Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 30
“That he forgoes the approval or favor of those who dominate the financial, political or academic world for the sake of remaining loyal to a moral or religious principle.” (Man is Not Alone pg.141).
This is the second half of the sentence I began yesterday’s writing with and it is sending pulsing throughout my body. When one of the two parties of our two party system is trying to, and may accomplish, the demise of our democracy as we have known it for the last 100+ years and the spirit of the inception of our democracy, and the other party has people who are more interested in their self-interest, their drunkenness with power and their joining with the destroyers, this fragment from Rabbi Heschel is so poignant, so powerful, so scary and so true. We are living in a time when we must “yield to the coercion to brood over purpose, meaning or value of living”. We must “forgoe the approval or favor of those who dominate…” in order to stand for and with what is right, true and loyal to the principles of spirit this country was founded on. We have to stop our seeking approval from those in power and join with the evil they are perpetrating onto a country, a state, a county, a city, an individual. All of this was unleashed by the election of Donald J Trump. Some of the people who are at the top of the food chain in politics, finance and academia used the election to let the tiger out of its cage- on both sides of the political and academic spectrum while the financial people just made more money and screwed over any and everyone else.
In this mix, comes Rabbi Heschel’s words/teaching. Rabbi Heschel’s belief in humanity is so strong, so connected to God’s belief in humanity that he utters these words and teachings in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the trial of the Rosenbergs, which was about anti-semitism and anti-communism, and the Korean War. We are living in the aftermath of 9/11, the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, two financial meltdowns, prejudice, racism, anti-semitism, anti-asian, anti-immigrant, anti-muslim, anti-LGBTQI, etc and reading these words. I hear the prophetic voice telling us to say NO to the people who are dominating these different spheres of our living: financial, political and academic and, I would add, religious. We are witnessing the “banality of evil” as Hannah Arendt spoke about. Most of the people who are engaging in this war on everyone who isn’t WASP are just “doing their jobs” without any or little awareness of the evil they are perpetrating and perpetuating. We are witnessing the effects of ‘evil flourishing while good people do nothing’. There are no good people who do nothing in the face of evil-one can’t be good and allow evil to flourish. To not allow evil to flourish, one has to stop participating in the banality of evil, one has to be aware of the impact of our actions and the actions of the “people in charge”. This is what makes the charlatans who bastardize Christ’s teachings such evil men and women. It is what makes these politicians who cater to the lowest animal instinct in humans to gain, regain, keep, grow their personal power-never giving a damn about the needs and or interests of another.
It is into this arena Rabbi Heschel is telling us, reminding us and cajoling us to wade into from the coercive force of love, the coercive power to brood over meaning, purpose, values more than kissing the asses of the political liars (not limited to one extreme), the academic intellectual elitists (again on both ends of the spectrum) who theorize and can’t actually do anything but tear down everyone else and the financial elite who could care less about human beings, their god is the almighty dollar. We can and must use our forces of love, meaning, purpose to stay loyal to the principles of our faith and our morality. We do this in all areas of our lives, we stop compartmentalizing our living. We don’t have one moral/religious principle for ‘our kind’ and not ‘their kind’; we acknowledge God’s truth and God’s vision that we all come from Adam and each and every human being has infinite worth and dignity that we have to respect, nurture and grow in our own self and in other selves. We have to stop pointing fingers and, instead, reach out our hand. We have to follow Bobby Kennedy’s example of sitting, listening and finding solutions/commonalities with all peoples, especially the peoples we don’t know.
In recovery, we are hyper-aware of our need to stay loyal to principles, not personalities. We are hyper-focused on helping another person suffering and being a contributing member of our society, our community and our family. This happens because we see the damage we created in family, community and in the spiritual fabric of our world with our non-recovering actions. We experience the pain, the destruction and the fear we engendered in everyone who was in our orbit. In recovery, we place principles above everything else, we know that we cannot live well if we aren’t staying loyal to God, to God’s ways and to God’s will.
I am a believer and practitioner of these words and not all the time. I fall short and I am guilty for the times I have, I have done T’Shuvah for those times and they are less and less. I know the cost of being truthful, transparent, passionate (at times too passionate), standing firm for principles and standing up to power. It is a mere pittance to the cost of selling my soul, having to face God, self and another(s) for not being all of these things. Do what I say not what I do just doesn’t work and for the charlatans/hiders among us who use us to feel good about themselves, I send pity and compassion. Stay loyal and God Bless, Rabbi Mark