cannot be fulfilled vicariously.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 91)

The last phrase above disturbs me greatly. Justice is “the supreme commandment” does not only mean what is legal, what is for the courts to decide. Justice has to permeate every action we take, between one person and another, between one community and another, between the people and the governments. Yet, all to often, we delegate the administration of justice to the courts, to another person, etc. Society continues to act as if “justice” can be “fulfilled vicariously.”

We have become indifferent to “justice” in our societal norms by relegating it to a legal construct. Throughout history there has been two tiers of justice, at least. One for the common person and one for the powerful and wealthy. One for the white person and one for people of color, one for the Christian and one for the Jew/Muslim/Buddhist, etc. Our indifference comes from our acceptance of these two tiers of justice, be it legal, business, personal.

We are witnesses to the degradation of this “supreme commandment”. Moses and Micah, when describing what “God wants” put justice first. “Do justly” does not only apply to a legal construct, it applies to caring for the stranger, the widow, the orphan, the poor. It applies to our tithes, it applies to the ways we acknowledge the worth, dignity and presence of every human being we encounter. Saying hello to people on the street is doing justly. Yet, we ignore so many people around us. Speaking truth rather than giving into our self-deceptions and the deceptions of another does justice to our Divine Image. Being involved in making our corner of the world a little brighter and better is a path of justice. None of these paths can be delegated to someone else, we are being reminded that “someone else will do this” is a response that retards justice.

None of us are exempt from doing justice and almost all of us fail to live justly in our daily affairs. In the 12th Step of Alcoholics Anonymous, we commit to “practice these principles in all our affairs”. We do not leave it up to someone else to live these principles, we have to be engaged in them, from setting up chairs to reaching out to another human being who is suffering, whether someone has 1 day or 30+ years. The same is true in our everyday living, the ‘pious’ among us are not exempt from “doing justly”, they are more responsible because of their proclaiming their piety. Prayer, study, engagement in religious life doesn’t give someone the right to dictate to another, rather it gives one the responsibility to be personally and totally engaged in justice. Blocking aid from getting into Gaza is not justice, believing it is okay to kill people because they are ‘not us’ is unjust, believing one can impose their narrow and fundamentalist interpretations of the law, the Bible onto the masses is unjust. Terrorist attacks on innocents on religious Holy Days is unjust. Because these acts are done by ‘our people’ it is imperative that we call these injustices out and find ways to stop ‘our people’ from perpetrating them, otherwise we are being indifferent to the suffering of another human being, another group, and this is the greatest injustice of all.

In the Bible, there are times when Moses, Abraham, Job, the prophets call out to God to “do justly”, to show mercy rather than wrath, to be open to the return of the wayward and those who commit grave errors. This too is a form of justice. Never writing someone out of our books, as I learned early on in my recovery-not sure of the source, we can put someone out of our homes and never put them out of our hearts. When we chant “Lock them Up”, when we believe one group, be it Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, Asians, Jews, are all bad because they don’t believe in Jesus, when the people in power want ‘a christian nation’ with laws that are anything but Christ-like, we are committed to being unjust, when we stereotype, when we fail to see each case on its own merits and the differences between people, we are being unjust. When we come under the spell of the Charismatic Leader, the authoritarian, we are heading down the road of injustice because we are allowing someone else to do our thinking for us, to decide what is just and what isn’t based on their whims and personal desires.

This last phrase disturbs me for the above reasons and, more so, because I have fallen prey to allowing justice to “be fulfilled vicariously”. I have gone along to get along. I have bought my own kool-aid at times and been unjust in my actions. I have made amends for these actions to everyone I believe has been affected by my acts of injustice, my allowing someone else to fulfill justice instead of me, and I am acutely aware of the negativity I left in my wake. For this, I am remorseful. I also know I have caused much distress because I have not waited for someone else to speak up, to “do justly” and railed, been bombastic, unbending in my ways of being just, of recognizing the dignity of everyone. I have confronted people loudly and aggressively for their indifference to their own unjust actions and ways. I have spoken, sometimes very loudly, truth to power, I have confronted deceptive people in the wrong moments, I have not always been correct in my assessments as well. I, have not, however, allowed myself to wallow in self-pity nor stay in my fallen state of allowing justice to “be fulfilled vicariously” very long, nor stand idly by the injustices towards another(s). I am disturbed by the abdication of doing justly in all our affairs by myself and so many others, I am disturbed at the violent assaults on our humanity when this happens. God Bless and stay safe Rabbi Mark

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