Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Day 49
“There is no other way to feel one with every man, with the leper or with the slave, except in feeling one with him in a higher unity: in the one concern of God for all men.” (Man is Not Alone pg.142)
“The dedication of the heart and mind to the fact of being present at a concern of God…” that Rabbi Heschel wrote in the paragraph prior to this one finds its culmination in this sentence. Rabbi Heschel is calling us all to take this action of feeling one with every person; that he calls us to feel one with the leper and with the slave is telling as well. Prior to his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement, his outward activism, he was an activist in his writings, he was and is an activist in his call to all of us to: stop theorizing about God; to stop creating false narratives about God; stop claiming ‘only my way/definition/knowledge about God is correct; there is no God; etc and meet God through meeting the concerns of another person, in the interests of another human being, in the connection, cooperation with another soul/spirit.
Reflecting on Rabbi Heschel’s background, how intensely the Shoah impacted him, how rich his childhood was with reverence, love, joy, being seen and freedom to be who he is, it makes perfect sense that the leper and the slave would be the extreme examples for him in 1951 when this book was published and in the years prior when he was writing it. Who were the lepers back then? I remember survivors of the Shoah thinking they were lepers and something was wrong with them, otherwise why were they chosen to be put in the camps and why were they chosen to survive? In the early 1950’s, prior to Elie Weisel’s publication of Night, people did not share their stories of horror, there was shame in even exposing their arms with their numbers tattooed on them, people stayed away from them, instead of welcoming them, for fear of any number of things and treated them like lepers to a certain extent.
The slave could have been the black people whom he saw being treated as slaves, even though they had been emancipated 90 years before, with the Jim Crow laws, with the attitudes toward people of color in the 1940’s/50’s even up to today. I imagine Rabbi Heschel being terribly mortified, sad, and righteously indignant towards the people who treated the black person as less than, who thought they were so much better then the black person and, while they paid them wages, albeit not as much as white people, they looked down on them as if they were slaves and servants. Rabbi Heschel doesn’t reconcile a belief in God, a meeting/identification with God and Judaism as being compatible with these types of behaviors, as I am experiencing his writing/teaching/wisdom today.
Rabbi Heschel is calling upon us to rise above our egos, our prejudices, our “eye diseases”, our societal norms, our self-deceptions, our lower reasoning, the calls of false prophets and clergy, to meet the slave, meet the leper, meet the person of color, meet the LGBTQI, meet the Jew, the Christian, the Muslim, the practitioner of Eastern disciplines, the enemy we fear, the white supremacist, the republican, the democrat, the neighbor, the person we disagree with, the ones who have harmed us and the ones we have harmed in this “higher unity” which is for all of the above to meet us as well! We do this by raising up our selves, raising up our souls and seeing the infinite worth and dignity of every soul. We do this by letting go of pettiness and pride, envy and enmity, false ego and misguided hearts and vision. We do this by, as is said in the 3rd paragraph of the Shema, “do not scout out after your hearts and your eyes to whore yourself after them”. We rise above and meet/feel one with another human being when we see their interests as our concerns, when we stop judging people by the color of their skin, by the religion they practice, the country they come from. When we stop judging people by their worst action and not their best, when we are stuck in binary thinking about another human being and ourselves, when we need power and prestige over and above our need to be connected and our need to be one with God/Ineffable One.
In recovery, we are constantly improving our “conscious contact with God as we understand God” so that we can carry a message and reach out to the person who is still stuck in their old ways of self-harm and harming another(s). In recovery, we know that we can only truly meet someone in spirit and in higher unity, which is a bedrock of recovery itself.
I am overwhelmed with sadness over the fact these words published 70 years ago, are still unheeded. The issues they teach us about and the solutions Rabbi Heschel knew to be the best ones/only ones are so prevalent today, on the right and the left, in the home, the school, the workplace, in our governments, in the streets. I am ashamed of how little progress we have made in eradicating the self-deception, mendacity, lack of concern for God and another person(s). I am constantly seeking to stay in Rabbi Heschel’s solution and when I miss the mark, I learn something new and I continue to meet people in the higher unity, the one concern God has for all of us and, even when another person(s) can’t meet me there, more often than not, I continue to hold a place for them rather than leaving God’s concerns and presence. Stay Safe and God Bless, Rabbi Mark